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Bucking Broncho: More Than Athletes

UCentral UCentralFebruary 21, 2018 5:00 pm

“So keep the political commentary to yourself or as someone once said ‘shut up and dribble’,” Fox News Anchor Laura Ingraham said.


Ingraham said this on her show after LeBron James and Kevin Durant were critical of the President on Uninterrupted’s Rolling with the Champions.


The Fox host introduced the clips from the podcast saying that LeBron’s comments were “barely intelligible”, “ungrammatical”, and “ignorant comments.”
“This is what happens when you attempt to leave high school early to leave for the NBA and it’s always unwise to seek political advice from someone who gets paid $100 million dollars to bounce a ball,” Ingraham said.
One of the major problems with her comments of “keep the political commentary to yourself” Is that millions of Americans have political commentary everyday, but professional athletes are not educated enough to have one in her opinion. How does being a professional athlete mean they are not intelligent? No NBA player has to dribble a basketball to survive. They play the game because they love it and they can make more money doing it than any low level Fox News anchor ever could.


Everything that Ingraham says in her statement contradicts itself because she is telling someone to keep their political commentary to themselves when she does not herself.
James and Durant are not just NBA players they are community leaders. James runs the I Promise organization in his hometown of Akron, Ohio that helps put at risk youth on the right track.
“Without LeBron James Outside of basketball, I’m going to tell you we would have had children who dropped out of school,” Executive Director of the LeBron James Family Foundation told USA Today. “We have 1,200 kids who are behind in school, but because of LeBron James they are catching up and believe they can be educated. they believe they can be anything.”
Durant donated $57,000 to make sure homeless kids in Oklahoma can still go to school. This was after he left the Oklahoma City Thunder and knew that the city hated him at the time.
As community leaders, we should value their opinions even more since they are helping mold our cities and the futures for the youth. Their voice should be respected not patronized. Just because Ingraham doesn’t agree with what they say doesn’t give her the right to belittle the both of them.


This is an example of lazy journalism by Ingraham. She is clearly trying to get a rise out of her audience and others to get attention for her show. She later asked James to come on her show to talk about it, which shows that all she is in it for is the ratings.
No profession should mean that your political voice should be heard less than any other. Everyone’s opinion should be valued and heard in America because it is a government ran by the people for the people. She needs a reminder of what the founding rule of what this country was built on.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

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