ESPN vice president Burke Magnus addressed the backlash against his company for not airing the national anthem ahead of the Sugar Bowl on Jan. 2, a day after the terrorist truck attack in New Orleans that killed 14 people.
Magnus called the failure to air the national anthem a “huge mistake” and blamed employees working in the Bristol, Connecticut office at the time.
“There’s a group of people in Bristol who just made a huge mistake, it was human error, it happens. I don’t want to minimize it in any way,” Magnus said. “It was just a terrible mistake made by a group of really well-meaning people who feel terrible about it.”
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The national anthem will be played before the 2024 Sugar Bowl between the Texas Longhorns and the Washington Huskies at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans. (Stephen Lew-USA TODAY Sports)
Magnus also said that the circumstances of the game, being delayed a day after the attack occurred early on January 1, affected the planning and timing of those working on the broadcast.
“There was nothing normal about it the next day, including our programming,” Magnus said. “I could give you any number of reasons why it wasn’t the normal circumstance,” he said.
Magnus insisted that the company did not make a conscious decision not to broadcast the national anthem.
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Authorities patrol Bourbon Street in New Orleans on January 2, 2024. (Kat Ramirez for Pakinomist Digital)
“The notion that it was somehow deliberate or that we were trying to avoid acknowledging what was a terrible situation in New Orleans was really misplaced. It was just a mistake that we feel terrible about, and by the way we should be held to account for,” he said.
“Our timing was messed up. We happened to be in a commercial break when the anthem happened, it was just not good by any measure and not up to our standards,” he said.
The failure to air the anthem was compounded by the decision to also air a controversial video message from Tom Wilson, CEO of Allstate, the Sugar Bowl’s corporate sponsor.
Tom Wilson, chairman and CEO of Allstate Corp. (Misha Friedman/Bloomberg/File)
In the video, Wilson suggested that Americans have an “addiction to division” and must “accept people’s imperfections and differences.” Many fans insisted they would cancel their Allstate insurance plans after the video aired. Allstate later deleted the video from its social media accounts.
The initial backlash to ESPN’s broadcast prompted the network to air the Sugar Bowl national anthem later this week during a Thursday edition of “SportsCenter.”
Still, many fans considered the network’s gesture too late at the time. The network also arranged to air the national anthem ahead of the Jan. 9 Orange Bowl between Penn State and Notre Dame.
The company then issued a plea ahead of the Cotton Bowl game between Ohio State and Texas on January 10.
