by Lawrence Strauss
Strauss is a free-lance writer in New York.

When you think of the words "sports" and "journalism," it's not likely that you free-associate to the word "television." TV is masterful at presenting the games, but when you think of memorable pieces of sports journalism it's not likely that they originated in the sports divisions of the major broadcast and cable networks. A few notable exceptions aside -- Real Sports on HBO, or Outside the Lines on ESPN, or the rare TV news magazine story -- there isn't much nuanced or hard-hitting material about sports on TV at all.

Why aren't there more TV news stories about, say, the politics and true costs to their communities of new stadiums, or about the major shift of televised sporting events to pay TV, or about how race relations play out on the field and in the locker room? Part of the answer has to do with a sense that viewers want to be entertained, not challenged. But the newer and more compelling possibility has to do with money.

Network sports executives like to declare that sports is entertainment and that entertainment is all that viewers want. "You know why there's not more sports journalism?" asks consultant Neal Pilson, a former president of CBS Sports. "Because most people don't care about it." But Seth Abraham, c.e.o. of Time Warner Sports, doesn't buy that argument. He points to Real Sports, the Time Warner property that airs for an hour six times a year. The show gets decent ratings for cable, and does not shy away from aggressive, in-depth stories, such as a piece in March about basketball point-shaving at Arizona State, or one in May about the fairness of the taxpayer contribution to a new $250 million stadium in Phoenix for the Arizona Diamondbacks.

The networks, Abraham says, "sort of look the other way unless the story hits them in the face."

Of course, HBO, whose sports programming includes Wimbledon, boxing, and Inside the NFL, does not have the same connections to major-league sports as do the networks that pay millions -- and, now, billions -- for broadcasting rights.

Media companies increasingly own sports teams (see chart, next page), and there's obviously some potential for a journalistic conflict of interest in such ownership -- a tendency to promote the team, or to ignore serious issues. But it is the staggering rise of television rights fees -- the money that broadcast and cable networks pay leagues and organizations for exclusive rights to broadcast events -- that seems more likely to further undermine TV sports journalism. The big money (see chart, right) can tempt the networks into viewing the sports organizations they cover as marketing partners.

Fox, CBS, ABC, and ESPN will pay a total of $17.6 billion for the rights to broadcast National Football League games over the next eight seasons. Rights fees for the previous contracts, which lasted four years, totaled about $4.4 billion. CBS paid $50,000 for the rights to televise the 1960 Winter Olympics, or roughly $278,000 in 1998 dollars. Compare that with the $375 million that the network paid for the games in Nagano last winter. NBC, which has locked up television rights for each of the summer and winter Olympics through 2008, has agreed to pay $3.55 billion for that package. The National Basketball Association recently signed a four-year, $1.75 billion deal with NBC -- up from $750 million for the previous four years. In August, ABC and ESPN jointly bid $600 million for NHL hockey, 1999-2004, which would be up 167 percent from the current contracts.

In the NBA-NBC partnership, the network and league work together on scheduling and selling the games to potential sponsors. That partnership supposedly ends when it comes to NBC's coverage of the league, according to NBA commissioner David Stern. "From time to time we have expressed our opinion on a feature on the networks," Stern says. "But always after the fact."

Yet in their book Money Players -- Days and Nights Inside the New NBA -- reporters Armen Keteyian, Harvey Araton, and Martin F. Dardis probe, among other things, Stern's relationship with NBC and Turner Sports. In the book Dick Ebersol, now chairman of NBC Sports, is quoted about a weekly NBC/NBA lunch held, "once the season starts up, to discuss how we're promoting, how we're producing, what we're doing with features in the pregame, at halftime, what Inside Stuff is doing, our thoughts about the previous weekend. And if he [Stern] feels that something may have been lightly treated, or not enough, he'll go right in the face of the producer or director or promo person and it will be a tough one minute."

Lines get blurred: Ahmad Rashad works as a sideline reporter for NBC, and as co-anchor, executive producer, and managing editor of NBA Inside Stuff -- a show produced and paid for by the NBA. This perhaps is less serious than, but still similar to, a White House correspondent moonlighting for the Democratic National Committee. Ken Schanzer, president of NBC Sports, defends Rashad's double duty: "There are so many interconnections in media and sport that at the end of the day, you have to rely on the integrity of the individual to wend his or her way through some of those interconnections."

Current and former network TV sports executives insist there's no connection between rights fees and coverage. "Escalating rights fees are a non factor in coverage decisions," says Pilson. But Abraham of Time Warner Sports says the escalating rights fees cause the networks and the leagues they cover to form marketing partnerships that can erode journalistic enterprise. And, he says, "the leagues don't want to be embarrassed" by tough stories. Broadcaster Bob Costas says the rising fees put increasing pressure on the networks to raise ratings. While this does not preclude journalism, commentary, and criticism, he says, "it certainly makes them a lesser priority."

Frank Deford, the highly respected Sports Illustrated writer and National Public Radio commentator, asserts that broadcast rights contracts do indeed have a chilling effect. As just one example, he points to CBS's reverential coverage of the Master's. In 1994, Gary McCord, a veteran golf announcer, was banished from the Augusta tournament for slightly risqué comments -- that the greens were so fast it seemed as if they'd had a "bikini wax," and that some balls went so far into the rough that they were out by "the body bags."

"Everybody is somehow silenced by these contracts and the fact that too many networks are chasing too few properties," DeFord says. "You don't want them coming to you and saying, 'You had these rotten things to say about us three years ago.' Everything is inhibited by the fear of losing these contracts. So everything is played down the middle of the fairway, every time."

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