Not really a question of a hardship. At least in my case, it has nothing to do with avoiding opinions with which I disagree. It's recognizing that ESPN is essentially the male version of The View where largely uninformed media people sit around and say things designed to gain attention. You can practically hear producers in their headsets telling them to pick opposing sides so that fans of both sides get either outraged or happy and gather and audience and clicks. This isn't just a sports thing. You can see this same M.O. on Fox News and MSNBC where they say shite to cater to their base and piss off the other side. Ugh...pass.

Personally...I'm not interested in that. Your mileage may vary. I used to watch ESPN when it was actually sports news highlights and live games. Very little commentary by anchors, and if you wanted commentary you'd put in on Sports Reporters on Sunday morning and you'd know what you were getting. And the show was populated by adult, thinking reporters who's schtick wasn't to be inflammatory just to get attention. Now? It's almost entirely opinion pieces, human interest stories, amateur comedians trying to out funny each other while being snarky about highlights, and loud-mouthed bomb throwers yelling at each other, etc. To me, that got old by the end of the Dan Patrick/Keith Olberman run on Sportscenter.

What made ESPN and Sportscenter so good years ago was that it took the basic premise of local sports news which only got about 5 or so minutes each night at 10PM and expanded it so that you got to see highlights of a ton of things. The problem for them was the same as it was for MTV. Eventually they needed to fill 24 hours blocks with programming so they began filling it with stuff like you see now. There is clearly an audience for it, but try not to pretend that those who jumped off the train a while ago did so because their delicate little minds couldn't handle the new programming. It's that many of us simply think it sucks as compared to what brought us in as fans in the first place.