Conflict of what?

 Listen, I know what people are gonna say here. They're gonna hear Michelle Beadle -- an eclipsed former star in the vast sports media firmament -- going after ESPN's ubiquitous Stephen A. Smith on her radio show the other day, and say she's just noshing on sour grapes. 

Can't argue with that. Because, yeah, those people likely aren't entirely wrong.

Thing is, neither is she.

Oh, to be sure, there's little love lost between Beadle and Stephen A., and not without reason. Stephen A. did, after all, blindside her by stealing her Sirius XM radio spot, which he announced before Beadle knew anything about it. One minute she had a show; the next she was hearing Stephen A. say on the air that, nah, man, I'm movin' in. See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya.

However.

However, when she took off on Stephen A. for his sleazy deal with a sleazy online solitaire app, she was absolutely on the side of the angels.

The app, Solitaire Cash, is run by Papaya Gaming, which recently was knicked for fraud. Seems they introduced bots into competitions that were supposed to be on the level -- i.e., actual paying customers playing actual paying customers -- thereby robbing said customers. To make matters, well, sleazier, Stephen A.'s deal was an apparent attempt to cash in on the now-famous incident in which he was caught playing solitaire on his phone at the NBA Finals, when he was allegedly supposed to be working. 

Think a carnival huckster endorsing a new shell-game app, and you've got the basic vibe. And to make matters, well, even sleazier, several other ESPN personalities jumped on Stephen A.'s train and endorsed the Papaya site, too.

"It's gross, man," Beadle was quoted as saying by the website Awful Announcing, which reported the story. "You gotta have principles in this thing."

Or, you know, not.

This whole business, after all, is a microcosm of professional sports and its beholden media these days, in which the latter climbs into bed with the former and then claims, "Yeah, but nothin' happened, so we can still be trusted as a journalistic entity." That's how we wind up with the ludicrous scenario of ESPN reporting on, say, the recent gambling scandal in the NBA while at the same time endorsing online gambling apps on its website.

Presumably money changes hands in those endorsements. Which means, essentially, that ESPN -- and, yes, the NFL, NBA and others -- is being paid by the gambling industry. Yet we're supposed to trust its reporting on that industry?

Please.

 Truth is, Sportsball World in the Baffling Twenties is one massive ball of conflicts -- so much so that those conflicts are rarely even seen as conflicts anymore. They're just bidness, as they say in the oil industry. And if that's true in sports, sports takes its cue from Washington D.C. -- where conflicts of interest have become as natural as humidity in August, and open graft is simply the way govermentin' gets done these days.

In which case, maybe Stephen A. and the rest of the yapping poodles at ESPN are just hanging ten on the national zeitgeist. A disheartening notion to be sure.