ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith is a blowhard who’s grating, easy to disagree with and dangerously out of his depth when his commentary veers, as it has lately, away from sports and into politics. As he has evolved beyond his role as his network’s best-paid host, he has become harder to ignore, easier to criticize and, many believe, dangerously aligned with a conservative movement that threatens democracy and does real harm to historically marginalized communities, including Black folks, women and immigrants.

If you conclude from the above that I won’t defend Smith after the National Association of Black Journalists gave him its Thumbs Down Award at its weekend convention, you’re half right.

I can only get to half, though, because despite the many valid criticisms of Smith, at this political moment, NABJ slapping him with its strongest official condemnation feels off. I say that not only as a former ESPN senior editor who has seen the results of Smith’s behind-the-scenes advocacy for Black journalists up close, but also as a former three-term NABJ board member. For six years, I was part of the deliberations over who received the organization’s strongest call-out and why.

NABJ handed out a record five Thumbs Down Awards this year, including Smith’s, which was specifically for using his political commentary to disparage Black women. “I was raised by Black women, I have two daughters, I have 10 nieces, I have four older sisters — what the hell are they talking about?” Smith said on NewsNation’s “CUOMO” on Monday night. Attributing NABJ’s rebuke to a “few people” in the group, he said, “I’m a registered independent. I believe in calling balls and strikes and being fair as I possibly can. As a result, you’ve got people within our community that, if I’m not parroting our speech, then they’ve got a problem with that, as if we’re all one monolithic group.”

In addition to Smith, NABJ called out Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, Circle City Broadcasting CEO DuJuan McCoy, CBS News and The Washington Post. Among that group, Smith stands alone as, in journalism parlance, talent rather than a media executive. Although Smith is expanding his reach, the other four recipients either are newsrooms as a whole or represent corporate and institutional power that far exceeds Smith’s.

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One-on-One with Stephen A. Smith

January 12, 2023 / 09:48

CBS and The Washington Post killed hundreds of journalism jobs over the past year, including jobs held by NABJ members. In 2024, Post owner Jeff Bezos killed the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to be a major party’s nominee for president. (The paper’s editor at the time, Will Lewis, said he was philosophically opposed to presidential endorsements.) While he claims otherwise, David Ellison, the Paramount Skydance chairman whose portfolio includes CBS, has nakedly aligned himself with the Trump administration’s crackdown on media independence to win regulatory favor for a spate of media mergers. Those include his intended purchase of CNN and Turner Broadcasting, which could further erode jobs and independence in journalism.

When Ellison installed Bari Weiss to run CBS’ news division, she cut jobs and reportedly inserted herself into editorial decision-making at the flagship news program “60 Minutes,” and CBS fired one of its most prominent journalists, Scott Pelley, after he pushed back against the terminations. (CBS News denies allegations of editorial interference.)

Bezos, Ellison and Weiss operate at higher levels and have much more power than Smith, but NABJ called out Smith by name and only referred to the names of the institutions Bezos, Ellison and Weiss oversee.

The FCC’s Carr is a key figure in President Donald Trump’s effort to use government agencies to put pressure on media organizations Trump deems insufficiently deferential. He’s being sued by the Walt Disney Co. over threats to some of the company’s broadcast licenses and his investigation of Disney’s diversity, equity and inclusion practices. The FCC says the suit is without merit, which is hard to square with Carr’s attacks on ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, his investigation into ABC’s “The View” and the FCC’s early review of ABC’s broadcast station licenses.

McCoy owns Circle City Media, an Indianapolis TV station operator that fired a Black meteorologist, Ashley Brown Elliott, last year. Brown says she was fired in retaliation for challenging what she called the company’s unfair treatment of Black women employees. In the spring of 2025, McCoy issued a statement that said, in part: “Simply put, we don’t discriminate! We proudly have one of the most diverse newsrooms in America which reflects the diverse communities that we serve every day!” Circle City also lambasted NABJ for giving the company a thumbs-down.

“Publicly trying to shame individuals based on supposition should be beneath an organization that claims to advocate for professionalism, fairness, accuracy, and accountability,” McCoy wrote on LinkedIn. “The fact that NABJ leadership would permit its name to be attached to such a factless initiative calls into question your judgment, credibility, and commitment to the values you profess to uphold.”

Compared with the others in his thumbs-down cohort, Smith’s clout is diminutive, and lumping him in with the rest has dulled what might otherwise be an appropriately loud conversation about who really holds power over the journalism industry and what havoc they can and have wreaked on careers, discourse and public policy. Even though he’s become the most influential commentator in legacy sports media, Smith has nowhere near the power that comes with running a government agency, nor does he have the resources to effect change at the scale of Ellison or Weiss.

What he does have is a huge platform on which he’s seen by millions every day, and that was doubtless on the minds of the NABJ board members when they voted to include him. Smith’s lack of institutional power doesn’t make him above reproach, and many would argue that his approach to addressing Black women on his political platforms — it’s notable that NABJ didn’t specifically call out his ESPN show, which he has broadcast live in the past from the group’s convention — gives license to those with their hands on the levers of power to behave in increasingly harmful ways. NABJ has long used Thumbs Down not just as an opportunity to put bad actors on blast, but sometimes to shock them to consciousness and spark a dialogue about how to do better. It wouldn’t be a surprise if that was its aim specifically in Smith’s case.

Smith is expanding his own independent media company beyond producing his own Sirius XM and YouTube shows, but unlike McCoy, he doesn’t own broadcast licenses that afford him final say over dozens of journalists or how news gets reported in hundreds of thousands of homes.

Despite those important distinctions, Smith should not be considered above reproach. In remarks she gave at the end of the group’s convention, NABJ President Errin Haines, whom I served alongside on the organization’s board, specifically called out Smith for his commentary about Black women. NABJ has long had a tradition of electing women to its top leadership positions, platforming Black women running for higher office and promoting the careers of women vying to ascend both in front of and behind the camera. If there’s any organization qualified to call out a specific media figure for their commentary about Black women, it’s NABJ.

But even compared only with other sports commentators who have conservative political leanings, Smith’s offenses pale in comparison to those of some of his contemporaries. For example, Jason Whitlock, an ESPN alumnus who now makes his living trafficking in the conservative content sphere, has called Serena Williams “classless” and repeatedly made disparaging comments about her body. He has said even worse about his former Fox Sports colleague Joy Taylor, another Black woman journalist.

Whitlock has never received a Thumbs Down Award, and Smith, who has a long-running public feud with Whitlock, might be wondering why. Smith, as former ESPN host Jemele Hill noted in an interview with Don Lemon this week, has a long track record of using his platforms to create opportunities for Black journalists, including women. Whether that work is enough to overcome the lurch to the right that seems to be fueling his recent ascent is debatable.

But the jury in NABJ’s boardroom has already rendered its verdict.

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