What’s profitable in the state universities falls a bit flat even in the state-protected cartel of cable television. [W]hen asked if the increasingly political nature of ESPN itself played a role in the layoffs…“That is definitely a percentage of it,” [ESPN anchor Linda] Cohn said Thursday (h/t NY Post). “I don’t know how big a percentage, but if anyone wants to ignore that fact, they’re blind.” Ah, naïve Linda.  Whether in a state monopoly or state-protected cartel, they’ll gladly take blindness and insulting half their audience over facing the true demand for their ideas.  As the ESPN experiment suggests, it’s a rather low demand!