During the rescheduled Sugar Bowl on Jan. 2 following the terrorist attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Day, ESPN faced harsh criticism for not broadcasting the pregame national anthem performed by Samyra.
While ESPN later aired the full moment of silence and anthem performance on a postgame edition of SportsCenter, the company’s president of content Burke Magnus offered a deep apology this week in an interview.
Appearing on The Sports Media Podcast from the Sports Business Journal, Magnus called the incident an “enormous mistake” while explaining how it happened and why ESPN does not shy away from the criticism around its error.
“There’s a group of people in Bristol who just made an enormous mistake. It was a human error. It happens,” Magnus said. “I don’t want to minimize it by any stretch, but … nothing was normal about that day, including our programming lineup, where we normally would have had College GameDay and that crew leading into the game. It wasn’t that, it was SportsCenter, which is done out of Bristol instead of on-site. I could give you a whole host of reasons why it was not the normal circumstance, but at the end of the day, that was just a horrible error that was made by a group of really well-intentioned people who feel terrible about it.”
Magnus went on to share a personal connection to the military, which has a strong connection to the anthem for many.
Growing up with a military veteran father, Magnus and his family were steeped in military culture and even had season tickets for Army football. Magnus’ father died shortly before the attack in New Orleans, and he insisted he would never allow ESPN to make a social statement out of such a moment.
Instead, Magnus reiterated that this was a simple logistical screw-up that ESPN will learn from.
“The notion that that was somehow intentional or we were trying to avoid acknowledging what was a horrific situation was really misplaced,” Magnus said. “It was just a mistake that we feel terrible about, and by the way, we should be held to account for. We want to be as good as we can possibly be at all times, and even though it was not a normal situation, our traffic got fouled up, our timing got fouled up, we happened to be in commercial break when the anthem happened, it was just not good by any measuring stick and not up to our standards.”
These types of incidents often become culture war fodder online, but Magnus did not shy away from taking the criticism on the chin and pledging to meet the mark in the future.
