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By Megan Armstrong
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ESPN allowed Linda Cohn to go out on her terms. The iconic "SportsCenter" anchor, with ESPN for 34 years, announced her retirement on June 22 and hosted her final "SportsCenter" on June 26.
Cohn premiered her eponymous YouTube show this week — just in time to criticize ESPN the company's latest round of layoffs — and, more specifically, for denying her former colleagues the respect she received on the way out.
"The ESPN layoffs were awful," Cohn said. "You hate to see anybody lose their job, right? Doesn't matter what they do for a living. If you work for a big corporation, you're usually blindsided. It's just the way it is. It's not fair. You're never paid your worth. It's not fair. But it doesn't matter what you do for a living, it's all bad. When you're laid off, when you're fired, when your salary is cut, when you have to think, what do I do now?"
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Cohn continued, "What made it even worse, if that could be possible, was the way ESPN PR handled it — or mishandled it — because they treated everyone on this latest firing list with zero respect. Zero."
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Cohn specifically lamented the mishandling of Ryan Clark, who had been at ESPN since 2015 and become a staple on "NFL Live," "Monday Night Countdown," "Get Up," and "First Take." Clark was pulled from Monday's episode of "NFL Live" and let go before he could finish the show.
It has been reported that the ESPN powers that be chose to inform him then because they news had been leaked, and they didn't want Clark to find out elsewhere.
"That whole PR debacle, PR nightmare, could have been avoided if Ryan Clark was alerted," Cohn said. "How about the night before? And how about before he took the set for 'NFL Live'? If you knew there were media outlets that going to break the news, and you were 'concerned' about Ryan finding out by looking at his phone during the show, then why didn't you just tell him before the show? [...] That is bumbling and fumbling."
Cohn went so far as to call it "buffoonery," noting that everyone else who lost their jobs "became an afterthought." Cohn shouted out beloved MLB voice Karl Ravech, who had been at ESPN for 33 years, longtime "SportsCenter" anchor David Lloyd, and "the over 150 people behind the scenes that were let go."
Watch the full segment below.
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