In October, Doug Gottlieb, a radio host and basketball analyst who'd
decamped for CBS the previous month after nine years with ESPN, went
on The Dan Patrick Show and dropped something of a truth bomb about
his time in Bristol:
I was told specifically, "You can't talk enough Tebow." I would
jokingly throw it into a segment. "I gotta find 15 seconds here to
talk about Tebow, all right let's move on and talk about Major League
Baseball."
Later, he said:
Is it ridiculous how much you have to talk about Tebow? Yeah! But for
whatever reason people can't get enough of that story, and they kind
of stoke the fire—that's kind of what ESPN does.
Gottlieb was referring to the network's yearlong infatuation with
Tebow, a player who hasn't made much actual news since he was traded
to the Jets in March. Bristol executives have decided that what we want
—or what we should want—is Tebow. "They want to own the Tebow story,"
said Jim Miller, the author of the ESPN oral history Those Guys Have
All The Fun. "They want to put their watermark on it."
This helps explain why, over the summer, ESPN dispatched veteran
reporter Sal Paolantonio and a crew to cover Jets camp as if it were
the run-up to the Super Bowl. ("ESPN embarrassed themselves," Dan
Patrick, who spent 18 years in Bristol, said of ESPN's flood-the-zone
coverage in Florham Park.) This helps explain why ESPN2's First Take
referred to Tim Tebow more than seven dozen times in late May even
though there was absolutely no Tebow news to report on. This helps
explain why SportsCenter covered Tim Tebow's 25th birthday like a moon
landing. This helps explain why it seemed perfectly reasonable to a
SportsCenter anchor to ask in-studio guest Liam Neeson whether Tim
Tebow should be the Jets' starting quarterback even though Liam Neeson
had no clue what he was talking about. This helps explain how ESPN
wound up breaking Tim Tebow news to, yes, Tim Tebow.
The story of how ESPN fell in love with Tim Tebow is really the story
of a breakup, between ESPN and the business of reporting the news.
The story of how ESPN fell in love with Tim Tebow is really the story
of a breakup, between ESPN and the business of reporting the news.
* * *
The Tebow phenomenon—that is, the sustained celebrity of a football
player of only moderate ability—says as much about ESPN as it does
about the quarterback himself. For the better part of a decade, the
narrative about ESPN has held that the integrity of the news operation
is subordinate to the Worldwide Leader's business concerns. (Just
think back to The Decision or to the Bonds on Bonds docuseries before
that, the one that ceded editorial control to the Giants outfielder
and left Pedro Gomez, ESPN's Bonds beat guy, pressing his nose up
against his own network's window.) Given that ESPN has deals with
nearly every major league—and ignores the ones with which it doesn't
have deals—the question has become inescapable: How can the company
produce honest journalism when it's in business with, well, everybody?
ESPN has proven it can—the coverage of the replacement-ref fiasco in
the wake of the Green Bay-Seattle Monday night game was a high point—
but in recent months something began to shift. There was Tebowmania,
of course, but more quietly there were several incidents of
journalistic malpractice that were notable not for the egregiousness
of the crimes but for ESPN's total indifference to them (about which
more later). We weren't the only ones to notice. A member of the
newsroom was just as baffled as we were by the silence of a media
company that blankets the office in memos at the drop of a zipper.
"Producers were looking to duplicate the success of First Take,"
according to a Bristol insider. "Given what the ratings were, you
would have been an idiot not to talk Tebow. Decisions to talk Tebow
were conscious and deliberate."
Why does any of this matter? For one thing, journalism is in the
company's DNA. It's no exaggeration to say that the modern ESPN was
built on top of its robust news division. When now-executive editor
John Walsh—an editor at the Washington Post's Style section in its
heyday, an editor at '70s-era Rolling Stone, and a founding editor of
the short-lived, much-loved Inside Sports—arrived on Bristol's campus
in the late 1980s, he declared that a strong newsroom would give the
station the identity it had lacked to that point. As he staffed up,
Walsh cared more about reporting chops than TV readiness: Andrea
Kremer (hired from NFL Films), Robin Roberts (from local TV and radio
in Atlanta), Peter Gammons (from The Boston Globe and Sports
Illustrated), Jimmy Roberts (from ABC News), Chris Mortensen (the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The National). Print people? Some
inexperience? Didn't matter. Talent did.
ESPN left its mark on the major stories of the early '90s—Pete Rose,
Magic Johnson, the O.J. saga—and competitors noticed. They worried
about ESPN's reach. Well, actually, not just its reach. They feared
its audience and its journalistic chops. Here's The Franchise: A
History of Sports Illustrated Magazine author Michael MacCambridge
talking in Those Guys Have All the Fun:
[Former Sports Illustrated managing editor] Mark Mulvoy was just
obsessed with whatever ESPN was doing. A lot of writers at Sports
Illustrated couldn't understand that and asked, 'Why are we so worried
about ESPN?' but to Mulvoy's credit, he saw that the paradigm was
changing and the primacy that Sports Illustrated had enjoyed in the
media world was being usurped by ESPN. And the reason was not because
ESPN was a cable network with x number of viewers; the reason was
Walsh had invested SportsCenter with a journalistic authority that had
not existed before he got there, and that did not exist anywhere else
where people did sports reporting on TV. Mulvoy was scared, and in
retrospect, he was right.
David Hill, the longtime head of Fox Sports, has called Walsh ESPN's
"secret weapon." Longtime Disney chief executive Michael Eisner, in
his 1998 autobiography Work In Progress, said Walsh's hiring was one
of the two turning points for ESPN (the other was getting part of the
NFL's Sunday night package in 1987). Walsh's genius, in Eisner's
estimation? He "recognized that it was possible to lure viewers to
ESPN with strong reporting about sports, even in instances where the
network didn't have broadcast rights to a big event," Eisner writes.
And it helps when the centerpiece show, SportsCenter, runs three times
a day. This seems obvious now, but think about how you watched sports
at the time: You watched them live. ESPN provided a self-contained
alternative—highlights, reportage, and analysis—without having to open
its wallet to buy every "big event," though eventually ESPN would grow
profitable enough to want to do that, too. It was a deliriously
effective business model. Today, ESPN is worth $40 billion, about $5
billion more than the combined value of every NFL team.
"You can't say enough about how important their news operation is,"
said Miller. "If you take John Walsh and [director of news] Vince
Doria out of its history, ESPN is a fundamentally different place.
It's a less important place, it's a less successful place."
But that success has created problems for the newsroom, which operates
within a distortion field that the company's size creates. Doria, for
instance, recently suggested to media reporter Ed Sherman that
passionate local hockey fandom "really doesn't transfer much" to the
"national discussion," which overlooked the fact that ESPN is the
national discussion. If the network doesn't talk about hockey—and the
evidence is strong that, lacking an NHL television contract, it won't—
the nation doesn't talk about hockey, either.
And how much power does the newsroom have, anyway? One of the
SportsCenter anchors who hosted the bizarre Tebow birthday bash said
that she wasn't that into the idea. But she didn't have a choice.
Here's Sage Steele speaking to SportsBiz USA (emphasis mine):
When it's Tim Tebow, when it's Tiger Woods, when it's Brett Favre, the
numbers are such they support the bosses' decision to do this stuff.
Not all the time. We can sit there in the newsroom and argue all we
want. Which many of us do. When they come out and say, 'OK Sage, fine,
here's a rating,' what do I say? What do I say? I can't fight that.
[…]
Unfortunately, when we do stories in that manner, I can't argue with
fans (who criticize ESPN). I can't. So hopefully we can squash all
that talk and cover more teams…I agree with people who are
complaining. But I also agree with our bosses who say, 'OK, it's the
business. Look at the ratings. They might hate it. But they're still
watching.' People might hate Skip Bayless. But they're still watching.
As a result, the steady stream of Tebow non-news is as much a part of
ESPN's identity now as Chris Berman doing NFL highlights on Sunday
night.
"It's great when they choose to flood the zone on a story that's
really important—like the Pete Rose trial early in their history," Jim
Miller said. "Nobody can do it the way they can, that's fantastic. But
when they do it to a story that doesn't necessarily warrant the
attention they're giving it, it gets confusing to viewers. It hurts
your pedigree.
"It's kind of out of whack," he continued. "You risk losing an
identity for a news organization that they've been building for 20
years."
* * *
The story of ESPN's Tebow obsession really begins last year. In
September 2011, ESPN2's First Take, having gone through several
different lives (a faint imitation of a morning TV show, a debate-cum-
variety show), went to an all-debate format starring
>In October, Doug Gottlieb, a radio host and basketball analyst who'd
>decamped for CBS the previous month after nine years with ESPN, went
>on The Dan Patrick Show and dropped something of a truth bomb about
>his time in Bristol:
>I was told specifically, "You can't talk enough Tebow." I would
>jokingly throw it into a segment. "I gotta find 15 seconds here to
>talk about Tebow, all right let's move on and talk about Major League
>Baseball."
>Later, he said:
>Is it ridiculous how much you have to talk about Tebow? Yeah! But for
>whatever reason people can't get enough of that story, and they kind
>of stoke the fire that's kind of what ESPN does.
>Gottlieb was referring to the network's yearlong infatuation with
>Tebow, a player who hasn't made much actual news since he was traded
>to the Jets in March. Bristol executives have decided that what we want
> or what we should want is Tebow. "They want to own the Tebow story,"
>said Jim Miller, the author of the ESPN oral history Those Guys Have
>All The Fun. "They want to put their watermark on it."
>This helps explain why, over the summer, ESPN dispatched veteran
>reporter Sal Paolantonio and a crew to cover Jets camp as if it were
>the run-up to the Super Bowl. ("ESPN embarrassed themselves," Dan
>Patrick, who spent 18 years in Bristol, said of ESPN's flood-the-zone
>coverage in Florham Park.) This helps explain why ESPN2's First Take
>referred to Tim Tebow more than seven dozen times in late May even
>though there was absolutely no Tebow news to report on. This helps
>explain why SportsCenter covered Tim Tebow's 25th birthday like a moon
>landing. This helps explain why it seemed perfectly reasonable to a
>SportsCenter anchor to ask in-studio guest Liam Neeson whether Tim
>Tebow should be the Jets' starting quarterback even though Liam Neeson
>had no clue what he was talking about. This helps explain how ESPN
>wound up breaking Tim Tebow news to, yes, Tim Tebow.
>The story of how ESPN fell in love with Tim Tebow is really the story
>of a breakup, between ESPN and the business of reporting the news.
>The story of how ESPN fell in love with Tim Tebow is really the story
>of a breakup, between ESPN and the business of reporting the news.
>* * *
>The Tebow phenomenon that is, the sustained celebrity of a football
>player of only moderate ability says as much about ESPN as it does
>about the quarterback himself. For the better part of a decade, the
>narrative about ESPN has held that the integrity of the news operation
>is subordinate to the Worldwide Leader's business concerns. (Just
>think back to The Decision or to the Bonds on Bonds docuseries before
>that, the one that ceded editorial control to the Giants outfielder
>and left Pedro Gomez, ESPN's Bonds beat guy, pressing his nose up
>against his own network's window.) Given that ESPN has deals with
>nearly every major league and ignores the ones with which it doesn't
>have deals the question has become inescapable: How can the company
>produce honest journalism when it's in business with, well, everybody?
>ESPN has proven it can the coverage of the replacement-ref fiasco in
>the wake of the Green Bay-Seattle Monday night game was a high point
>but in recent months something began to shift. There was Tebowmania,
>of course, but more quietly there were several incidents of
>journalistic malpractice that were notable not for the egregiousness
>of the crimes but for ESPN's total indifference to them (about which
>more later). We weren't the only ones to notice. A member of the
>newsroom was just as baffled as we were by the silence of a media
>company that blankets the office in memos at the drop of a zipper.
>"Producers were looking to duplicate the success of First Take,"
>according to a Bristol insider. "Given what the ratings were, you
>would have been an idiot not to talk Tebow. Decisions to talk Tebow
>were conscious and deliberate."
>Why does any of this matter? For one thing, journalism is in the
>company's DNA. It's no exaggeration to say that the modern ESPN was
>built on top of its robust news division. When now-executive editor
>John Walsh an editor at the Washington Post's Style section in its
>heyday, an editor at '70s-era Rolling Stone, and a founding editor of
>the short-lived, much-loved Inside Sports arrived on Bristol's campus
>in the late 1980s, he declared that a strong newsroom would give the
>station the identity it had lacked to that point. As he staffed up,
>Walsh cared more about reporting chops than TV readiness: Andrea
>Kremer (hired from NFL Films), Robin Roberts (from local TV and radio
>in Atlanta), Peter Gammons (from The Boston Globe and Sports
>Illustrated), Jimmy Roberts (from ABC News), Chris Mortensen (the
>Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The National). Print people? Some
>inexperience? Didn't matter. Talent did.
>ESPN left its mark on the major stories of the early '90s Pete Rose,
>Magic Johnson, the O.J. saga and competitors noticed. They worried
>about ESPN's reach. Well, actually, not just its reach. They feared
>its audience and its journalistic chops. Here's The Franchise: A
>History of Sports Illustrated Magazine author Michael MacCambridge
>talking in Those Guys Have All the Fun:
>[Former Sports Illustrated managing editor] Mark Mulvoy was just
>obsessed with whatever ESPN was doing. A lot of writers at Sports
>Illustrated couldn't understand that and asked, 'Why are we so worried
>about ESPN?' but to Mulvoy's credit, he saw that the paradigm was
>changing and the primacy that Sports Illustrated had enjoyed in the
>media world was being usurped by ESPN. And the reason was not because
>ESPN was a cable network with x number of viewers; the reason was
>Walsh had invested SportsCenter with a journalistic authority that had
>not existed before he got there, and that did not exist anywhere else
>where people did sports reporting on TV. Mulvoy was scared, and in
>retrospect, he was right.
>David Hill, the longtime head of Fox Sports, has called Walsh ESPN's
>"secret weapon." Longtime Disney chief executive Michael Eisner, in
>his 1998 autobiography Work In Progress, said Walsh's hiring was one
>of the two turning points for ESPN (the other was getting part of the
>NFL's Sunday night package in 1987). Walsh's genius, in Eisner's
>estimation? He "recognized that it was possible to lure viewers to
>ESPN with strong reporting about sports, even in instances where the
>network didn't have broadcast rights to a big event," Eisner writes.
>And it helps when the centerpiece show, SportsCenter, runs three times
>a day. This seems obvious now, but think about how you watched sports
>at the time: You watched them live. ESPN provided a self-contained
>alternative highlights, reportage, and analysis without having to open
>its wallet to buy every "big event," though eventually ESPN would grow
>profitable enough to want to do that, too. It was a deliriously
>effective business model. Today, ESPN is worth $40 billion, about $5
>billion more than the combined value of every NFL team.
>"You can't say enough about how important their news operation is,"
>said Miller. "If you take John Walsh and [director of news] Vince
>Doria out of its history, ESPN is a fundamentally different place.
>It's a less important place, it's a less successful place."
>But that success has created problems for the newsroom, which operates
>within a distortion field that the company's size creates. Doria, for
>instance, recently suggested to media reporter Ed Sherman that
>passionate local hockey fandom "really doesn't transfer much" to the
>"national discussion," which overlooked the fact that ESPN is the
>national discussion. If the network doesn't talk about hockey and the
>evidence is strong that, lacking an NHL television contract, it won't
>the nation doesn't talk about hockey, either.
>And how much power does the newsroom have, anyway? One of the
>SportsCenter anchors who hosted the bizarre Tebow birthday bash said
>that she wasn't that into the idea. But she didn't have a choice.
>Here's Sage Steele speaking to SportsBiz USA (emphasis mine):
>When it's Tim Tebow, when it's Tiger Woods, when it's Brett Favre, the
>numbers are such they support the bosses' decision to do this stuff.
>Not all the time. We can sit there in the newsroom and argue all we
>want. Which many of us do. When they come out and say, 'OK Sage, fine,
>here's a rating,' what do I say? What do I say? I can't fight that.
>[ ]
>Unfortunately, when we do stories in that manner, I can't argue with
>fans (who criticize ESPN). I can't. So hopefully we can squash all
>that talk and cover more teams I agree with people who are
>complaining. But I also agree with our bosses who say, 'OK, it's the
>business. Look at the ratings. They might hate it. But they're still
>watching.' People might hate Skip Bayless. But they're still watching.
>As a result, the steady stream of Tebow non-news is as much a part of
>ESPN's identity now as Chris Berman doing NFL highlights on Sunday
>night.
>"It's great when they choose to flood the zone on a story that's
>really important like the Pete Rose trial early in their history," Jim
>Miller said. "Nobody can do it the way they can, that's fantastic. But
>when they do it to a story that doesn't necessarily warrant the
>attention they're giving it, it gets confusing to viewers. It hurts
>your pedigree.
>"It's kind of out of whack," he continued. "You risk losing an
I just learned that CTRL+Enter = Send. What I meant to post:
>> Tebow, Tiger, Favre...and DANICA FUCKING PATRICK all the damn day!
> I'd much rather it be:
> DANICA FUCKING PATRICK
DANICA FUCKING PATRICK
DANICA FUCKING PATRICK
DANICA FUCKING PATRICK
DANICA FUCKING PATRICK
DANICA FUCKING PATRICK
DANICA FUCKING PATRICK
DANICA FUCKING PATRICK
DANICA FUCKING PATRICK
DANICA FUCKING PATRICK
DANICA FUCKING PATRICK
DANICA FUCKING PATRICK
DANICA FUCKING PATRICK
DANICA FUCKING PATRICK
DANICA FUCKING PATRICK
In article <k84hg4$8o...@dont-email.me>,
David Johnston <davidjohnsto...@block.com> wrote:
> On 11/14/2012 4:30 PM, Michael Press wrote:
> > In article <2436a8prrb3kmm11k1nmpal5r568805...@4ax.com>,
> > Ashton Crusher <d...@moore.net> wrote:
> >> Is it actually possible that anyone over the age of 10 cares what
> >> happens in "sports news"?
> > You care enough about _your_ precious opinion to
> > top post it _and_ quote 366 lines of prose you
> > pretend not to care about.
> Failing to delete isn't exactly a mark of deep interest.
To be sure---it is a sign you are not interested in
those you address. Again, even expressing your
disinterest in what happens in sports news, with
ungrammatical quotation marks, shows that you want
others to know your opinion on the matter, decidedly
not disinterest, while your simultaneously disparaging
any who hold an opinion not aligned with yours
(poisoning the well) shows not disinterest but contempt
for those you address. Qualifying with "over the age of
10" shows sloppy thinking. Under 10's are not
interested in what happens in sports news.
> In October, Doug Gottlieb, a radio host and basketball analyst who'd
> decamped for CBS the previous month after nine years with ESPN, went
> on The Dan Patrick Show and dropped something of a truth bomb about
> his time in Bristol:
> I was told specifically, "You can't talk enough Tebow." I would
> jokingly throw it into a segment. "I gotta find 15 seconds here to
> talk about Tebow, all right let's move on and talk about Major League
> Baseball."
> Later, he said:
> Is it ridiculous how much you have to talk about Tebow? Yeah! But for
> whatever reason people can't get enough of that story, and they kind
> of stoke the fire—that's kind of what ESPN does.
> Gottlieb was referring to the network's yearlong infatuation with
> Tebow, a player who hasn't made much actual news since he was traded
> to the Jets in March. Bristol executives have decided that what we want
> —or what we should want—is Tebow. "They want to own the Tebow story,"
> said Jim Miller, the author of the ESPN oral history Those Guys Have
> All The Fun. "They want to put their watermark on it."
> This helps explain why, over the summer, ESPN dispatched veteran
> reporter Sal Paolantonio and a crew to cover Jets camp as if it were
> the run-up to the Super Bowl. ("ESPN embarrassed themselves," Dan
> Patrick, who spent 18 years in Bristol, said of ESPN's flood-the-zone
> coverage in Florham Park.) This helps explain why ESPN2's First Take
> referred to Tim Tebow more than seven dozen times in late May even
> though there was absolutely no Tebow news to report on. This helps
> explain why SportsCenter covered Tim Tebow's 25th birthday like a moon
> landing. This helps explain why it seemed perfectly reasonable to a
> SportsCenter anchor to ask in-studio guest Liam Neeson whether Tim
> Tebow should be the Jets' starting quarterback even though Liam Neeson
> had no clue what he was talking about. This helps explain how ESPN
> wound up breaking Tim Tebow news to, yes, Tim Tebow.
> The story of how ESPN fell in love with Tim Tebow is really the story
> of a breakup, between ESPN and the business of reporting the news.
> The story of how ESPN fell in love with Tim Tebow is really the story
> of a breakup, between ESPN and the business of reporting the news.
> * * *
> The Tebow phenomenon—that is, the sustained celebrity of a football
> player of only moderate ability—says as much about ESPN as it does
> about the quarterback himself. For the better part of a decade, the
> narrative about ESPN has held that the integrity of the news operation
> is subordinate to the Worldwide Leader's business concerns. (Just
> think back to The Decision or to the Bonds on Bonds docuseries before
> that, the one that ceded editorial control to the Giants outfielder
> and left Pedro Gomez, ESPN's Bonds beat guy, pressing his nose up
> against his own network's window.) Given that ESPN has deals with
> nearly every major league—and ignores the ones with which it doesn't
> have deals—the question has become inescapable: How can the company
> produce honest journalism when it's in business with, well, everybody?
> ESPN has proven it can—the coverage of the replacement-ref fiasco in
> the wake of the Green Bay-Seattle Monday night game was a high point—
> but in recent months something began to shift. There was Tebowmania,
> of course, but more quietly there were several incidents of
> journalistic malpractice that were notable not for the egregiousness
> of the crimes but for ESPN's total indifference to them (about which
> more later). We weren't the only ones to notice. A member of the
> newsroom was just as baffled as we were by the silence of a media
> company that blankets the office in memos at the drop of a zipper.
> "Producers were looking to duplicate the success of First Take,"
> according to a Bristol insider. "Given what the ratings were, you
> would have been an idiot not to talk Tebow. Decisions to talk Tebow
> were conscious and deliberate."
> Why does any of this matter? For one thing, journalism is in the
> company's DNA. It's no exaggeration to say that the modern ESPN was
> built on top of its robust news division. When now-executive editor
> John Walsh—an editor at the Washington Post's Style section in its
> heyday, an editor at '70s-era Rolling Stone, and a founding editor of
> the short-lived, much-loved Inside Sports—arrived on Bristol's campus
> in the late 1980s, he declared that a strong newsroom would give the
> station the identity it had lacked to that point. As he staffed up,
> Walsh cared more about reporting chops than TV readiness: Andrea
> Kremer (hired from NFL Films), Robin Roberts (from local TV and radio
> in Atlanta), Peter Gammons (from The Boston Globe and Sports
> Illustrated), Jimmy Roberts (from ABC News), Chris Mortensen (the
> Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The National). Print people? Some
> inexperience? Didn't matter. Talent did.
> ESPN left its mark on the major stories of the early '90s—Pete Rose,
> Magic Johnson, the O.J. saga—and competitors noticed. They worried
> about ESPN's reach. Well, actually, not just its reach. They feared
> its audience and its journalistic chops. Here's The Franchise: A
> History of Sports Illustrated Magazine author Michael MacCambridge
> talking in Those Guys Have All the Fun:
> [Former Sports Illustrated managing editor] Mark Mulvoy was just
> obsessed with whatever ESPN was doing. A lot of writers at Sports
> Illustrated couldn't understand that and asked, 'Why are we so worried
> about ESPN?' but to Mulvoy's credit, he saw that the paradigm was
> changing and the primacy that Sports Illustrated had enjoyed in the
> media world was being usurped by ESPN. And the reason was not because
> ESPN was a cable network with x number of viewers; the reason was
> Walsh had invested SportsCenter with a journalistic authority that had
> not existed before he got there, and that did not exist anywhere else
> where people did sports reporting on TV. Mulvoy was scared, and in
> retrospect, he was right.
> David Hill, the longtime head of Fox Sports, has called Walsh ESPN's
> "secret weapon." Longtime Disney chief executive Michael Eisner, in
> his 1998 autobiography Work In Progress, said Walsh's hiring was one
> of the two turning points for ESPN (the other was getting part of the
> NFL's Sunday night package in 1987). Walsh's genius, in Eisner's
> estimation? He "recognized that it was possible to lure viewers to
> ESPN with strong reporting about sports, even in instances where the
> network didn't have broadcast rights to a big event," Eisner writes.
> And it helps when the centerpiece show, SportsCenter, runs three times
> a day. This seems obvious now, but think about how you watched sports
> at the time: You watched them live. ESPN provided a self-contained
> alternative—highlights, reportage, and analysis—without having to open
> its wallet to buy every "big event," though eventually ESPN would grow
> profitable enough to want to do that, too. It was a deliriously
> effective business model. Today, ESPN is worth $40 billion, about $5
> billion more than the combined value of every NFL team.
> "You can't say enough about how important their news operation is,"
> said Miller. "If you take John Walsh and [director of news] Vince
> Doria out of its history, ESPN is a fundamentally different place.
> It's a less important place, it's a less successful place."
> But that success has created problems for the newsroom, which operates
> within a distortion field that the company's size creates. Doria, for
> instance, recently suggested to media reporter Ed Sherman that
> passionate local hockey fandom "really doesn't transfer much" to the
> "national discussion," which overlooked the fact that ESPN is the
> national discussion. If the network doesn't talk about hockey—and the
> evidence is strong that, lacking an NHL television contract, it won't—
> the nation doesn't talk about hockey, either.
> And how much power does the newsroom have, anyway? One of the
> SportsCenter anchors who hosted the bizarre Tebow birthday bash said
> that she wasn't that into the idea. But she didn't have a choice.
> Here's Sage Steele speaking to SportsBiz USA (emphasis mine):
> When it's Tim Tebow, when it's Tiger Woods, when it's Brett Favre, the
> numbers are such they support the bosses' decision to do this stuff.
> Not all the time. We can sit there in the newsroom and argue all we
> want. Which many of us do. When they come out and say, 'OK Sage, fine,
> here's a rating,' what do I say? What do I say? I can't fight that.
> […]
> Unfortunately, when we do stories in that manner, I can't argue with
> fans (who criticize ESPN). I can't. So hopefully we can squash all
> that talk and cover more teams…I agree with people who are
> complaining. But I also agree with our bosses who say, 'OK, it's the
> business. Look at the ratings. They might hate it. But they're still
> watching.' People might hate Skip Bayless. But they're still watching.
> As a result, the steady stream of Tebow non-news is as much a part of
> ESPN's identity now as Chris Berman doing NFL highlights on Sunday
> night.
> "It's great when they choose to flood the zone on a story that's
> really important—like the Pete Rose trial early in their history," Jim
> Miller said. "Nobody can do it the way they can, that's fantastic. But
> when they do it to a story that doesn't necessarily warrant the
> attention they're giving it, it gets confusing to viewers. It hurts
> your pedigree.
> "It's kind of out of whack," he continued. "You risk losing an
> identity
