A couple of years ago, John Stewart appeared on Chris Wallace. In an attempt to defend FOX’s conservative bias, Wallace threw out CBS News (around the 11:26 mark of the linked video) as an example of a similar company promoting their own liberal bias. Stewart countered that those institutions were not biased at all, but instead were sensationalist and lazy. Structuring Stewart’s argument is the reasoning that major news networks and organizations are throwing out creative, in-depth content in exchange for quick, flashy news headlines that people are more likely to listen to or click on. To really dive in to determine if this trend is true, each organization needs to be examined to tell if they have turned into a so called "24 hour" news outlet. Today, I’m going to examine ESPN, the worldwide leader in sports, from the very real renovation of its sets to the renovation of its staff.
ESPN spent over 100 million dollars renovating their SportsCenter studio in Bristol, Connecticut. In a time where they need to catch people's attention, they are betting big on flash and dazzle. When you turn on the program to watch, you are immediately greeted with blue… everywhere. Bright, bright blue and big video screens. You could argue that the red and black of the old set needed a redo, but instead, ESPN went out of it’s way to make a splash. But the problem with this is that it overshadows what really matters. The men and the women in the suits.
You can grab people’s attention by designing a room entirely made out of pure 23 karat gold, but if you don’t give people a reason to stay, everyone walks out after awhile. Apart from the solid grouping of Neil Everett, Stan Verrett, and Kenny Mayne, ESPN has made some interesting choices. Headlining the nine PM Sportscenter, it’s biggest time slot, the network has abandoned the traditional duo of newscasters.
In it’s place is the single Scott Van Pelt. They introduced him with a lot of fervor, a large advertising budget that ramped up expectations. What we got was a transformed version of Sportscenter, ditching the normal analysis with gimmicks such as a nightly “what we love about sports”, bringing in of regular guests, and quirky segments including cartoon characters. Essentially SportsCenter at nine has turned into the Scott Van Pelt show, a late night TV program. Late night television is the essence of sensationalist, using comedy to make light of popular culture. ESPN has tried to do their own version of this, switching pop culture with sports.
Apart from Sportscenter, ESPN has chosen to emphasize polarizing personalities that regularly churn out headlines. Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless have at least one clip emphasized on the ESPN.com feed a day, with captions such as “Was it necessary for the NBA to chime in on Harden’s shot” and “D’Angelo will never be trusted again.” The context of these videos don’t matter as much as the statement they make. Opinionated quotes designed to make people click to watch, whether they disagree or agree with what the talking head is saying. The content in the video isn’t important as long as the amount of views it gets is high, which emphasizes what ESPN is going for by emphasizing these two, and others, on a regular basis.
My previous points outline the sensationalist tendencies that have sprung up in ESPN’s programming, but their laziness comes from what they’ve let go. On November 2nd, 2015, ESPN officially shut down its sister site Grantland. This event took place roughly seven months after the network informed the sport and pop culture site’s founder Bill Simmons that they would not be renewing his contract, effectively letting him go.
Grantland's attitude that went so against sensationalism and laziness made this so important. The writers of the site created content that was intended to be ingested in a timely manner. They didn’t immediately cover events to get splash views from google searches or promote short soundbites. Instead, they published well written and thought provoking pieces meant to analyze the topic that was being talked about. Simmons’ invention was a breath of fresh air in an era of fast-paced wheezing. The termination of Simmons and the site highlights how the company valued this type of reporting. It saw the venture as costly, and they took the first opportunity to end it when Bill Simmons left.
It’s very lazy of me to just say that ESPN has become lazy and sensationalist. They still employ a litany of writers that take their work very seriously and pump out real content, and also produce TV shows that aren’t solely to produce soundbites. The network retained on some of Grantland’s writers, Zach Lowe and Bill Barnwell, and allow good TV such as PTI to air. But it’s their shift in focus to Scott Van Pelt, Stephen A. Smith, and others, away from people like Bill Simmons, that characterized the direction the network is going. As a 24-hour sports news Network, ESPN will always have a need to create their own stories, but it can come at a cost that deprives true journalism.
