Sports Media Watch presents thoughts on recent events in the sports media industry, this week focusing on disparate approaches to ESPN by three different leagues.
A recurring theme in the early months of this year has been publicly expressed dissatisfaction with ESPN by some of the most powerful people in sports business. This column has already dug into the complaints of LeBron James and Rob Manfred, which date back to last month but flared up again last week. James’ escalating conflict with ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith dominated the headlines and even drew the attention of NBA commissioner Adam Silver, while Manfred — who no doubt noticed that the LeBron-Stephen A. feud overshadowed Opening Day — continued to criticize ESPN for its perceived lack of Major League Baseball coverage.
It should be noted that both James and Manfred took their complaints to ESPN-linked personalities, James doing so on the network’s air during “The Pat McAfee Show,” and Manfred doing so in an interview with “First Take” contributor Chris Russo.
The old journalism adage “never become the story” has never applied to ESPN, whose personalities have consistently overshadowed the games they cover dating back to the days of the Dan and Keith “Big Show” — a trend that has only exacerbated in the “embrace debate” era. Yet one wonders if the spotlight on ESPN this year is not at least somewhat uncomfortable. It is at the very least unflattering. The most famous athlete of his era went on an ESPN show to ridicule the best-known ESPN employee (as well as ESPN reporter Brian Windhorst, who unlike Smith did nothing to deserve it). One of the “Big Four” commissioners is openly deriding how the network approaches his sport, the kind of talk that has surely gone on in private for decades, but is rare to hear stated publicly.
The phrase ‘any publicity is good publicity’ is an excuse for those who are incapable of representing themselves well in the public arena. Bad publicity is in fact bad publicity.
Yet what, if anything, is at stake for ESPN? Could James and other like-minded NBA players freeze out the network? That seems unlikely, given James just gave McAfee an exclusive interview. The network just re-signed with the NBA in a deal that cements its status as the league’s “A” partner with rights to every NBA Finals. ESPN is obviously in line to lose its Major League Baseball package, but the network willingly opted out and reportedly made MLB an offer so low as to be insulting. Manfred’s after-the-fact complaints do not change the reality that ESPN was the driving force behind the relationship ending.
There is good reason for ESPN to feel some level of impunity. The network knows what a real pressure campaign looks like, and neither James nor Manfred are in a position to create one.
The sledgehammer: Roger Goodell
If one wonders what ESPN looks like when it is running scared, just take a short hop in the time machine. The NFL had long taken issue with ESPN’s coverage of the league, dating all the way back to the Mark Shapiro brainchild “Playmakers” in 2003 — a drama about a fictional pro football team that hit on every single controversy (and arguably stereotype) it possibly could. Then-NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue pressured the network into cancelling the show.
A decade later, ESPN was to have its brand name on a documentary about concussions based on the book “League of Denial,” written by two of its reporters, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru. It was not flattering (though with a decade-plus of distance, it was not anywhere close to fatal either), and the NFL pressured ESPN to distance itself.
These were the days when ESPN was still signaling some journalistic intent. “Outside the Lines” still existed in prominent form. There were occasional articles that made league partners look bad. The network even created an ombudsman position, hiring a series of outside journalists to chronicle its various missteps and controversies over more than a decade.
Perhaps all of those gestures were bound to fade away in an increasingly uncertain time for corporate media. It is increasingly obvious that journalism is a luxury for the major media outlets and one of the first things to cut when things get dire. For ESPN, and all of cable, things got dire in the second half of the 2010s and have not really let up. The vulnerability created by the collapse of the cable bundle has made ESPN abandon a lot of the pretenses that sustained the first three-plus decades of its existence, from its commitment to journalism to the idea that nobody could be bigger than the brand.
That may explain why the NFL was so successful when it began pressuring ESPN again in the late 2010s, this time concerned about the network’s coverage of unflattering developments in the league, as John Ourand reported in 2018: “Their complaints ranged from the number of times ESPN’s ‘Outside the Lines’ covered the concussion issue to the number of stories from feature writers Don Van Natta and Seth Wickersham” about the inner workings of the league.
The NFL acted on its displeasure with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. ESPN’s Monday Night Football schedule became noticeably mediocre, it suddenly had to share its NFL Draft spotlight with Fox, and for at least a period of time, the league reportedly considered pulling the network’s annual Wild Card playoff game. After John Skipper’s abrupt resignation as ESPN president in 2017, the network set about repairing its relationship with the league under new president Jimmy Pitaro. Now, ESPN is in the Super Bowl rotation. Its Monday night schedule features some of the biggest games of the year. It may well assume management of the NFL media apparatus.
Meanwhile, one might notice that “Outside the Lines” barely exists; that there are few, if any, of the periodic articles by Van Natta and Wickersham putting readers inside NFL owners meetings; and that amidst discontent by James and Manfred, there is nary a negative word being said about ESPN from the likes of Goodell.
If there is any lesson to be learned from the early months of 2025, it is that blunt, unmistakable pressure campaigns often work with little in the way of resistance. There are not a ton of courageous companies out there. Yet one should not expect James and Manfred to have the same success that the NFL enjoyed in bending ESPN to its will.
The diplomat: Adam Silver
In the case of James, it is simply true that even the most powerful of all players is still a player. He would need the backing of NBA commissioner Adam Silver in order to push ESPN in any meaningful way. However Silver truly feels about ESPN NBA coverage, it may not be in his personality to use leverage to meaningfully affect the coverage decisions of his partners.
To begin with, ESPN and the NBA just had a negotiation last year in which the network got pretty much everything it wanted, albeit for a massive $2.6 billion/year price tag. Burke Magnus was clear that ESPN viewed the NBA Finals as a “must-have,” but if Silver was insistent that the league wanted to alternate it with NBC, what exactly was ESPN going to do? Lose one of its most valuable properties over four-to-seven games every-other-year? All ESPN lost in the negotiation was one conference final in 11 years (the company has 10 total, compared to six each for NBC and Amazon) and a handful of regular season windows. If Silver had any interest in putting the squeeze on ESPN, he had the opportunity and let it pass.
It is also the case that Silver is generally diplomatic, at least publicly, in his approach to most issues. On the James-Smith feud, and the growing complaints by NBA players and fans regarding coverage of the league, Silver said last week that he is sometimes “jealous” of the coverage other leagues get, which “seems to be more celebratory often than it is in the NBA” and that he will sometimes “cringe at a lot of the coverage” of his own league. Yet he balanced that critique with an acknowledgement that the league is “often the beneficiary, too. There’s seemingly as much social media interest in this league at times than all the other leagues combined, so it’s a two-edged sword.”
The critic: Rob Manfred
Compare Silver’s approach not to Goodell, but to Manfred, who on the Russo show last week was candid about his league’s relationship with ESPN. “There was a level of dissatisfaction on our part, which started with the end of Baseball Tonight, where we appear on SportsCenter in the morning.” He added that ESPN had “stepped up” for the NBA and NFL in their respective media rights negotiations, a contrast to the sharp reduction in rights fees ESPN was reportedly seeking. “Did we want to be partners with them? Yes — but taking less money?”
Manfred was also effusive in his praise of Fox Sports, the league’s “A” partner, when asked by Russo why the network did not send announcers to the MLB season opening games in Japan. Fox, he said, had been the ideal partner. “It will be a cold day in hell before you hear me criticize Fox as a partner,” Manfred reportedly said. “They are heaven and they continue to be the best possible partner … on balance, Fox does right by our game.”
The issues Manfred cited regarding ESPN’s coverage of MLB are seemingly more acute on Fox. The company’s cable network FS1 rarely highlights baseball on its debate shows, spending far more time discussing the NBA – a league with which it has no relationship. The remote broadcasts of the Tokyo games are a sharp reversal from a year ago, when ESPN sent its announcers to Seoul for the season openers. As to the rights fee conflict, neither Fox nor TBS had the opportunity to opt out of their contract that ESPN exercised. Perhaps neither would have, but it is impossible to know either way.
The contrast between Silver and Manfred may well come down to money, and it is perhaps easier to take a balanced approach when one is offered $2.6 billion per year as opposed to $200 million. If Silver passed on the opportunity to exercise leverage over ESPN, Manfred had none to exercise, thanks to cut rate deals with Apple and Roku that made ESPN’s $550 million deal — itself a reduction from $700 million in the prior contract — look like a severe overpay.
Thus ESPN has little to fear from is detractors in NBA and baseball, no matter how powerful. Silver’s NBA lacks the ruthlessness of Goodell’s NFL, and Manfred’s MLB has devalued itself to the point that it has little ability to advocate for its interests. If ESPN is to change course, the incentive will have to come from within, and that seems unlikely.
