All Blog Posts from Public Eye

We tackle many media issues in this space. Politics. Religion. Bias. Technology. War. Professional ethics.

Today I bring up the issue of media hexes.

And the Missouri Tigers.

And the Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx.

But first, a step back for perspective.

The Missouri Tigers football team has drawn a lot of attention outside of the “Show Me” state this week as they surged to #1 in the college football rankings – a spot they’d only held once before, in 1960, and for just a week at that – with just Saturday’s game against Oklahoma standing between them and a national championship game birth.

As today’s front page of USA Today read:

As much as Missouri's 36-28 win against Kansas belonged to its once-embattled coach, to its Heisman Trophy hopeful at quarterback, and to an upstart team that began the season unranked, it also belonged to a plumber from Lemay and every other long-suffering Tigers fan — from Blue Springs to St. Joseph to Poplar Bluff and beyond.

Having parents who met at the University of Missouri, not to mention family in or near all the towns (and glorified intersections) mentioned in the USA Today story, this writer is far from indifferent or dispassionate on the topic.

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ESPN’s traditional catchphrase has always been “The Worldwide Leader in Sports.” But nowadays – as it seems to happen every year in June and July, when they seem content to fill “SportsCenter” time pointlessly – its motto seems to become “What Else Are You Going To Watch?”

Bashing on ESPN in the summertime is so easy that it’s not even, er, sporting. Although given the fact that the network aired the “Rock, Paper, Scissors” championship over this past weekend, maybe “ESPN Bashing” could be the next big thing in action-packed summer programming.

This week’s Newsweek, though, gives me cover with Devon Gordon’s piece: ESPN: The Worldwide Cheerleader.” Gordon makes the point that the most recent annual ESPN Awards Show (called the ESPY’s – get it?) was all that is wrong with the four-letter network:

In a way, the Espys have become an apt metaphor for ESPN. It's a party the network throws for itself and its closest friends. Everyone sits together, news anchors rubbing elbows with All-Stars. It's more business as usual—two crowds that should probably keep their distance, getting a little too cozy instead.

Now the issue of coziness and bias and how ESPN gives air-time to partners like Arena Football and not to the National Hockey League are serious ones, no doubt. (Been there. Done that.) But my main problem is that ESPN – and it’s one touched upon in Newsweek as well – just doesn’t seem to try when it comes to filling air-time during the summer months. Two summers ago, in an effort to pad their hour-long “SportsCenter” broadcast, they did a special “50 States in 50 Days” segment, based on two assumptions: A) That us viewers didn’t know about the sports history of New Mexico, and B) That we wanted to remedy that?

This summer’s time-filler makes “50/50” look like Kahn's “The Boys of Summer,” as far as sports journalism is concerned. It’s a make-believe (there’s no other way to put it) tournament of athletes pitted against each other in brackets (a la the NCAA basketball tournament) to find out … Drumroll Please … “Who’s Now?”

What does that mean? As far as I can tell, “Who’s Now” stands for one or both of the following:

Who’s Now … Just Mailing It In?

Who’s Now ... Taking America’s Sports Fans Hostage?

Obviously, ESPN takes that competition in a rout.

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The Worldwide Leader … Locked Out

In news that will overjoy America’s throngs of Jeanne Zelasko fans – what, it’s just me? -- tonight’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game will be free of those pesky ESPN sportscasters. Apparently, ESPN did not adhere to the embargo rules and divulged the all-star game fan voting results a couple minutes too soon – incurring the wrath of Fox Sports. According to the Hollywood Reporter:

Major League Baseball has limited ESPN's access to Tuesday night's All-Star Game after the network broke an embargo and broadcast news of the players' selections a few minutes after an exclusive, rain-delayed telecast on TBS.

Baseball executives told ESPN that it must pare its broadcast efforts from AT&T Park in San Francisco, where the All-Star Game is being held. So, most coverage will be done out of ESPN's headquarters in Bristol, Conn., rather than having "Baseball Tonight" and a portion of "SportsCenter" originate from California as planned.

Bad news for sports fans, yes. But at least it gives America’s sports talk radio hosts a topic to discuss on the dullest sports day of the year – well, that and Dan Patrick.

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Andrew Tyndall argues that there "is a subtle, but significant shift, in the networks' news agenda as they make the transition from pure television broadcasters to multi-platform providers of video news."

Networks, he notes, often don't put news packages about sports and show business online. The reason? Potential copyrights issues. Since the rights to show, say, an a baseball game on television don't automatically transfer to the Internet, sports stories are often withheld from network Web sites for legal reasons.

Tyndall suggests that this means there will be fewer sports and showbiz stories as the news continues to shift online. I'm skeptical of that argument: It seems more likely that news outlets (and their lawyers) will simply learn how to better negotiate the still-murky waters of Internet copyright. Sports and showbiz are just too popular for news networks to abandon simply because they haven't bothered to craft agreements that allow usage across different platforms.

Lost Remote's Steve Safran argues that networks may, at the moment, be being overly cautious, and suggests that "fair use" rules could apply when it comes to putting this sort of content on the Web. But Safran acknowledges that the networks' reticence to do so is understandable, since sports organizations are notoriously strict when it comes to their copyrights. (Remember the evil college baseball blogger?)

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In a column I wrote yesterday on Terrell Owens, the Philadelphia Eagles' bad boy wide receiver, I glanced on an angle that's puzzled and perturbed me for awhile: why doesn't the conventional press cover sports and entertainment more?



I think most people would disagree with my premise and argue not only does the press cover sports and entertainment way too much, but that coverage is integral to the tabloidization of the news. Cases in point: O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, and Janet Jackson. And both morning and primetime shows are filled with celebrity interviews and profiles. The counter-argument continues that sports and entertainment have their own devoted media and press corps and the main sections of newspapers and television hard news broadcasts ought to stay away.



While all that is true, what is missing from the mix is (to use the "s" word) serious coverage of sports and entertainment. After all, the average American individual watches 4 hours, 32 minutes hours of television a day. A day! As an influence, even a basic ingredient, of American life it is unparalleled. Yet how much reporting, analysis or even opinion journalism is there about those four and a half hours a day -- the economics, effects and even composition of them? Zippo.

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