Tethered Swimming – ESPN Doesn’t Hate You: They Just Don't Know How to Love
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“Bart Simpson telling you to lock the doggie in the barn ‘cause here comes dodgeball action! The shirts continued their domination over the skins today.” – Bart Simpson
Four years ago, when ESPN first put that awful “Playmakers” show in their lineup, I had a conversation with a friend of mine about whether or not it was a good thing. We decided that it wasn’t, even if the show hadn’t sucked. Our main reason was that we didn’t want to see ESPN turn into MTV with sports.
Most of today’s MTV viewers weren’t even born when the station got its start back in the eighties. At the time all MTV really did was show these newfangled music video things. That was how it began, as music television. Today MTV has become less of a music channel and more of a youth oriented brand with numerous original series, reality shows (they practically invented the genre), pop culture celebrations, etc. Our fear was that ESPN might gradually follow the same path until it was little more than a clearing house for sports themed programs that aren’t actually sports. A lot of those fears turned out to have been justified, but it doesn’t really bother me because I don’t have to watch everything on ESPN.
The monumentally silly “Who’s Now” series, cause of so much on-line teeth gnashing, hasn’t had the slightest effect on me because I didn’t see even a single second of it. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve watched an entire SportsCenter from start to finish since I got a TiVo. No less an ESPN luminary than Bill Simmons, the Sports Feller himself, said on a recent podcast (26 July with Matthew Berry) that he doesn’t even watch SportsCenter anymore. He just TiVos ESPNews and watches one when he needs to see highlights. It’s not like anyone is forcing you to watch all of the filler that ESPN crams into their schedule, especially during the summertime sports doldrums.
I think the on-line sports community often loses sight of the fact that the universe of sports fans goes beyond people with internet connections and lots of time on their hands. This is a crude simplification, but if the comments section of popular blogs and the questioners on the daily ESPN.com chats are anything to go by, the on-line sports community is primarily composed of two groups, kids in high school and college plus white collar guys with desk jobs that do not require their full attention from nine to five. (There is a reason Deadspin only updates during the daytime.) That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t account for a lot of people who take an interest in sports.
To give just a few examples, it doesn’t include truck drivers, mechanics, people that construct or repair homes and offices, cooks, janitors, retail sales clerks, factory workers, and a hell of a lot of other people who don’t spend their workday at a desk with internet access. According to the most recent column by the ESPN.com ombudswoman there were over five million on-line votes cast for “Who’s Now”. That doesn’t mean five million people, but at a bare minimum it has to mean hundreds of thousands. That’s a huge number, and they thought enough of “Who’s Now” to actually log-on and vote. Similarly, it’s easy and fun to make fun of people like Jim Rome and Schrutebag, but like it or not they have big audiences.
ESPN targets all of those people to expand its reach, the same way any other large media outfit does. One of the ways they do that is by trying to turn coverage of an event into ownership of the public discussion about that event. That can piss people off. For example, determining yourself to be the arbiter of “Sportsnation” betrays an insulting hubris towards your audience. Other tactics include using gimmicky camera angles during play to make things seem more exciting, shameless use of the word ‘coverage’ to avoid telling you when the game actually starts, and of course, never ending cross promotions designed to get you to watch/listen to/read their other offerings. You could read those things almost as a list of my grievances against ESPN, but I understand them.
Like any large organization ESPN probably has a lot of smart people in powerful positions, but they also have a lot of stupid people in powerful positions. They get an enormous amount of feedback in the form of ratings, web statistics, e-mails, blogs, etc and then try to make informed decisions. Sometimes they screw up and sometimes they do well, but in a media environment that evolves as rapidly as ours has in the past fifteen years mixed results are inevitable. Even Google and Amazon make mistakes.
To illustrate, I’d like to cite another telling piece of information in that ombudswoman’s “Who’s Now” column. She mentioned one Glenn Jacobs, whose job she described as “senior coordinating producer for 6 p.m. and weekend morning editions of SportsCenter”. I don’t know what “senior” and “coordinating” mean in that context, but if there is a person in charge of just those editions of SportsCenter it begs the question of what, besides the title and theme music, those editions have in common with the others? Maybe everybody except me already knew this about SportsCenter, but I find it very significant. Is the 6 p.m. SportsCenter like “60 Minutes II”, a lesser version that can be taken less seriously?
It’s unfair of me to single out “Who’s Now” and the 6 p.m. SportsCenter, but it goes to a larger point – SportsCenter, and by extension all of ESPN, is a gargantuan enterprise that will inevitably sprawl in some dumb and embarrassing ways. They attempt to provide coverage for everyone with even a passing interest in sport while expanding to new audiences, and they have to do it every day of every week on their enormous website, numerous television channels and an almost uncountable number of radio programs, some of which you will enjoy and some of which you will not. That’s why we have things like TiVo and flash block, to make selective consumption of information easier.
I understand that writing off things like “Who’s Now” and the ESPYs as merely annoying and frivolous doesn’t address a deeper, and widely held, objection. Namely whether or not ESPN’s journalism and objective coverage are undermined when other parts of the empire are manufacturing content and piggybacking on celebrities (some of whom they are largely responsible for making famous). I don’t have much of an answer to that question, but I think it misses the point. We live in a world of corporately owned media outlets that seek greater profits through something called, if you’ll permit me to use a foul word, synergy. That structure has come under increasing scrutiny the last few years (witness the recent hand wringing over the sale of the Wall Street Journal) but it’s with us now, for better or worse.
MTV had a lot of success branching out from what originally made them popular, and so has ESPN. They will continue to do highfalutin journalism (steroid investigations, NCAA violations, etc), gutter journalism (what Pacman Jones is up to, which celebrity is sleeping with which athlete), and fluff pieces (NBA stars in third world countries, inspiring stories of people overcoming things). I’m not saying we shouldn’t make fun of “Who’s Now”. We should; something that self indulgent is crying out to be ridiculed. But what it ultimately comes down to is that ESPN, in all its forms, is a media organization that focuses on sports. All we can do is roll with the punches and take each story one at a time. The third and final installment of “ESPN Doesn’t Hate You” is coming on Wednesday.
This is the second in a series of three posts on www.tetheredswimming.com about television and sports. At the kind invitation of Dan Lewis I’ve posted them here as well. The third, coming on Wednesday, is a few ideas about where we go from here, including some things that we, the humble sports fans and viewers, can do to push things in a smarter direction.
