Bernie Sanders Stands with Deadspin Employees, Blasts Stick to Sports Mandate

Democratic Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders (I-VT), has sided with employees of left-wing sports site Deadspin, who were told by their new owners to stick to sports.

A group of now-former Deadspin employees — some of whom were fired, others who quit — were incensed when the firm that bought the site ordered writers to focus on sports news.

Now, Sanders says he’s with the employees.

“I stand with the former @Deadspin workers who decided not to bow to the greed of private equity vultures like @JimSpanfeller,” Sanders tweeted on Thursday. “This is the kind of greed that is destroying journalism across the country, and together we are going to take them on.”

Some of the former employees rose up in anger after parent company G/O Media Editorial Director Paul Maidment told writers that going forward the “sole focus” for the sports site would be sports.

This week, Deadspin Deputy Editor Barry Petchesky was fired after some of the writers purposefully went out of their way to post stories that had nothing at all to do with sports, stories Petchesky pointedly approved for publication in protest to the “stick to sports” mandate.

But the site’s new management points out that sports stories always make up the most-visited stories for Deadspin.

“In September, unsurprisingly, 24 of the top 25 stories on Deadspin were sports-related while non-sports content accounted for less than 1 percent of the page views on the site,” a spokesman explained.

The spokesman went on to note that the funny, fun, and non-sports articles get almost no traffic on a site that is supposed to be dedicated to sports.

The decision to end non-sports content is clearly one based on numbers, not one meant solely to stifle writers.

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