The Wall Street Journal has an interview with John Skipper, who is the president of ESPN, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Co. From the interview:
WSJ: What's the value of niche sites like The Undefeated and FiveThirtyEight?
Mr. Skipper: At the Undefeated, the play is about content. If you do a time-lapse of the last two or three years in sports, you'd see more stories pop to the top about race and sports than anything. It is an important area to explore. There is a business reason: among our most important consumers are African-Americans. There is not right now a go-to site for black fans, other than just ESPN sites. [The Undefeated] will be a black-run and black-staffed site.
Maybe I am missing something, but what is to stop some otherwise well qualified white or Asian or otherwise non-black sportswriter or sports editor from applying for a job at The Undefeated, getting turned down, and then suing for racial discrimination in hiring, using as evidence Mr. Skipper's public statement that the the site will be "black-run and black-staffed"? I guess this is life in America in 2016, that a top official of a public company can speak openly about using race as a decisive factor in hiring and not even get a follow-up question about it from the two reporters at the Wall Street Journal. One could argue about whether this sort of thing should be legal or illegal, and even about whether it is a good idea or a bad one (not all bad ideas should necessarily be outlawed). But as someone who used to be in the business of hiring journalists, it certainly gave me pause.
