Sports

I am of the opinion that ESPN does not get a fair shake from the sports blogosphere, that the sports blogosphere is likely to nitpick and take whatever angle on a situation is least favorable to ESPN while ignoring potentially exculpatory or explanatory circumstances, that much of the criticism leveled at ESPN is overblown, and whatever its other faults, it’s far better at being a “news” organization than most actual American news organizations. Even its debate shows represent one more side than Fox News and MSNBC are likely to give you; I continue to push for a general-news version of PTI.

But recently, criticism of ESPN seems to have come to a head, and perhaps the biggest threat the prospect of competition from NBC and Fox poses is an alternative to what passes for journalism at ESPN. While NBC SportsTalk has been disappointing most of the times I’ve watched it (at one point seeming to devolve into “First Take, Evening Edition”) and the TV version of Pro Football Talk came across to me as actively worse than ESPN’s shows (NFL32, now airing at the same time, seems to have improved tremendously), The ‘Lights held the promise of being almost a must-watch show (too bad it’s shrunk instead of grown and may be hamstrung by NBCSN’s other morning efforts), and Fox may well be planning on going after SportsCenter more directly, while providing more platforms for Jay Glazer, considered the NFL’s best reporter.

So reading SportsBusiness Daily‘s interview with John Skipper, I have to wonder how much ESPN even grasps the criticisms leveled at them. Let’s go step-by-step:

ESPN President John Skipper gave a full-throated defense of the quality of ESPN’s journalism, saying the company does more to cover sports than any other entity.

And that’s the problem. ESPN is so huge, and makes up so much of the coverage of sports (especially with the decline of newspapers and local sports minutes on local newscasts), that it effectively determines the sports agenda for a not-insignificant portion of its audience who may not have Internet access or may not be aware of sites like Deadspin and Fanhouse or even Yahoo, and who only hear of sites connected with other networks when those networks plug them. This gives ESPN a tremendous responsibility, perhaps one no organization can be expected to live up to. As the Poynter Review Project puts it in their final column as ESPN’s collective ombudsman:

ESPN’s critics seize on every mistake, which can make the company’s editors, producers and PR folks defensive at times. That’s understandable; it’s not easy waking up each morning knowing you’re a big target.

But to put it simply … tough. ESPN’s sheer size and power demand such scrutiny. Media analyst SNL Kagan estimates ESPN will make $8.2 billion in revenue this year. It controls the rights to a huge range of live sports, using that content as fuel for its sports-information engine…This places considerable strain on its journalists. ESPN draws lines between its news division and its business and production arms, and we never heard of an executive storming across that line and telling ESPN journalists what to do or what not to do. At its best, ESPN’s reporting is thorough and uncompromising about matters of great concern to its business partners: Take its recent series on football concussions, or the throw-the-script-away “SportsCenter” that followed the debacle of an NFL replacement ref’s blown call that cost Green Bay a victory in Seattle. Both storylines served fans and undermined the business interests of the NFL.

But although ESPN has sought to separate its divisions and so preserve its journalists’ integrity, there is a massive and inherent conflict of interest here, so the arrangement demands constant monitoring. ESPN is so big that it occupies a position in sports not unlike that of Microsoft in the ecosystem for computer hardware and software in the late 1990s, or Apple’s place at the intersection of hardware, apps and downloads today.

ESPN can’t be an observer or bystander because its mere presence changes things. This is true not just in business but also in journalism: As noted earlier, if ESPN covers a story, it becomes big news; if it ignores it, often it withers. But occasionally, as happened in the wake of the grand jury indictment against former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, the rest of the world overrules ESPN’s judgment and the network must reverse course and pursue a story it originally treated lightly.

Much of the time, ESPN’s journalism is thorough, professional and of high quality: Able to pick and choose from the world’s best sportswriters, analysts and investigative reporters, it has hired and developed a substantial news operation. That’s sorely needed. Sports might be entertainment, but they’re multibillion-dollar forms of entertainment, and although we want sports to be escapes from our troubles and issues, the truth is that they reflect — sometimes even magnify — the world and all its flaws.

Sports are a window into public health; labor relations; institutional power and abuses; government regulation; children and education; and matters of race, class and gender. We need storytellers and watchdogs to explore these issues and questions in sports as badly as we need them to do so elsewhere.

Whether the story is child sexual abuse, head injuries, the proper role of college athletics, performance-enhancing drugs, public funding of stadiums or the advancement of women, we need journalists such as ESPN’s — and they, in turn, need standards and practices that are clearly and wisely defined, and faithfully followed. That will allow fans to benefit from ESPN’s enormous resources while insulating them from the network’s considerable conflicts. And that will help us better see the world through sports.

And that’s an ombudsman…

He specifically highlighted ESPN as the only sports media company that uses an ombudsman and has published social media policies for its reporters and on-air talent.

…that’s been roundly criticized throughout its term where previous ombudsmen were not, with even its attempts to make up for the criticism only engendering more criticism, yet still was able to criticize ESPN’s social media policy just six months ago. (I’m going to attempt an unbiased assessment of the job Poynter has done as ombudsman next week.)

“We have standards of journalism that are at the highest order,” Skipper told THE DAILY during an extensive interview in his N.Y. office. “There’s a separate question, which is, ‘Are we adhering to them?’ But at least our intention and what we publish is that we are going to adhere to high standards.

There are some cases where a few bad apples have done things that didn’t live up to ESPN’s journalistic standards, among them the multiple ESPN employees who were disciplined for using the phrase “chink in the armor” in reference to Jeremy Lin earlier this year. Unfortunately, there are also reports of cases where higher-ups at ESPN have explicitly told employees not to follow certain standards, even when those employees and on-air personalities themselves wanted to. More important than “are we adhering to them” is “does ESPN even care about them other than for their PR value?”

As evidence, Skipper brought up the Ben Roethlisberger story from ’09, when the Steelers QB was named in a civil suit that accused him of rape. ESPN was criticized for not reporting on the story initially. But Skipper said the newsroom made the correct decision to not report the problem at the time because ESPN had a policy in place not to report on civil suits. The company has since changed that policy. “We changed our policy and set specific guidelines. We said that we can no longer ignore it; if it becomes widespread and the AP goes with it, we will go with it, too. We’re willing to change to adapt to changing times.

As I said at the time, ESPN’s failure to report on the story was only part of the issue; a bigger issue involved the context of what ESPN did choose to report on, including apparent violations of that same policy. That issue, in and of itself, wasn’t necessarily fixed by loosening the apparent policy against reporting on civil suits, and indeed, ESPN has continued to come under fire for being slow to report on numerous stories since, including the Jerry Sandusky scandal.

We decided to be quicker. We started Front Row so we could be a little more transparent. I don’t think anybody responds more or has higher standards.

From what I can tell, Front Row is a constant barrage of ESPN PR and little else. It hardly adds any more “transparency” to what happens in Bristol, and is hardly “responsive” to the issues laid out here.

One of the most persistent criticisms has dealt with the potential conflict between ESPN’s news gathering journalists and its business execs, who invest billions of dollars into the leagues those journalists cover. Such a conflict does not exist, Skipper said. “The thing that makes me angriest is that ESPN has a conflict. Give me three examples where we pulled up. I think that we did a comprehensive story on stadium and arena food standards and found about one quarter of the stadiums to be deficient in terms of their health standards. I don’t recall anyone else doing that or being in that much conflict with all of their partners. I think I remember a whole week of stories about the concussions in the NFL. But people still write it as a matter of fact, ‘Of course, ESPN’s not leading the way in writing about concussions.’ Other than the N.Y. Times, we’ve clearly been the most aggressive on that. Talk to David Stern about whether he thinks we pull up on stories.”

I don’t think that’s the problem. If anything, ESPN is accused of having the opposite problem: on the one hand, giving too much coverage to LeBron James, Tim Tebow, and Linsanity while penalizing leagues that don’t have relationships with them with limited SportsCenter exposure, and on the other, pursuing stories that don’t pan out, such as the Saints wiretapping scandal. Where ESPN pulls up is in stories that haven’t broken yet and in more peripheral aspects of its programming, as in the NFL-mandated death of “Playmakers”. On the concussion issue, it’s worth noting that until reports started coming out about it (not initially from ESPN, I might add), ESPN was as in bed with the NFL’s physicality as anyone, as anyone who does a Google search for “jacked up” will learn. By the way, according to Deadspin’s “Bristolmetrics” feature, ESPN covered a meaningless Monday Night Football game more than the Jovan Belcher saga.

Another persistent criticism deals with the popularity of debate programming on shows like “First Take.” But Skipper says critics are mistakingly applying journalistic standards to a show that is not steeped in journalism. “It’s just another show. It’s not journalism. Nobody goes, ‘Gee, look how awful it is that CBS does these awful reality shows. Doesn’t that taint their great news organization?’

No one wants First Take to be some bastion of journalism, though it’s worth noting that First Take was not always two solid hours of Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith “embracing debate”. The problem is twofold: first, that First Take is tainting everything else ESPN does, and second, that even by debate-show standards First Take disappoints. At least Around the Horn and PTI talk about whatever’s in the news that day; does First Take exist as anything but a way for Skip and Stephen A. to spout their inane opinions over and over for two hours? At the height of Tebowmania, First Take might as well have been called “The Tim Tebow Show”. People don’t want First Take to be a bastion of news; they want it not to exist at all, at least in its current form.

Nobody goes, “Gee, look how awful it is that CBS’ news shows are doing nothing but talking about their awful reality shows and the things those shows are talking about. Doesn’t that taint their great news organization?” You know why? Because no other news organization with any reputation to uphold lets the equivalent of Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith set their news agenda. Can you imagine if Andy Rooney’s Sunday rant was the only thing the CBS Evening News reported on for the rest of the week?

But people say, ‘Gee, that awful debate that you’re doing, how can the great ‘SportsCenter’ coexist with the debate of ‘First Take.’ I don’t know, how do infomercials coexist with the great journalism they’re doing someplace else? We’re not a micromanaged place. Jamie Horowitz is the producer of ‘First Take.’ He’s gone in a direction that’s working. Ratings are up.”

Again, the problem isn’t that SportsCenter can’t coexist with First Take, it’s that it’s not coexisting with it.

Skipper says he takes complaints seriously. So far, the complaints have not resonated outside of sports media, and all research suggests the ESPN brand has not been damaged by any criticisms — at least not yet. “The brand’s never been stronger. We care most about our brand with fans. We have no choice but to worry about our brand with our friends in the media and with advertisers and with business people.

To this, I’m just going to quote Awful Announcing:

Not for all viewers and readers certainly, not even the majority, or probably even close to it.  For most ESPN watchers, the network’s journalistic practices are less than an afterthought to the latest game, debate, or evening SportsCenter.  But enough engaged sports fans who follow ESPN almost as closely as they do the sports themselves are beginning to lose faith in the self-proclaimed worldwide leader.  The explosion of blogs and Twitter has meant there are more engaged fans than ever before who pursue information beyond the Bristol city limits and don’t have to take ESPN at their first word.

ESPN’s brand doesn’t rest on its journalistic integrity. It rests on its coverage of live sports events and the fact it holds so much power in the world of sports its brand could only possibly decline if ESPN itself declines, especially if it shields its viewers from its missteps. No one has ever said that ESPN is a bastion of great sports journalism, so in terms of “protecting its brand” ESPN doesn’t have to care about how strong its journalism is. But if ESPN comes under attack from new sports networks run by NBC and Fox, networks even people who don’t even know the sports blogosphere exists can stumble upon and discover what’s happening outside the Bristol bubble? Then ESPN will have to care right quick.