ESPN, the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports, today announced it was creating a new network aimed exclusively at African-Americans while good ole regular ESPN would be geared only to white viewers. ESPN defended the controversial move by saying it allowed advertisers a more targeted investment in the product.

The two channels will be named ESPN Word for the black viewer and ESPN Bird for the white viewer, a reference to a basketball great from French Lick, Indiana whose main rival was, yes, a black man.

ESPN Word will feature new programs such as “Saturday Night Jive,” a compilation of the week’s “Yo Momma” jokes by professional athletes, “ESPN: 69” featuring bootleg videos of black athletes nailing white women and “Pardon the Interrogation,” a show featuring dramatization of police interviews with the Cincinnati Bengals, University of Miami Hurricanes, and Mike Tyson.  ESPN Word will continue to broadcast “The Sports Reporters” hosted by John Saunders.  The network will never, ever mention ice hockey.

ESPN Bird’s new programming will feature “Get Er Done,” a show featuring country line dancing, bull riding and all sorts of Frisbee sports, to be hosted by Brett Favre, “Everybody Loves Bob,” a campy sitcom based on sportscaster Bob Costas’s life and is already being called the white man’s Cosby Show,  and “Jim Rome is a Pussy, “ aimed to make every white man feel good that he is NOT Jim Rome. ESPN Bird will broadcast “The Sports Reporters” hosted by, well, John Saunders.  The network will never, ever mention ice hockey.

(Hockey fans, all 1,235 of them, will be able to follow their sport on ESPN Who Cares, which will feature European sports that will never make it big in the United States.)

ESPN said the Word/Bird move was made during a time when white audiences bristle about  extensive coverage of the NBA playoffs during the opening of the baseball season.

“You might say we’ve received some feedback from the Caucasian audience and African-Americans have made their opinion known,” said Chris Berman, an original ESPN anchor whose popularity among whites is through the roof. “I should have never started tweeting. White people love the new technologies and have been on my ass about the NBA stuff for weeks now.”

Asked how blacks showed their disapproval of baseball coverage, Berman mumbled something about “drive by’s and things of that nature,” a remark he later apologized for without saying what he was apologizing for. He said he learned that trick from Jason Giambi and other disgraced white athletes.