U.F.C. and Partners Reluctant to Speak On Dana White Slapping His Wife

ESPN, which pays the U.F.C. hundreds of millions of dollars annually to show its fights and is its most important corporate partner, provided a statement but did not say anything more about White.

“Endeavor, the parent company, no comment. ESPN, the broadcast partner, no comment. U.F.C., no comment,” Dan Le Batard, the former longtime ESPN host, said on his podcast on Wednesday. He added: “Like, no you’re not going to get change that way. You’re going to be OK with a video of a very powerful man slapping his wife a couple of times, if it is no comment, no comment, no comment from the powerful people in charge of policing this stuff.”

Shares of Endeavor, a publicly traded company, fell Tuesday after the video was released, but they were up on Wednesday and Thursday. According to the company’s financial filings, “owned sports properties,” which is largely made up of the U.F.C., accounted for a third of Endeavor’s revenue in the third quarter of 2022.

The relationship between ESPN and the U.F.C. is unique. In 2018, ESPN agreed to pay the U.F.C. $1.5 billion over five years to show 30 events annually. A year later, ESPN and the U.F.C. reached an agreement for ESPN’s streaming service to exclusively distribute the U.F.C.’s pay-per-view fights. The value of the deal was not disclosed.

That makes ESPN the biggest single source of revenue for the U.F.C., but crucially, unlike in most of its other agreements with sports leagues, ESPN does not control the content on U.F.C. broadcasts. The U.F.C. produces its own events, hiring its own camera people, producers and commentators, and ESPN distributes the feed. ESPN has used that more distant relationship to sidestep a number of U.F.C. controversies, including this one, telling some reporters that it only distributes the U.F.C.

But that also means ESPN, which prides itself on its large newsroom of independent journalists, won’t control what its viewers hear and see about White during the next U.F.C. broadcast, on Jan. 14. Instead those viewers will hear and see what the U.F.C. decides to broadcast.

In the days since the video was released, ESPN showed it on “SportsCenter” and dutifully covered it online and on the radio, but has also come under heavy criticism for its coverage.