How ESPN Ditched Journalism And Followed Skip Bayless To The Bottom: A Tim Tebow Story

[TMC]

http://deadspin.com/5929361/how-espn-ditched-journalism-and-followed-skip-bayless-to-the-bottom-a-tim-tebow-story

John Koblin

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 former newspaper
columnist Skip Bayless. This new iteration wasn't all that popular
with other producers in Bristol, a source said, but the decision was
made after ESPN consulted a focus group.

"We focus-grouped it to people and realized pretty quickly that
viewers wanted debate," hot-shot First Take producer Jamie Horowitz
told Men's Journal. "In particular, they wanted to see Skip debate."

Producers around the network saw it the same way a lot of us do: as
willful crap. Staged disagreement. On the show, Bayless would be
pitted against another panelist—often a black counterpart, including
Stephen A. Smith, who is now the full-time co-host—and "debate" him or
her, Crossfire-style, on the sports topic of the moment. Around the
time that Bayless become the country's most visible and outspoken
Tebow supporter—which ultimately spawned this abomination and the 4
million clicks that went with it—ratings for the show began to climb.

Before long, a source told me, higher-minded Bristol producers
swallowed their pride and acknowledged that something was working. And
the producers who really took notice? The ones who worked on the live
morning edition of ESPN's SportsCenter, which runs opposite First
Take. The morning SportsCenter's producers had a problem: First Take
was eating into its ratings. In September 2011, the 10 a.m. and 11
a.m. editions of SportsCenter had 636,000 more viewers a day than the
same time slot that First Take owned on ESPN2, according to data from
Nielsen. Over the next six months, a period that stretched from
Tebow's emergence in Denver through his trade to New York, First Take
narrowed that deficit each month. By March, when Tim Tebow was traded
to the Jets, the SportsCenter lead was down to 182,000 viewers—less
than a third of what its margin had been.

A programming battle ensued. Morning SportsCenter producers "noticed
that First Take was killing them in ratings with Tebow stuff, so they
made a conscious effort to deliver more Tebow," the source said. "ESPN
is a competitive environment and the competition between SportsCenter
and First Take is very real."

It resulted in the sort of skirmishes that you might find ESPN
fighting outside the company. At times, SportsCenter producers made
sure that certain NFL analysts weren't available for First Take, the
source said. When SportsCenter went all-in on Tebow during Jets
training camp in a way, some folks in Bristol saw it as a move to
neutralize First Take.

"Producers were looking to duplicate the success of First Take," said
our 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."

A small, prideful ratings battle had metastasized around the network.
ESPN had become the source for Tebow news, whether it bled into
SportsCenter or into its various NFL shows or its Monday night pre-
game show or its NFL reporters' Twitter feeds or its dot-com stories
or its SportsNation polls.

And what dawned on a segment of the newsroom was something that
would've seemed absurd even five years ago: Skip Bayless and Stephen
A. Smith were indirectly setting the editorial agenda for the biggest
platform in the sports world. As our source put it to me, First Take's
ratings surge late last year "completely changed" the look of ESPN.

* * *
Meanwhile, there were smaller moments that, taken as a whole,
suggested ESPN was long past caring about its news operation. A
litany:

Our old friend, Sarah Phillips, was a weekly contributor to ESPN's
website while also moonlighting as a sort of social-media huckster.
The red flags were there when she was hired—a lack of experience, a
trail of accusations in the message boards of the betting website
where she briefly contributed—but she was given a column anyway
because, as she put it, "they thought I was pretty, quick witted, and
knew my stuff."
Lynn Hoppes, an ESPN senior writer and former senior editor (he was
the guy who recruited the scam artist mentioned above), was caught
copying-and-pasting from Wikipedia and occasionally from press
releases, too. ESPN called Hoppes lazy, but it turns out no editors
over there could be bothered with updating any of his stories that we
flagged. There are no editors' notes appended to Hoppes's stories; no
corrections or links or attributions or clarifications. They exist
exactly as they did before our initial story was published. He remains
employed.

In July, a German soccer player Lukas Podolski claimed that an
interview posted to ESPN's Soccernet never actually happened. The
story was removed from the web, and all Bristol had to say was that
the interview was conducted by a "freelance contributor," and that the
company was looking into "sourcing questions." A few weeks after the
incident, I asked ESPN for an update; a spokesman gave me the same
statement that was trotted out after Bristol deleted the story. Was
the interview made up? Was it conducted when Podolski thought it was
off the record? Who knows?

Later that month, a SportsCenter anchor read on air, word for word,
without attribution, something written by RealGM.com about Dwight
Howard. An ESPN spokesman said steps were being taken to prevent it
from happening again.

Three weeks later, it happened again.

In September, ESPN's soccer blog initially failed to credit an SI
writer, who raised a small fuss over the omission. Poynter gave ESPN a
slap on the wrist for that one.
The same month, ESPN scooped itself when a video posted to ESPN.com
broke the news that prized college hoops recruit Demetrius Jackson had
elected to go to Notre Dame. The video was quickly yanked. Why?
Jackson's announcement was scheduled to be broadcast exclusively by
ESPNU later that evening—a staged event that for obvious reasons was
more important to ESPN than the news itself.
These cover the waterfront of journalistic malfeasance: plagiarism,
fabrication, a hiring clusterfuck, business decisions masquerading as
news judgment, business decisions overriding news judgment. Taken
individually, none of these missteps is pervasively illuminating. All
newsrooms screw up. But here's why the recent incidents tell us lots
about how ESPN regards journalism: nothing happened.

At any newsroom around the country, these dust-ups would prompt a self-
administered proctology exam. There'd be earnest committee
assignments, standards-and-practices reviews, a "Letter to Our
Readers" or two. None of the mea culpas really matter in the grand
scheme of things—mistakes will go on happening no matter how many
seminars the Poynter Institute convenes on the subject—but the point
is to let your readers and colleagues know that you're deeply
concerned about these things, that somewhere a standard is being
upheld. But if any of this were happening in Bristol, it would come as
a surprise to the rank and file in the newsroom.

"What's funny is that as soon as the Steve Phillips [sex scandal] went
down, they were very proactive about informing us on company policies
and all that jazz," said one ESPN insider. "This?" the source went on,
referring to Hoppes, Phillips, and the quote fabrication. "Crickets."

* * *
"It is a business first and foremost," Bruce Feldman, a 16-year
veteran of ESPN who left for CBS last year, told me. "The people who
run the company told me as much when I was going through it with them.
There's still an element of ESPN that does journalism and there are
some people there who are really good journalists. But above all it is
a business."

Feldman ran into his own problems with ESPN. (Long story short, for
those who don't remember the "Free Bruce" episode: Feldman told ESPN
brass that he was writing a book with then-Texas Tech coach Mike
Leach. ESPN brass approved. Then when Leach decided to sue ESPN over
its coverage of the Adam James affair, network execs ignored the fact
they had given Feldman permission and suspended him. He chose to leave
the network.)

"ESPN serves two masters—entertainment and journalism, information—and
depending on the day, we're probably only serving one of those," said
one ESPN insider. "We can't be purely journalistic because we have too
many business interests with the subject we're supposed to cover
objectively. But in a way, it's a copout. We move the journalistic
line when it suits us."

And occasionally that line grades into incoherence. On Oct. 8, in
anticipation of the Texans-Jets Monday night game, which was broadcast
on ESPN, ESPN.com splashed a 3,100-word Skip Bayless story answering
the question no one was asking: Why is Skip Bayless such a staunch
supporter of Tim Tebow? During the pre-game show, there were segments
devoted to Tebow. An ESPN New York Jets beat reporter breathlessly
tweeted that Tebow was throwing more in pre-game warm-ups than he ever
had before and this had to mean something.

What was it that Doug Gottlieb told Dan Patrick? He said "they kind of
stoke the fire—that's kind of what ESPN does." That's not quite right,
though. On this Monday night, ESPN didn't just stoke the fire. ESPN
was the fire, the fireplace, the poker being jabbed at the coals, and
the coals, too. The newsroom was covering a "story" that another wing
had manufactured.

As Dan Patrick told Gottlieb: "They've lost that credibility, a large
portion of the credibility of covering news. I think that it's now:
'What's trending?' Focus groups. You're trying to create things
there."

In the end? Tebow saw seven snaps for a team that lost and fell to
2-3. During the game, ESPN's stat line at the bottom indicated that
Tebow was 0 for 1 passing because a receiver dropped the ball. And it
turns out he was throwing all those balls in the pre-game because he
was a little bored. Game 2 of the Orioles-Yankees ALDS ran opposite
the Texans-Jets game, but 14 million viewers tuned in to watch
football anyway—about a million more than the Monday Night Football
average. It was a bad night for journalism, but a good one for ESPN.

Image by Jim Cooke

[Damon Hynes, Cyclone Ranger]

Tebow, Tiger, Favre...and DANICA FUCKING PATRICK all the damn day!

[Ashton Crusher]

Is it actually possible that anyone over the age of 10 cares what
happens in "sports news"?


On Mon, 12 Nov 2012 22:56:27 -0800 (PST), TMC <tmc...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Michael Press]

In article <2436a8prrb3kmm11k...@4ax.com>,

Ashton Crusher <de...@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.

--
Michael Press

[The Undead Edward M. Kennedy]

"Damon Hynes, Cyclone Ranger" <damon...@gmail.com> wrote

> Tebow, Tiger, Favre...and DANICA FUCKING PATRICK all the damn day!

I'd much rather it be:

DANICA FUCKING PATRICK

[The Undead Edward M. Kennedy]

"The Undead Edward M. Kennedy" <e...@o.com> wrote

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

--Tedward

It's DANICA FUCKING PATRICK all the way down!

[Johnny Morongo]

Don't you mean FUCKING DANICA PATRICK?

[David Johnston]

Failing to delete isn't exactly a mark of deep interest.

[IYM]

Not me...I'd rather it be Danica Fucking ME!! Get this Patrick dude
out 'da way!!! :)

[The Undead Edward M. Kennedy]

"IYM" <nor...@whitehouse.gov> wrote

>>> Tebow, Tiger, Favre...and DANICA FUCKING PATRICK all the damn day!
>>
>> I'd much rather it be:
>>
>> DANICA FUCKING PATRICK
>>
>
> Not me...I'd rather it be Danica Fucking ME!! Get this Patrick dude out 'da way!!! :)

My middle name is Patrick.

--Tedward

In the middle of the night...

[Michael Press]

In article <k84hg4$8og$2...@dont-email.me>,

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.

--
Michael Press

[TMC]

On Nov 12, 10:56 pm, TMC <tmc1...@gmail.com> wrote:
> http://deadspin.com/5929361/how-espn-ditched-journalism-and-followed-...

> variety show), went to an all-debate format starring ...
>
> read more »

http://www.awfulannouncing.com/2012-articles/november/espn-s-journalistic-integrity-coming-under-close-examination.html

A story we've closely followed over the last year and a half has been
what's happened to journalism at ESPN. As one of the biggest, most
valuable media companies in the entire world, ESPN can be all things
to all people. They air the games, report about the games, debate the
games, and all on global platforms of TV, radio, and the internet.

Sports fans have to feel they can trust ESPN because ESPN is sports.
The national sports discussion is ESPN and what ESPN's talking about
dictates and reflects what sports fans are talking about on Twitter,
around water coolers, and everywhere in between.

But in the last year and a half, that trust factor has eroded for fans
who follow the sports world and the world that covers sports closely.
Several things happened this week to bring this to the forefront.
Monday, the scrutiny facing ESPN's journalistic practices reached new
heights as Poynter filed their last column as ESPN ombudsman and John
Koblin filed a great piece on ESPN selling their soul to Tim Tebow at
Deadspin. Monday night, Rick Reilly was sheepishly caught begging for
attribution in having Ben Roethlisberger's injury news first on
Twitter. Then on Wednesday, Fox's Jay Glazer became the latest
reporter to publicly call out ESPN for stealing one of his reports
without attribution. The combination of those two pieces (that are
well worth your time to read in full), Reilly's actions, and Glazer's
frustration bring to light an issue that has haunted ESPN in the last
year and a half.

ESPN is losing our trust.

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. With more
information available to fans, we're much more likely to know now
whether or not we're getting a square deal from ESPN.

The questions surrounding ESPN's journalistic practices first became a
serious topic when Bruce Feldman was suspended in July 2011. At the
time, I called it ESPN's journalistic Waterloo. Sure, we had The
Decision and Bonds on Bonds before that, but Feldman's suspension was
the watershed moment in questions towards ESPN's integrity. Since
that episode, the tidal wave of skepticism towards ESPN has increased
tenfold. When ESPN chose to stick with Craig James - a backslapping,
underhanded analyst with delusional Senatorial aspirations over Bruce
Feldman - a journalist with a sterling reputation and support from
colleagues and rival competitors, the company set its course for the
future. The fact that ESPN college football reporter Joe Schad was
taking notes directly from Craig James and his hired PR firm was a
sure sign honest journalism was nowhere to be found.

Since the Feldman debacle, we've seen numerous stories shedding light
on everything from ESPN's questionable use of sources to them pulling
the strings on conference realignment to birthday parties for Tim
Tebow. A selection...

October 2011 - Boston College AD Gene DeFilippo lets it slip that ESPN
"told us what to do" regarding the ACC and conference realignment.
DeFilippo then had to embarrassingly correct himself when ESPN
publicly disputed his quote.

November 2011 - E-mails released from Texas A&M AD Bill Byrne show the
university in a panic over ESPN's relationship with Texas and the
Longhorn Network. Byrne notes ESPN "threatened" Texas Tech with
putting one of their games on LHN.

November 2011 - #WhenSkipMeetsTebow

December 2011 - One of many ESPN sourcing controversies in the past
year.

May 2012 - Sarah Phillips.

July 2012 - Arsenal's Lukas Podolski claims ESPN Soccernet published a
fabricated interview with him. Nobody knows what if any action ESPN
took regarding the claims except for pulling the article.

July 2012 - Chris Broussard's sources report information known by
everyone else in the world.

August 2012 - Saints GM Mickey Loomis is cleared in a wiretapping
probe, bringing ESPN's report on the matter under serious doubt.
Questions emerge about ESPN's John Barr staying in New Orleans until
he could find something negative to report on the franchise.

August 2012 - JetsCenter takes over ESPN for almost 3 weeks. And, I
went on a bit of a Twitter rant when watching ESPN's Tim Tebow
birthday extravaganza.

October 2012 - David Stern and the NBA reportedly blocks ESPN's hiring
of Stan Van Gundy, ESPN denies the NBA's role.

November 2011 - November 2012 - ESPN reports sexual abuse allegations
against Syracuse basketball assistant Bernie Fine after largely
missing out on the Jerry Sandusky case. After a year long
investigation, FIne faces no charges. ESPN's Mark Schwarz is
questioned for connecting accusers with one another and ESPN is
questioned for aggressively over-pursuing this story in the wake of
being slow to react to the Penn State scandal.

November 2012 - Jay Glazer becomes the latest to accuse ESPN of
stealing his scoop and changing his name to "Source."

And again, that's just a selection since last July of the troubles and
criticisms facing ESPN's journalistic integrity. Deadspin highlighted
even more cases like the Lynn Hoppes fiasco. The problem isn't that
these incidents occur. At a place as large as ESPN, they are bound to
happen occasionally. The problem is the apparent lack of action taken
regarding ESPN's direction and the fact they keep occurring more and
more frequently.

As ESPN ombudsman, we had hopes the Poynter Institute would hold
ESPN's journalistic practices accountable in the public eye. While
Poynter had a few hits, it was clear from the beginning they were
going to serve ESPN internally more than serving viewers externally.
For that reason, Poynter's tenure was largely a disappointment. They
never delivered on a promised Craig James column and never answered to
some of the more consistent concerns voiced regarding ESPN. Instead,
there were columns about standardized policies, ad-approvals, how to
use Twitter, and interviewing practices. The columns that did hit on
relevant topics, like this one on Chris Broussard's sources or Bob
Knight were scarce. Poynter's final column yesterday did hit on the
big picture, though. Because of ESPN's sheer power and reach, they
demand a high level of scrutiny...

"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. ESPN’s fulfillment of its ambitions in recent years has been
nothing sort of breathtaking. It understands the primacy of live
sports rights in broadcasting today, has the financial muscle, in
theory, to buy whatever rights it sees as necessary and has the
ambition to think on an amazing scale.

As a result, ESPN has come very close to being synonymous with sports
in the United States, with its business deals reshaping the very
landscape of college sports conferences, to name just one high-profile
example of its power and influence.

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."

That conflict of interest was illuminated in John Koblin's stellar
piece chronicling how the network hitched its wagon to Tim Tebow. The
most stunning aspect of the story was SportsCenter competing directly
with First Take and shifting to more Tebow coverage because of First
Take's ratings success eating into SportsCenter's ratings. The
result? Skip Bayless and First Take's decision to go All Tebow All
The Time forced SportsCenter's hand and the agenda of the entire
network. Here's the money quote from Koblin:

"And what dawned on a segment of the newsroom was something that
would've seemed absurd even five years ago: Skip Bayless and Stephen
A. Smith were indirectly setting the editorial agenda for the biggest
platform in the sports world. As our source put it to me, First Take's
ratings surge late last year "completely changed" the look of ESPN."

Doesn't that part in bold startle you? Because Tebow equaled ratings
for First Take, SportsCenter had to go Tebow. Other studio shows had
to go Tebow. Radio had to go Tebow. Online had to go Tebow. The
entire ESPN Universe had to revolve around Tim Tebow. Now, even ESPN
college basketball broadcasters are openly making light of their own
network's obsession with the man as the universe begins to cave in on
itself.

ESPN expects us as viewers to compartmentalize the ESPN empire. To
some extent, that's possible. I've heard from scores of people on
Twitter in the last year who used to watch ESPN 24/7 and now only
watch the games because they got tired of everything else. It's true
that ESPN is not a monolith and there are a ton of things ESPN still
does very well. But isn't ESPN concerned that people are actively
turning away from their news and analysis? Isn't ESPN concerned with
the fans that are losing faith in their network operation?

These journalistic questions affect the ESPN brand as a whole because
they are systemic. Sure, they may not affect your viewing of 30 for
30 or game coverage. But, when you see "Source" on a screen, can you
really trust that ESPN - from the corporate suits to production staffs
- is being honest with you? When you see someone get credit for
breaking a story on Twitter, can you really trust that they had it
first? Can you really trust what you see and hear on SportsCenter is
ESPN's honest attempt at journalism, or are they just reading Jay
Glazer or Jon Heyman's Twitter timeline and passing it off as their
own?

When you see the latest Tim Tebow debate, you should know by now that
it's not news, it's just lowly ambulance chasing for ratings from the
most robust sports company in the world. Is that serving viewers
first? Is that the breathtaking fulfillment of ESPN's highest
ambitions Poynter speaks of?

Maybe we're to blame. Maybe if we watched more Outside the Lines than
First Take, maybe if we supported the more ambitious pieces at
Grantland or from ESPN The Magazine, maybe if Bob Ley had more Twitter
followers than Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith, maybe if we actually
turned the channel when ESPN did talk Tebow, things would be
different.

But ESPN is ultimately responsible for setting their own course. ESPN
has made the decision to chase ratings instead of real stories. ESPN
has made the decision to ignore the cries from competitors that they
are stealing scoops and continue with the same old practices because
they're big enough to get away with it. Just take a moment and
imagine CNN stealing stories from ABC and CBS and Fox News. It would
be the journalistic scandal of the century. And yet, these same
questions are levied now almost weekly at ESPN, a company worth $40
billion dollars, with no repercussions whatsoever. ESPN feels they
can credit Fox Sports in an online article for first breaking a story
and then remove it altogether like nothing ever happened. Isn't there
something wrong with that picture?

ESPN has made their bed with TebowMania and Linsanity and "embrace
debate" and shady sources. Now they have to lie in it. If those
extra ratings are worth losing trust from more engaged, committed
sports fan and pushing respected entities to the margins, so be it.
If Skip Bayless is going to be the one to lead the Bristol brigade
like he's General Custer with a bunch of anonymous sources backing
him, so be it. It's the choice ESPN has made.

Why do we care so much about ESPN's journalism? Because almost
everything you know and hear about sports is filtered through ESPN.
If ESPN says hockey "doesn't transfer to a national discussion" then
it doesn't. ESPN is that powerful and any powerful entity needs to be
held accountable. Because we shouldn't have to live in a world where
the default reaction to an ESPN report is that it's actually somebody
else's work. For all those reasons, the microscope needs to stay
fixed on ESPN's journalistic practices. Permanently.