Armando Salguero Leaves Miami Herald to Join Right-Wing Pundit Clay Travis – Miami New Times
Miami Herald sports columnist Armando Salguero and then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, making news in 2016.
Screenshot via Fox and Friends
Veteran Miami Herald sportswriter Armando Salguero — who bemoaned the injection of politics into athletics in a 2017 column entitled “Dear sports: Stick to sports” — is moving to a sports and politics website founded by a COVID-19 truther that devotes as much space to fist-shaking at vaccine requirements as it does to football.
Salguero, who’s worked for 30 years covering the Miami Dolphins and the NFL for the Herald, revealed his departure from the newspaper on Twitter this past Thursday. Having made headlines last year when he defended the three-fifths compromise and bashed athletes who supported racial justice, he’s now joining the right-leaning sports and politics outlet OutKick, which announced later on Thursday that it had hired Salguero as a senior NFL writer.
“My coverage in the Miami Herald has never been about me but rather the outstanding people I have covered in 40 years of journalism. That will continue at OutKick.com,” Salguero told New Times in an emailed statement last week.
OutKick founder Clay Travis, a sports media personality who has been a recurrent guest on Fox News and who frequently decries COVID-19-related mask mandates and vaccines, welcomed Salguero with an “Excited to have you on the team” tweet that also teased that the sports site’s staff would be growing “in the days and weeks ahead.”
Welcome to @Outkick @ArmandoSalguero. Excited to have you on the team. Many more additions going to be announced in the days and weeks ahead. Buckle up: https://t.co/4OMQWufb4j
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) August 13, 2021
New Times has covered a number of Salguero’s contentious moments in the past, including the time in 2013 he told a Vietnam veteran during an email exchange that he “sucked as a soldier,” and a 2016 column in which he wrote that he preferred Satan to former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.
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Last August, Salguero and Miami Herald leadership came under fire after comments the sports columnist made on social media regarding athletes who supported racial-justice protests.
After police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man, leaving him partially paralyzed, numerous sports teams protested the act by boycotting games or walking off their playing fields, including the Miami Marlins. The Tennessee Titans put out a video explaining why they boycotted a practice session, in which Titans quarterback Ryan Tannehill, who is white, condemned police brutality and said America was founded on “racist ideas.”
Salguero evidently took issue with that statement.
He retweeted the video, saying he was tired of “America bashing by people who have never lived and would never live anywhere else.”
Ryan Tannehill says the United States of America “was founded upon racist ideas…”
I am so sick of the America bashing by people who have never lived and would never live anywhere else.pic.twitter.com/xHgA8nHvyN— Armando Salguero (@ArmandoSalguero) August 28, 2020
Citing an example of a racist U.S. idea, a commenter on Twitter proffered the three-fifths compromise, — a 1787 deal between northern and southern states that held that for taxation and apportionment purposes, the enslaved Black population in the U.S. would count as three-fifths of its total number. Salguero shot back by sharing a video from the conservative online platform PragerU that argued that the three-fifths compromise was actually anti-slavery, and therefore not racist.
Salguero’s comments drew ire from fellow Herald writers who felt Salguero was “gaslighting” and failed to recognize the nation’s history of racist policies.
Despite the public outcry from readers and his peers over his past actions and comments, Salguero wrote in his emailed statement that he was surprised to have been the subject of so much coverage.
“It amazes me that the Miami New Times is so obsessed with me as to have written multiple stories about me and continues to do so — no doubt to cherry-pick ‘facts’ and choose to slant them whatever way it wishes as to portray me in a negative light,” Salguero wrote. “Nothing you’ve written or will ever write about me moves me. Or anyone else that I know,” he added.
Last August, then-executive editor Mindy Marques told New Times Salguero’s views did not reflect those of the Miami Herald, but contended that Salguero had broader latitude to express his opinions because he was a columnist — a statement that drew backlash from Herald employees who felt leadership was not doing enough to condemn racism.
Marques stepped down as executive editor of the Herald two months later following a controversy surrounding Salguero and a separate incident that involved weekly insert espousing racist views that had been published for months in El Nuevo Herald.
Monica Richardson, former senior managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, replaced Marques in December, becoming the first Black executive editor in Miami Herald history.
Reached by New Times via email last week, Richardson said Salguero chose to leave of his own accord and she wishes him well.
“As the executive editor, I am focused on the future of the Miami Herald and our audiences. I have a newsroom full of incredibly talented journalists and we are focused on ensuring that we produce great journalism that matters to the communities we serve,” Richardson wrote.
Clay Travis, OutKick’s founder, has made a career of being a provocative and anti-politically correct sports commentator who bashes athletes who protest for social justice causes and champions “the First Amendment and boobs.” The cover image for his “Anonymous Mailbag” column on OutKick features Travis standing between two bikini-clad women, and another, unrelated photo of a blonde displaying her cleavage.
OutKick recently published an uncredited post praising Salguero for “destroying” Kaepernick.