Report: ESPN President John Skipper, a UNC-CH Alum, Bashes Trump, Fox News, Clay Travis at Company Meeting

ESPN’s journey from extremely popular sports media empire to merely another cog in the liberal mainstream media’s wheel has been well documented.

But according to a report from Outkick the Coverage, ESPN President John Skipper, who happens to be a Lexington native and UNC-Chapel Hill graduate, is completely oblivious to this reality.

In fact, multiple ESPN employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Outkick that Skipper used a recent private company meeting to insist “ESPN is not a political organization,” and went on to claim he watches ESPN programming all day but has never seen anything political on their channels.

Considering Skipper’s assertion that “ESPN is not a political organization,” he appears to have spent a large chunk of the meeting bashing President Donald Trump, Fox News, Tucker Carlson, and Outkick the Coverage founder Clay Travis, a former Democrat political operative turned leading critic of ESPN’s rapid shift to the left.

Later on in the private meeting, Skipper doubled-down on his wild claims and warped sense of reality by agreeing with a ESPN employee’s theory that there was a vast right-wing conspiracy led by Fox News to bring down ESPN because Fox executive Rupert Murdoch is friends with President Trump.

On the existence of such a vast right-wing conspiracy, and his possible involvement in such a conspiracy, Clay Travis wrote:

“For the record, this notion is patently absurd. I have never met Rupert Murdoch and no one at Fox or Fox News has ever told me what to write or say. In fact, I’d welcome any Fox executive I’ve ever worked with to go on the record and discuss how frequently they’ve suggested I be less controversial and asked me to tone down my content… I receive $0 from anyone at Fox Sports or Fox News or 21st Century Fox. This argument of a right wing media conspiracy designed to bring down ESPN is totally made up and the sad ramblings of the leader of a failing company.”

Skipper apparently also took the occasion to remind ESPN employees that their social media accounts are not personal, and that there are limitations to what they can say, despite the fact that it’s apparently completely within company rules for ESPN host Jemele Hill to call the President of the United States a “white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself [with] other white supremacists.”

Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists.

— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) September 11, 2017

Hill also went on to say Trump’s Presidency was “a direct result of white supremacy. Period.”

Trump is the most ignorant, offensive president of my lifetime. His rise is a direct result of white supremacy. Period.

— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) September 11, 2017

The ESPN employees who spoke about the meeting also indicated that more than half the meeting was a discussion on the company’s political nature, and the overwhelming majority wholeheartedly endorsed liberal politics and believed those who disagreed should be ridiculed.

So much for not being a “political organization.”