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sports journalism
The King: How ESPN changes everything
by Jim Shea
Jim Shea has worked at The Hartford Courant for eighteen years,
the first twelve covering sports and sports media. He is now a feature writer,
and produces a weekly humor column. His book, Husky Mania: The Inside Story
of the Rise of UConn's Men's and Women's Basketball Teams, was published
in 1995.
Ever
wonder why today's athletes dance and mug and celebrate after even the most
routine plays? The answer, and many athletes will admit it, is that they know
it gives them a better chance to make the evening highlights package on ESPN's
SportsCenter.
Or consider the NFL's reaction to an opinion voiced by ESPN anchor Chris Berman. Commenting on a new taunting fad among pro football players – the slashing hand across the throat — Berman strongly condemned it. Two days later, the NFL announced the gesture would henceforth be considered unsportsmanlike conduct and subject to a fifteen-yard penalty. Coincidence?
And don't try to tell fans of the University of Tennessee football team that ESPN doesn't throw its clout around. They are convinced that Peyton Manning, the Heisman Trophy favorite two years ago, would have won the award if not for the fact that ESPN analysts began touting another player — who eventually won — in an effort, Tennessee claims, to boost ratings.
By virtue of its omnipresence, its audience size, its content, its credibility, its popularity, ESPN is the king of sports television. It has become the most dominant force in the history of sports broadcasting, an interconnected colossus of multimedia synergy, which now routinely influences and alters the way sports are viewed, covered, and even played.
From a seat-of-the-pants operation originally intended to telecast University of Connecticut basketball and New England Whalers hockey twenty years ago, the Connecticut-based company has become the world's largest cable television sports network, with an estimated worth of $15.4 billion and gross revenues projected to be $1.3 billion in 1999.
It delivers 4,900 hours of live or original sports programming annually to more than 77 million homes on ESPN, and 4,200 hours to 67 million-plus households on ESPN2.
In addition, the Disney and Hearst-owned company includes: ESPN Inter national, a separate, 20-network operation, broadcasting to 150 million households in 180 countries in 21 languages; ESPN Classic, featuring games, heroes, and moments from sports history, seen in more than 20 million homes; ESPNews, a continuous run of news, highlights, scores, analysis, and live press conferences; ESPN Radio, which provides twenty-four-hour a day programming to more than 650 affiliates, including 80 stations that carry the network 24 hours a day; ESPN.com, the most popular sports site on the Web; ESPN The Magazine, a twice-monthly, ten- by twelve-inch glossy with a circulation of 850,000 that may be poised to challenge the venerable Sports Il lustrated; ESPN Zone, a budding chain of sports-themed restaurants; and ESPN Enterprises, a division given the full-time responsibility of developing new products and businesses using the ESPN brand.
"When Disney bought the whole Cap Cities package in 1995, they said they thought the franchise was ESPN," says Leonard Shapiro, who writes about the sports media for The Washington Post. "ABC was almost an afterthought. They felt the great growth potential was ESPN."
In terms of how sports are now reported and covered, nothing has had a greater impact than ESPN's signature show, SportsCenter. Originally thirty-minutes long, Sports Cen ter grew to sixty minutes and airs several times a day. It's current for mat was shaped by ESPN ex ecutive editor John A. Walsh, fifty-four, who came to ESPN in 1988 after having held a variety of positions in the print media, including founding editor of In side Sports magazine, managing editor of U.S. News & World Report, and managing editor of Rolling Stone.
"I don't think I had any overriding philosophy when I came here," Walsh says. "I was a sports fan and I wanted to see what a sports fan would want to see." But one of the first things Walsh did was change the format of SportsCenter to reflect a newspaper approach. Rather than have stories run in blocks according to sport, as was common TV practice, Walsh had all the day's major stories appear at the top of the show in order of importance. With its mix of game highlights, information, scores, interviews, analysis, and quirky humor, SportsCenter has grown to attract a twenty-four-hour daily aggregate audience of 5.5 million.
Although Walsh says SportsCenter does not seek to influence, he is aware of its sway over other media. "The smartest people react to our coverage, because they understand that a part of the makeup of their most intense readership is people who watch our shows," Walsh says. "But we don't operate here in Bristol, Connecticut, thinking we are influencing something. We are trying to make the best decision for the avid sports fan. To get the most viewers to watch for the longest period of time — that's our job."
ESPN and other sports networks do that job so well that they are contributing to the demise of the sports anchor role at local television stations, says Henry Mauldin, of San Francisco-based Don Fitzpatrick As sociates, a television talent headhunting firm. "Sports is definitely on the back burner at local stations now," Mauldin says. "The thinking is that if people want sports they go to ESPN, CNN/SI, or Fox. ESPN updates scores twice an hour, plus they have the hour-long shows. What the local stations are doing now is making sports local, lo cal, local. They are also much more feature oriented. I'm not saying the job of local sports anchor is dead, but it's dying. There is just not that much left for it anymore."
Also affected are newspaper sports sec tions, which are now being packaged, foc used, and even written dif ferently be cause of ESPN. "More than any other entity, ESPN has changed the way we cover sports,'' says Don Skwar, sports editor of The Boston Globe. "They bring so much to people before and after the event, plus analysis and in-depth stuff. ESPN has also changed the way young readers have been exposed to sports. Highlights are critical to them, and as a result we have something called Plays of the Game now. We also do other things in our cov erage that maybe we would not have done before, and it is because of ESPN and its influence."
Although Skwar says ESPN has not made print sports pages more local, he does say that local coverage is the main area in which newspapers still maintain a significant advantage. "If five minutes is all you want to spend with the sports news, then ESPN may be where you want to go," Skwar says. "They do a great job of providing information to every single person in the United States. But if you really want to know absolutely everything about the Red Sox or Celtics, you can't get that from ESPN — yet."
ESPN has become an 800-pound gorilla in other arenas as well, particularly on the field and in the locker rooms. "I think the biggest thing with ESPN for everyone in newspapers is access," says Skwar. "More and more, access is becoming a big problem for the newspaper journalists. ESPN has much more of an opportunity to talk to the players because the players recognize ESPN."
"It drives me crazy," says Shapiro. "I also cover golf for the Post and for the past two years I have been trying to get an interview with Tiger Woods, but his handlers won't allow it. Then I pick up ESPN The Magazine, and this SportsCenter anchor has a one-on-one Q & A with him that runs for six pages."
Athletes such as Woods favor ESPN because they are familiar with, and often fans of, the network. The coziness between ESPN and the athletes it covers has come under criticism in some journalistic quarters. In particular, critics cite a series of SportsCenter promos featuring anchors and athletes. These highly entertaining spots are so popular that many normally aloof superstars literally beg to be on them.
Al Tompkins, a former TV news director who teaches broadcast news ethics at The Poynter Institute, is uncomfortable with the relationship. "How would it be if you appear in a promo with an athlete, and then the next day you have to do a difficult story about their cocaine use?" Tompkins says. "It would be quite difficult."
Sports Illustrated writer Frank Deford, in a commentary for National Public Radio, framed the situation this way: "For a couple of years now, ESPN has been running some delightful commercials praising ESPN that feature the very star athletes that ESPN covers. ESPN and ABC are the same company. Visualize, if you will, Tom Daschle and Trent Lott teaming up to do a funny commercial on ABC urging you to watch Peter Jennings's news. Because that's the exact equivalent of the ESPN gambit."
Skwar disagrees: "Sports isn't politics, that's where I would draw the distinction. No one's running for office. Sure, there's a public trust involved, but it's a totally different thing."
"We had some questions about the promos," concedes ESPN managing editor Bob Eaton, who spent twenty-five years with NBC News. "We looked at it and we ultimately structured it so that we make a donation to the athlete's charity of choice. We don't pay them and we don't give them any special treatment. Roger Clemens [the Yankee pitcher] has done some of the promos, and we were certainly as tough on him as any pitcher in baseball over the last few months of the season."
While sensitive to the credibility perceptions the promos may create, Walsh also thinks they may enhance ESPN's standing with viewers because they give the impression the network is close to the athletes, and therefore has a better grasp of what is going on.
Another area in which SportsCenter has drawn fire involves anchors being paid to appear in commercials. In this case, Walsh concedes that if he and others in the company had their way, on-air people would not do commercials. However, because the practice is so common in sports — even the highly regarded Bob Costas of NBC has done them, for TV Guide — Walsh says he has had to compromise or put ESPN at a disadvantage in the talent marketplace.
"It's a very difficult issue because at CNN or NBC News people don't do these kinds of things," Walsh says. "And we don't want our people to be salesmen. What we have done is set up guidelines. If it's a sports product or relates to something that touches sports, we don't let our people do it. We don't let any of our people do Nike or any of the sneakers companies. We don't have people dealing with golf equipment. We routinely get proposals that we turn down." But outside of those parameters, "we do let our people make their own decisions," he says.
Tompkins, of the Poynter Institute, agrees that ESPN is not the only outlet that allows sports anchors to sell goods, and he finds the practice unfortunate. "The Radio and Television News Directors Foundation did a survey of news viewers across the nation last year, and they found that eight in ten news viewers believe that advertisers have undue influence — that's a key phrase, undue influence — over editorial content on television. That's an alarming number. That speaks to an erosion of confidence that is real in the viewers' minds. And anything we do to reinforce that, to water down our credibility, is damaging in the long term."
Shapiro, of The Washington Post, agrees: "I don't think journalists endorse products. It's the old thing, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck then it must be a duck. Well these guys are walking like a journalist, and talking like a journalist, so they must be journalists. But they're not because they are pumping products. And I think that's a big mistake."
"Every person who works in this business has to answer to himself first," says Bob Ley, a SportsCenter anchor and host of ESPN's Emmy award-winning investigative show Outside the Lines. "I understand the issues, and they are valid points to consider. But I don't see this as being black and white." Still, Ley has chosen not do commercials.
Sports anchors have found other ways to cross journalistic lines. For example, Robin Roberts, one of ESPN's most high-profile anchors (she also contributes to ABC News) acted as emcee at a Madison Square Garden fundraising event last November for presidential candidate Bill Bradley, an event that included many of the candidate's former New York Knicks teammates. When her appearance raised eyebrows, Roberts expressed surprise, saying if she knew what the reaction was going to be, she never would have been involved. "Certainly the fallout has given us cause to look at the issue," says Walsh. "I think Robin — and she has stated so — was a bit naive."
In his NPR commentary, Deford noted that the journalistic community routinely applies different standards to sports than it does to other branches of journalism. He pointed out some of the media outlets that own pieces of professional teams — The Dallas Morning News (Mavericks) and the Chicago Tribune (Cubs) — as well as outlets that sponsor events that they cover, such as The New York Times (U.S. Open Tennis Champion ships) and Sports Illustrated (The Olympics).
"Sports journalism is held to a different standard," Deford said, off the air. "Which is why athletes can show up on ESPN and it doesn't bother anybody. Listen, John Walsh is a Class A journalist and so are the people around him. ESPN is not doing anything others haven't done. They are just continuing in the grand tradition."
Poynter's Tompkins agrees that sports journalism operates within a slightly different set of rules. "I come from twenty-five years in television," Tompkins says. "I'm not without sin here. I personally treated sports more leniently than I treated news. I had a very high standard for news content, but I have to admit I had a lesser standard for sports content. I let my sports guy do stuff I wouldn't let my news anchors do."
Walsh says that all these issues of journalistic limits and ethics raise "interesting questions. Ultimately, I cut to the bottom line. Are we able to cover the stories we should cover in the way that we should cover them? I go home smiling every night thinking we are doing the job we should do."
Whether one shares it or not, Walsh's comfort level is not something to be taken lightly. ESPN, by virtue of its ever-growing might, will surely be the major factor in setting standards for sports journalism in the new century. n
Jim Shea has worked at The Hartford Courant for eighteen years, the first twelve covering sports and sports media. He is now a feature writer, and produces a weekly humor column. His book, Husky Mania: The Inside Story of the Rise of UConn's Men's and Women's Basketball Teams, was published in 1995.
