I very much enjoyed reading the current ESPN Ombudsman Robert Lipsyte's final column "Serving sports fans through Journalism." He discussed ESPN's current reporting style and lack of priority given to sports journalism within the company. A lot of complaints about ESPN are proffered on this website, legitimate or not. But the one that has always rung most true for me was ESPN's entertainment masquerading as sketchy reporting.
http://espn.go.com/blog/ombudsman/post/_/id/501/serving-sports-fans-through-journalism
Choice quotes include:
How do you turn over the rocks in the Southeastern Conference, for instance, while owning the SEC Network?
...ESPN’s journalistic integrity has taken hits for its perceived slow response to stories that reflected poorly on business partners; for broadcasting “The Decision,” ...and for removing the company’s brand from a joint enterprise with PBS on the documentary “League of Denial,” which covered that most important sports story of our time: the deadly concussions in the NFL and the accompanying cover-up.
A starting point: cut through ESPN’s variety of voices offering various kinds of information and speculation -- reporters embedded with teams and college conferences; “First Take” debaters; Insiders with rumors of trades and injuries; squawk radio; Grantland podcasters and espnW profilers.
As Laurie Orlando, ESPN’s senior vice president of talent development and planning, told me last year, “This is a halfway house for coaches. We build up relationships, and we have better access when they go back to coaching. And they’ll come back to us again if they had a good experience.”
Those kinds of revolving doors (similar to ones that spin for former political operatives on mainstream news shows) can end up turning some of the analysts into spokespeople for an industry they might want to return to, rather than full-hearted sharers of informed opinions.
Regarding Jamies Winston and the reporting of sexual assault cases:
Chris Fowler, host of “College GameDay,” addressed this toward the end of a recent interview with Rolling Stone in which he was asked about my recent column about “flabby coverage” on the topic.
Said Fowler: “When you cover this sport, you always have to live in a bit of denial. You check some things at the door. It’s entertainment, it’s a diversion, it’s a distraction from the real world.”
I appreciate Fowler’s insight and candor, but denial, in all its forms, is at the core of most of sports’ current crises.
Whether you agree with Fowler or Lipsyte, I was surprised to see someone call out ESPN in this manner on their own site.
