This ESPN Bullshit is the Future

I worry that the drama at ESPN between Rachel Nichols and Maria Taylor is a harbinger of our dystopian future.

A quick summary for anyone who missed the New York Times story from July 4th: Last year, in the NBA bubble, ESPN gave the hosting duties for its pregame show “NBA Countdown” to Maria Taylor, something Nichols complained about in a call with Adam Mendelsohn, an advisor to LeBron James. Nichols suggested that ESPN made the decision because it was “feeling pressure” about diversity in the wake of racial justice protests last summer. That conversation was accidentally recorded onto an ESPN server and then passed around the company, eventually being heard by Taylor. After it was reported by the Times this week, Nichols was removed from coverage of the NBA Finals, and Taylor seems poised to leave ESPN when her contract expires in a few weeks.

This is really a media story more than a sports story, but I could not resist writing about it. For one, ESPN is involved, and whenever ESPN gets caught up in racial politics, it is always a fascinating debacle. But it’s also a workplace dispute playing out in a very public way, and the reactions to it are very discouraging for the future of the working class. It seems that the future of work is more and more surveillance by employers sowing more and more distrust among employees.

The fact that this conversation was improperly recorded by an ESPN camera in Nichols’ hotel room has not really gotten the attention it deserves, even though it almost sounds like something from a dystopian sci-fi story. Of course, it’s not as if ESPN intentionally bugged her room—it appears she simply failed to turn off the camera she had been given to record her show remotely during quarantine. But that’s what makes the story so relatable. As more and more work shifts to Zoom and Slack and other apps and technologies installed on personal devices and used in personal spaces, it will get harder and harder to keep track of what is personal and what is public. More and more messages will be seen by bosses. More and more conversations will be recorded without people realizing it. More and more personal data will end up in corporate files. Whenever it looks improper, it will blamed on an employee’s mistake—someone forgot to turn off a camera or switch to private mode or guard their data better. It will never be the employer’s fault.

And evidently, judging from the number of people and organizations calling for Nichols to be punished (including the National Association of Black Journalists), we have already reached the stage where people hardly bat an eye at the idea that someone might get disciplined by their boss for something they say in the privacy of their own home. Of course, this situation is admittedly more complicated, since Nichols’ conversation was not completely private—she was talking in a professional capacity, to a source who also worked with Taylor. Nichols certainly violated professional standards when she brought up a colleague to a journalistic source, and it’s possible that warrants some type of punishment. But we should be concerned about the precedent of punishing employees for things that are improperly recorded in the privacy of a domicile.

One reason privacy is such an important value is that private relationships take on complexities and nuance that are lost when exposed to the public. You develop shorthands, nicknames, rhythms of conversation, etc. that communicate things to each other, but mean nothing to outsiders. People love to insist that we say what we really think in private—but just as often, we say the opposite of what we really think, maybe because we’re bragging or we’re kidding or we’re upset or we’re hungry or we don’t even know what we really think but just want to say something. In this particular case, Nichols was upset after just losing out on a job, and she was stuck in a quarantine—not exactly circumstances where people are likely to express themselves most eloquently.

And yet everyone listening to the Nichols conversation is sure they know how to interpret it. Every description I’ve seen insists that Nichols was saying Maria Taylor did not deserve the hosting job. But here is the full extent of what Nichols said about Taylor on the recording, at least what has been reported so far:

“I wish Maria Taylor all the success in the world — she covers football, she covers basketball…If you need to give her more things to do because you are feeling pressure about your crappy longtime record on diversity — which, by the way, I know personally from the female side of it — like, go for it. Just find it somewhere else. You are not going to find it from me or taking my thing away.”

That’s it.

Is there a way to read that statement as saying, “Taylor only got this job because ESPN was feeling pressure on diversity”? Absolutely. Is it kind of cringe that she compares her experience as a white woman to Taylor’s as a Black woman? Definitely. But is there another interpretation, where Nichols is mad that ESPN has not yet found a good role for Taylor, and so is hastily making up for it by plugging her into the job Nichols had? Where she believes Taylor deserves a promotion but is simply mad that it is coming at her own expense? I think so. Indeed, in another clip the Times released, Mendelsohn makes exactly that point:

“You could actually generate a really interesting conversation about how it’s just so very white male for them to turn two women on each other to compete for the one spot that they’re dangling over them instead of a broader conversation about all the spots that should be under consideration.”

While he says this, Nichols responds enthusiastically, telling him, “There isn’t just one seat at the table for a minority of whichever version this week we’re trying to please,” which seems to indicate her anger is at ESPN for not giving minorities more opportunities, and not at Taylor herself. But nobody has really mentioned that part of the tape, instead bringing up the part seconds earlier, when Mendelsohn tells Nichols, “Between MeToo and Black Lives Matter, I got nothing left” and Nichols laughs hard. It’s another uncomfortable moment that has been characterized in the least charitable way possible, as them laughing at those movements.

I am not here to defend Nichols and Mendelsohn. I truly do not care who hosts an NBA pregame show I don’t even watch. But I am alarmed at the glee with which some people will apparently rat each other out because they believe they have detected racial bias in a sentence like “I wish Maria Taylor all the success in the world.” We all seem to have become little narcs, eager to demand our bosses discipline our coworkers, so long as it is in the name of racial justice. Is this the future of Black Lives Matter? Last year it meant dismantling the racist carceral state, and now it will become a tool for workers to spy on each other and get each other fired? I could not imagine a better outcome for the owners of capital invested in America’s racial caste system.