ESPN’s Elle Duncan Slams Those In Media ‘Besmirching and Denigrating’ Women Amid Caitlin Clark Discourse

ESPN anchor Elle Duncan accused prominent figures in sports media of putting down other women in an effort to compliment Caitlin Clark amid recent discourse.

Clark, through no fault of her own, has been at the center of multiple divisive debates since making her WNBA debut. Last week, the conversation was about her taking a hard foul from Chicago Sky guard Chennedy Carter. This week, the outrage is centered on Clark’s exclusion from the U.S. women’s Olympics team.

Duncan, like Fox Sports analyst Rachel Nichols, called the recent coverage of women’s basketball “exhausting.”

“I think I just sort of naively thought, ‘All this attention that Caitlin is going to bring is gonna shine a spotlight on everyone else and it’s just gonna grow and it’s gonna be so great and everyone’s gonna get to see how awesome the W is,'” she said on Wednesday’s episode of The Dan Le Batard Show. “And it has become like everything else in this country — a total and complete culture war where everyone that’s new to the party is showing up with pitchforks; and that doesn’t sound like a fun party that I’d wanna be at.”

It’s gotten so bad, Duncan said, that people have privately reached out to her to criticize her male colleagues.

“All my girl group chats just look like, ‘What is wrong with the men? What has happened to the men? They’re losing it!'” she said.

Duncan has been covering women’s college basketball for the last three year. She added that although she’s new to the WNBA, she hasn’t been afraid to turn to her more knowledgeable colleagues. That’s something that other newcomers haven’t done.

When the national team’s roster was leaked, for example, she hoped that ESPN analysts Chiney Ogwumike and Andraya Carter would be tapped to break down USA Basketball’s selections. Instead, there was controversy.

“The people with the biggest platforms are the ones who wanna be able to throw Caitlin Clark in the ‘A’ block, but in a way that they think is digestible to their fans,” Duncan said, “which is simply going to the one thing that they know about, which is besmirching and denigrating an entire group of women, thinking that you’re doing it in a way that’s promoting Caitlin Clark, which is beyond strange to me, too.”