journalists, especially Black ones from its airwaves and have either left their positions vacant or filled them with former athletes who lack the training, skill or courage, to carry the torch of Kaepernick’ s protest for racial justice.
Jemele Hill, Michael Smith, Chris Broussard, Howard Bryant, Bomani Jones, Elle Duncan and just about every other trusted voice who fairly covered Kaepernick’ s protest is gone.
ESPN is not alone in thinning the ranks of its journalists. The Washington Post, New York Times and dozens of other regional newspapers and news outlets have cut back on sports reporting.
As for the other news outlets, the mediums less invested in the finances of the NFL and thus able to provide Americans with a wider, more nuanced, discussion of Colin Kaepernick’ s protest, they’ re all but gone now – devoured by corporations, investment groups and billionaires that too often view social protests as an attack on their bottom lines.
Shortly after David Ellison’ s Skydance Media gained control of Black Entertainment Television as part of its acquisition of Paramount Global, it erased the entire written news archive of BET. In doing so it wiped out over 25 years of Black history.
Ellison gained control of CBS in August 2025, and this month he finalize his purchase of CNN.
If the history of what Ellison did to BET News is prologue, then it can be expected that he will soon do the same to any archives of Black history at CBS and CNN, including their coverage of Kaepernick’ s protest of police violence against Blacks – and the broad resistance movement that he sparked.
Stalwart Black news outlets that provided real insight into the protests spawned from Kaepernick, like the Griot, The Root, Newsone and even Essence are putting out just 50 percent of the daily content they provided just a decade ago, and that might be a generous assessment. And you can forget social media. The Kaepernick memes and threads that once organically populated Twitter have been stomped out by oligarchs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg who’ ve turned these once vibrant spaces into echo chambers for rage baiting bots and the fools who think they’ re real.
So, who stood up for Kaepernick?
In the“ community,” his jersey once was donned by every rapper and celebrity who could get their hands on one to show solidarity. Public intellectuals swore off the NFL until Colin Kaepernick was given a legitimate chance to return to the playing fields of the NFL.
How long did any of that last?
Ratings for the league have jumped up for five years straight as large numbers of people who swore they would never again support a league that mistreated a sincerely protesting Black athlete have walked back that commitment.
Many of these deserters now play Fantasy Football and get gambling tips on the outcome of NFL games from some of the same football analysts who tried to bury Colin a decade ago. The moral arc that Colin Kaepernick was trying to bend towards justice, now leans in the wrong direction.
Al of this is proof that we have a long way to go to bring about the justice Kaepernick sought. The plague of police brutality this nation experienced in 2016 has morphed into police-state type raids by masked ICE agents who prowl the streets of this nation looking for new people to victimize.
The beatings this nation’ s moral compass has taken over the past decade should cause millions of Americans to join Colin Kaepernick in taking knee to protest these injustices. n
Jason Johnson, a professor of politics and journalism in the School of Global Journalism & Communication at Morgan State University, is a political analyst for MSNow.
13