The Fall and Rise of KC’s Jason Whitlock

PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 2025

In the late 1990s, I co-hosted a talk show on KMBZ radio. Although our show was not about sports, if we saw Kansas City Star ace sportswriter Jason Whitlock leaving the sports talk show in the adjoining studio, we would corral him into ours. Always good copy, we knew he had the chops to go somewhere. We just didn’t know where. Neither, as it turns out, did he.

Just about 30 at the time, Whitlock had already shown flashes of his special power—stirring the pot. Critics of talk radio have long thought it a cesspool of unregulated gab, but those critics could never have done commercial talk radio.

The so-called Overton window is so narrow I constantly edited myself, knowing that if I didn’t, the station manager would do it for me. On one occasion, we interviewed Hillary Clinton, then First Lady, by phone.
Knowing that I wasn’t exactly a fan, the station manager stood right beside me. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. His every grimace and facial tic kept me coloring between the lines. Both of my co-hosts had already been sued for slander or something like it. He didn’t need the Justice Department on his butt.

For sportspeople, the window is narrower still. If Hillary Clinton chose never to speak to me again, it would only enhance my talk-radio cred. But if, say, a George Brett or a Patrick Mahomes chose not to speak to a local sports writer or broadcaster, that person might be out of a job.

Most people in sports media desperately want the athletes and coaches to like them. Not Whitlock. Says he, “Too many people enter this profession hoping that they’ll walk into a press box or walk into a locker room hoping that everyone is happy to see them. I don’t really care.”

Through sheer bravado, he made himself The Star’s most-read and best-paid writer. For the 15 years he worked there, no one ever thought to accuse him of being a DEI hire. He made his way to the paper the old-fashioned way, working his way up through small-market papers and correcting mistakes along the way. Said Whitlock, “I was willing to go wherever the career took me.”

While still at The Star, Whitlock started writing columns for ESPN, the premier sports network. He also filled in as a guest host on a variety of ESPN’s TV talk shows, this despite the fact that Whitlock has a face—and body—made for radio. In truth, he looked like what he was—a former college football offensive lineman gone, admittedly, to seed.

Whitlock had come to the realization that stardom came with owning a niche. “I knew it was going to be the intersection of sports and culture and sports and race,” observed Whitlock. To own that niche in a meaningful way, Whitlock knew he had to speak truthfully.

If the newspaper tolerated Whitlock’s bluntness, ESPN was less forgiving, particularly on matters racial. Almost unheard of on TV, Whitlock held black people to the same standards he held everyone else. On one occasion, for instance, he called sportswriter Robert “Scoop” Jackson “a clown,” adding, “The publishing of Jackson’s fake ghetto posturing is an insult to black intelligence.” ESPN fired him.

As I watched from afar, Whitlock bounced from one network to another, never shy about speaking his mind, never overly concerned about burning bridges. “I also believed and still believe,” said Whitlock, “that, as a journalist, our job is to make the comfortable people uncomfortable.” He may have believed that, but his bosses often did not.

In 2021, Whitlock found a home with Glenn Beck’s Blaze Media. There, he hosts a popular daily podcast called, appropriately enough, Fearless. Yes, there are some sports people pulling bigger salaries than Whitlock, most notably his nemesis, ESPN’s $20 million a year man, Stephen A. Smith, but Whitlock envies him not all.

On Fearless, he calls his own shots. A running theme on the show is the seduction of sports journalists by corporate dollars. Although the zeitgeist may be changing, for the past quarter-century, sports commentators have been able to express no opinion right of an anodyne center. In recent years, this unspoken censorship has forced sports journalists to embrace, among other phenomena, the participation of “trans women” in women’s sports.

Whitlock will have none of it. Even his enemies, and he has more than a few, have to agree that Whitlock is his own man. And that man has continued to evolve in ways that have to shock those who knew him in his more, let us say, free-wheeling days in Kansas City.

Whitlock today operates from what he calls “a biblical worldview.” This erstwhile hedonist has become something of an evangelist. What makes his preaching so entertaining is his humility. Not one to run from the past, he concedes to having indulged in just about every one of the seven deadly sins, one or two of which he has not quite put behind him.

Whitlock’s worldview has armed him well to do battle in today’s ever-raging culture wars, and no sports figure is less afraid of a fight than this former offensive lineman. Amusing, too, is his willingness to take on not just media biggies like Smith but sports giants like, say, Lebron James. Whitlock relishes being the David to their Goliaths, and so does his audience. Says he, “I tend to fight up.”

As a culture warrior, Whitlock has been pulled kicking and screaming into politics. In 2024, he even voted. First time. He does not say for whom he voted, but the audience knows. And approves.

The diversification of the media has allowed hard-headed individualists like Whitlock to flourish. Fearless now has more than 500,000 subscribers, and Whitlock has a net worth in $10 million range. His bank account may never catch up with Stephen A’s, but I suspect he sleeps better at night.