Media WATCH
By Joe SchaefferThe Los Angeles Times announced May 3 that it has tabbed ESPN’s Kevin Merida to be its new Executive Editor.
In keeping with the racial obsessions currently dominating establishment media organs, Merida is black. His work at ESPN has been exclusively focused on that fact.
Merida has been editor-in-chief of the cable sport’s network’s Undefeated division since 2015. “The Undefeated is the premier platform for exploring the intersections of race, sports and culture. We enlighten and entertain with innovative storytelling, original reporting and provocative commentary,” the About section on the Undefeated website reads.
Merida is not concealing his goal of using his position to advance social change. “Thank you, @DrPatSoonShiong and the @latimes for believing in me and understanding my value,” he wrote in a May 3 tweet about his new job. Patrick Soon-Shiong owns The Times, the largest daily newspaper in the state of California. “Let’s create something truly transformative. Let’s shake up the world.”
Under Merida, The Undefeated has been an unabashed source of racial agitation within the sports world. The site endlessly champions the Marxist Black Lives Matter movement and has regularly smeared former President Donald Trump and his supporters as racial bigots.
A Jan. 8 column by Undefeated “Senior Writer” Justin Tinsley titled “I was at the Republican convention in 2016 and could see the Jan. 6 riot coming” serves as a particularly inimical example:
“The energy and excitement were palpable that week in Cleveland. These folks weren’t just voting for Trump. They were pledging their lives to him. That was true then, and it’s undeniable now. So, on [Jan. 6], when Trump unchained his minions, punch-drunk off lies of election fraud, and let them run amok on the U.S. Capitol, I wasn’t surprised. No Black person was, because this was always going to happen. And I’m not saying that in a gloating way. I’m saying it because I saw it coming in the summer of 2016.”
What does this have to do with sports? Who knows? But it is does indicate the journalistic direction The L.A. Times will now be taking.
In 2018, Merida hailed the addition of Jemele Hill, one of ESPN’s most controversial race-baiting talking heads, to the staff of The Undefeated. “This is bigger than big. She is an extraordinary journalist whose range, voice and depth will be put on full display,” he gushed in a tweet at the time.
Hill frequently used her sports platform to label Trump a white supremacist on a par with Adolf Hitler.
"When you're under the leadership of a president that refuses to condemn Nazis and racism, how am I supposed to function the rest of the day and pretend as if I give a s*** about [white NFL quarterback] Blake Bortles losing his job?" Hill thundered during a Sports Illustrated media panel in 2017.
Hill eventually proved too polarizing even for ESPN. The network bought out her multi-million-dollar contract in 2018.
The Undefeated has enthusiastically backed Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL quarterback best known for kneeling during the National Anthem to protest systemic racism in America. In 2020, a staffer luridly labeled Kaepernick “a black light for identifying the racists who live among us” in a softball feature hailing his activism.
In its article detailing Merida’s hiring, The Los Angeles Times explicitly acknowledged that race was a prime motivator for the move.
“With Merida’s hiring, Soon-Shiong took a step toward delivering on a promise to readers last fall to increase newsroom diversity, which the biotech entrepreneur called ‘mission-critical for our business,’” the paper stated.
“Only a diverse newsroom can accurately tell this city’s stories,” Soon-Shiong wrote in his September letter, the paper detailed, “noting that a more inclusive newsroom was integral to providing stronger coverage of ‘Black, Latino, Asian and underrepresented communities.’”
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