IN A COUNTRY OF 334 MILLION, ONLY A HANDFUL WATCH STEPHEN A. SMITH

Rather than debate whether pundits have ruined sports TV, let’s address a cold truth: Only a wee fraction of Americans are into Smith, Skip Bayless and Dan Le Batard — and each has sacrificed dignity

     The operative word is dignity. Stephen A. Smith and Dan Le Batard once had it, before they chased dumb money and became carnival barkers. Now they’re arguing about who’s better for sports television — Le Batard says Smith and Skip Bayless ruined it; Smith claims Le Batard piggybacked his act — when in truth, cutting through the flimflam, they’ve all become low-rate entertainers who don’t appeal to nearly as many people as they think.

     Last I checked, 334 million humans lived in the United States of America. On a good day, Smith might attract an average viewership of 470,000 to his live two hours on ESPN’s “First Take.” Bayless might generate a 140,000 average to 2 1/2 hours of “Undisputed” on Fox Sports 1, while Le Batard’s podcast lures loyalists but is blown away by true-crime and religion genres. Smith’s ratings rank 322nd among American TV shows — according to the USTVDB database on Tuesday — and Bayless’ show ranks 477th. Le Batard’s content ranks 39th among podcasts, per Podtail, behind sports offerings by Bill Simmons and Barstool.

     What all three pundits have done in recent times, after successful careers as sportswriters who crafted compelling columns and broke authentic news stories, is guzzle the show-business juice poured by media executives who spend entire calendar years convincing themselves that the show ratings are good — when they’re not.

     The numbers suck, actually.

     Do advertisers know it? Or are they among the duped?

     Because these broadcast bosses are inherently simple-minded, they equate validation to mentions in sports media columns, not realizing many of those authors are relegated to that beat because they’re incapable of covering more important matters. Opinions from those columns often are gleaned from social-media browsing, which means they’ve handed over the art of media criticism to day drinkers with Twitter feeds. Nonetheless, when an argument can be made that all are lucky to still be on the air — Bayless, in particular — they are paid handsome sums thanks to entertainment agents who seduce the TV execs by picking up lunch tabs in Beverly Hills, if not lap dances at the gentlemen’s club.

     This is a very, very small bubble of bullshit in a very, very large country. Desperate to make a headline of any kind, the carnival barkers say crazy and irresponsible things and think tens of millions are hanging on every word. I call it fanboy evangelism, an appeal to impressionable young minds who consider a sports debate to be the purpose of life itself. Fortunately, smart ones attend medical school or law school or try to change the world with an epic invention. Unfortunately, there are just enough slackers to nourish the b.s., enabling the barkers to appear on each other’s platforms, with Le Batard eyeing crossover traffic when he invited Smith on his podcast last week.

     “I hate what you have done to sports television,” Le Batard told Smith.

     Um, was the host struck by a convenient case of amnesia? What has Le Batard done to sports television, having installed his father as co-host of a since-cancelled ESPN show, with a supporting cast of quirky friends, in the same time frame when Smith and Bayless were teaming up on “First Take” in the 2010s? Stephen A. pounced on the hypocritical shot, as only Stephen A. can. “You can say that all you want to. I would say, ‘Who the hell are you to sit up there and say me and him?’ ’’ Smith said. “What about you? Where the hell were you? Living under a rock? Teaching at Miami U? You were part of it, too! You ain’t innocent!”

     Once clicks had been created on sites such as “Awful Announcing” — what, “Joe Buck’s Buttcrack” already had been taken by another web publisher? — Le Batard smelled another buzz opportunity and posted an Instagram video. “I told Stephen A. Smith that I hated what he and Skip Bayless had done to sports television and the reaction was hostile and swift on Elon Musk’s kind, gentle community app,” he said of the Twitter backlash. “People say that I’m a fat, ugly, hypocritical, jealous jerk, a-hole, moron, idiot. And I’d just like to defend myself against that. I’m not jealous.”

     Either this is weak Dana White promotional bluster or a bad open-mic night. Whatever, all of it is beneath sportswriters everywhere. And don’t you dare call me a hypocrite. Not once did I say anything on “Around The Horn” for ratings or headlines. Twice as high as Smith’s and six times higher than Bayless’, our big numbers happened organically, grown from ground zero as an ESPN start-up. For eight years, I was being myself in my daily studio seat, lawyer-like in my reasoning, occasionally guilty of stridency when trying to make sense of Woody Paige but generally in no mood to entertain, except when they made us wear Halloween costumes and I had to dress as Steve Bartman or Kate Hudson. Each day, the challenge was to speak my piece and hope I wasn’t cut off by the host’s mute button, which should have been scrapped on Day One before reducing us to a clown show of sorts. Those programming decisions were made above my pay grade. I was just the hired help, day after day, mute after mute.

     I controlled only what came out of my mouth, and never, unlike Le Batard, did I turn it into a comedy show where I mocked my seventy-something dad. And never, unlike Smith, did I deride Shohei Ohtani for being Japanese and having an interpreter. And never, unlike Bayless, did I pillory Dak Prescott for admitting he was weak after his brother’s suicide and suffered depression, or wonder on Twitter how the NFL could postpone a game after Damar Hamlin’s heart stopped twice. Of course, those comments won them headlines and attention as their bosses smiled, knowing a few thousand more people might tune in.

    And to think Stephen A. says he censors himself. My God, what might he say if he didn’t? “Yes, but I self-censor because I’m responsible,” Smith said on The Interview, yet another self-promotional podcast appearance. “I represent ESPN, which is owned by Walt Disney. You have to be responsible enough to recognize that you don’t represent just yourself when you have these airwaves available to you. You represent a commodity, an entity that employs you. So, in that regard, the word, you know, just being responsible comes to light. But I don’t want to say careful. Because I think that when you say careful, what happens is, is that we have so many people that do believe in being so, quote unquote, careful that they come across as very phony and inauthentic. And that’s not something I’m going to allow to happen.”

     So it’s OK to be a xenophobic Ohtani hater as long as you’re sincere about it. Got it.

     And, in Le Batard’s case, it’s OK to take the grimy sponsorship money of DraftKings and not care about the number of problem gamblers who bet on the app, or the future problem gamblers who hear tout promotions on his podcast. Each one of the pundits is a sellout, in one form or another.

     Every so often, as a social experiment, I’ll ask someone in a restaurant or at a tennis club if he or she is aware of “Stephen A.” or “Le Batard” or “Bayless.” This is Los Angeles, of course, where the real entertainers make movies and play music, but I expect at least a few people to recognize the names.

     I’m still waiting for the first immediate yes.

     Which only proves my perpetual point about the industry: The only people who care about sports media are sports media, or sports media wannabes. Allow me to retrieve a plunger before the toilet bowl overflows.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.