Sports Illustrated’s embrace of woke agenda blamed for downfall of iconic brand

The “go woke, go broke” narrative surged on social media shortly after word broke Friday that Arena Group, which operates Sports Illustrated for owner Authentic Brands, would cut the entire editorial staff, a reduction of about 100 workers.

{snip}

“Sports Illustrated used to be the crown jewel of sports journalism. Even in this digital age, they had the opportunity to continue to make themselves indispensable,” said Curtis Houck, managing editor of the conservative Media Research Center’s Newsbusters.

“Instead, corporate liberalism reared its hideous head and destroyed the magazine from the inside like a rapidly spreading cancer,” he told The Washington Times. “The embrace of transgenderism, the eager celebration of woke, political activism, cheapening the value of the written word by outsourcing content to AI, and putting obese and transgender models in the swimsuit issue all made for a concoction of stupidity where SI’s parent company only has itself to blame.”

Authentic, which acquired SI for $110 million in May 2019, pulled its licensing agreement with Arena Group recently after it missed a $3.75 million payment, the latest blow to the publication long regarded as the sports journalism standard.

Amid financial woes, SI went from publishing weekly to biweekly in 2018, and then fell to monthly in 2020.

Sports Illustrated isn’t the only magazine to struggle as the internet, burgeoning with competitors, pushed out print publications. But SI had an ace in the hole: Its swimsuit issue, launched in 1964 to fill the winter sports void each year after the Super Bowl, that became a money-making phenomenon of its own.

{snip}

In 2016, SI struck a blow for body positivity by placing plus-size supermodel Ashley Graham on the cover. As larger models go, Ms. Graham isn’t the largest—she wore a size 16 at the time—but the magazine appeared to up the ante each year with even curvier models.

Canadian psychologist and YouTube host Jordan B. Peterson touched off a kerfuffle last year after SI put plus-size model Yumi Na on the cover by tweeting: “Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.”

Accused of fat-shaming, he told the [U.K.] Telegraph: “Beauty is an ideal. Almost all of us fall short of an ideal. I’m not willing to sacrifice any ideal to faux compassion. Period. And certainly not the ideal of athletic beauty.”

M.J. Day, editor-in-chief of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit, declared her intention to strike a blow for social change in her 2018 editor’s note, saying she was “proud that the Swimsuit Issue, born decades ago as the ultimate vehicle of escapism, now also reflects the rich beauty of diversity.”

“Now that the definition of what’s beautiful has been expanded, the next step: making SI Swimsuit an essential vehicle of empowerment as well,” she said.

In 2019, U.S. soccer star Rapinoe became the first openly gay swimsuit model. She’s since become a regular. The same issue showcased for the first time a Muslim model, Halima Aden, in a hijab and burkini.

A year later, SI broke the transgender barrier. Brazilian Valentina Sampaio became the first male-born model to don a bikini in the magazine’s pages. In 2021, model Leyna Bloom became the “first trans person of color” to appear in the issue, as well as the first transgender cover model.

{snip}

Clay Travis, publisher of the right-tilting sports outlet OutKick, floated the idea of buying the SI swimsuit brand and bringing it back to its roots.

“Listen to me!” he said on his podcast. “People want to see good-looking women in bathing suits! They want to see good-looking women out of bathing suits! They want to see good-looking women. That’s the entire basis of your business. They don’t want to see chicks with d**ks! They don’t want to see fat chicks! Nobody does!”

He accused SI of listening to the wrong voices. “You’re getting fooled by a bunch of losers who don’t actually represent the world,” Mr. Travis said. “They’re not real. That’s not your market.”

The layoffs come with SI recovering from an AI scandal after Futurism reported that the magazine published AI-written content by fake authors. Arena Group said the product reviews came from a third party, AdVon Commerce, and that it would remove them.

{snip}

Authentic Brands indicated that SI would maintain a presence in some form, telling the Associated Press that “we are confident that going forward the brand will continue to evolve and grow in a way that serves sports news readers, sports fans and consumers.”

The Washington Times reached out to Arena and Authentic for comment.