Report: Dan Le Batard Chose To Stay Off Radio Today After Talks With ESPN President

ESPN personality Dan Le Batard is not hosting his daily radio show this morning, a decision that he reportedly made after having spent the weekend talking to ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro about the network’s policy against talking politics. The reasoning behind Le Batard’s absence was reported by John Ourand of the Sports Business Journal:

This is all the result of an impassioned rant Le Batard gave during his show last Thursday, which was directed at Donald Trump’s white supremacist behavior and ESPN’s cowardly decision to bar its own employees from talking about such issues on the air. One of Pitaro’s biggest moves since becoming president of the network was instituting a strict no-politics policy, which was reportedly reiterated to employees over the weekend. This is the first time during Pitaro’s tenure that an employee—a particularly high-profile one, at that—has so brazenly disobeyed the policy. He’s had about four days to figure out how to respond to Le Batard righteously airing out the stupid policy live on the air, and so far it doesn’t seem like he has any good ideas.