Sports Media Watch presents thoughts on recent events in the industry, starting with the implications of ESPN’s new NFL deal on the network’s journalistic efforts.
While the main focus of the ESPN-NFL Media deal is the former’s acquisition of the latter’s media platforms, including NFL Network and RedZone, the other side of the deal should not be overlooked. The NFL is expected to take up to a ten percent stake in ESPN, finally bringing to fruition a goal that Disney CEO Bob Iger began pursuing two years ago — that of finding a strategic partner to invest in ESPN. It is also the culmination of a nearly decade-long effort to transform the relationship between ESPN and the NFL from a cold war under John Skipper to the ultimate symbiosis in the history of sports on television.
Since organized sport began to take hold in the United States nearly 200 years ago, its relationship with the media has been mutually beneficial. Early sportswriters like Henry Chadwick did not only promote sport — both as a general pursuit and specifically baseball — they played crucial roles in its development. The reverse was also true, and there were no illusions about the symbiotic relationship.
“All sides now recognize that their interests are identical,” read the 1889 edition of the annual Reach baseball guide, according to Harold Seymour’s Baseball: The Early Years. “The reporters have found in the game a thing of beauty and a source of actual employment. The game has found in the reporters its best ally and most powerful supporter. Hence the good feeling all along the line.”
But what is about to happen will take that symbiotic relationship to an entirely new level. The single most powerful sports media entity, an organization that once prioritized journalism and even today makes at least some token nods toward independence, will count as one of its owners the single most powerful league in American sports.
As the circumstances facing linear television have grown more dire, there has been a widespread culling of that which is unnecessary. In broadcast television, that might be late night comedy shows. For ESPN, that might be journalism. Of course, the retort from Bristol would be that ESPN still does journalism. But it does not seem like a coincidence that ESPN did not break the recent NFL collusion story — it was instead an ex-ESPN reporter, Pablo Torre.
In fact, one might ask when the last time was that ESPN broke a story that made the NFL look bad. Certainly, ESPN can cover those stories and will likely continue to. But to break them is another thing entirely.
When Robert Kraft was arrested in 2019, NFL Network covered the story. It broke into programming and provided news updates. But as noted by John Ourand, then of Sports Business Journal, the network’s coverage was cursory compared to ESPN, FS1 and NBCSN. “An executive at NFL Network says the channel does not spend a lot of time on news — regardless of whether it’s good news or bad — that does not have a direct impact to the on-the-field action,” Ourand wrote. “The bottom line is that NFL Network viewers were made aware of the Kraft story and kept up to date on its developments. But people who wanted to follow the story more closely would have to tune into another outlet.”
Is that going to be the template for ESPN going forward? Perhaps it already is.
The NFL has long been convinced that simply having a contractual relationship with the league comes with certain limitations. In 1955, then-NFL commissioner Bert Bell made a clear distinction between those who had a contractual relationship with the league and those who did not.
Explaining why there was “not an element of censorship” in his detailed rules for NFL broadcasters to follow — including that they do not criticize mistakes or second-guess officials — Bell argued in 1955 that the “sports writer has to answer only to his paper, and he writes the game as he sees fit. But the broadcasters are different. You might say that they are being paid by their sponsors through the league — or even by the league through their sponsors — and that makes them salesmen for football. You never heard of a salesman saying that his product was no good, did you? Well, we don’t want any of our broadcasters saying or even implying that about football.”
Bell — who died during his tenure while attending a game in 1959 — did not live long enough to see the day when the sportswriters would work for the broadcasters. It fell to his successors to try and tease out the distinction between the sportswriter who has to answer to his employer and the broadcaster who has to answer to its league partner.
When ESPN aired the primetime soap opera “Playmakers” in 2003 — which featured a fictional football team going through every possible hot-button controversy in one single, tumultuous season — NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue did not mince words, calling it “a rather gross mischaracterization of our sport.” He went as far as to say on HBO’s “Inside the NFL” that he felt the show “traded in racial stereotypes.”
When asked whether the show would impact the NFL’s long-term relationship with ESPN, Tagliabue said the league would “take it into account to the extent we could,” but added that “we don’t view ourselves as the ultimate censor. I don’t view myself as a 14th-century pope in terms of what people have access to. I made my views known. I hope they consider them. If they don’t it will be their editorial judgement, but life will go on.”
But make no mistake, ESPN got the message. “Playmakers” got canned after one season.
In retrospect, it is hard to believe that ESPN ever even flirted with jeopardizing its NFL relationship by airing a fictional drama series, considering that scripted series are entirely unnecessary for a 24-hour sports network.
Journalism, on the other hand, has long been viewed as a necessary component of sports television. From the moment Jim McKay uttered “they’re all gone” at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the idea of sports television being the toy aisle was less a reality than a stereotype. There was an expectation of some substance amidst the silliness. Watch SportsCenter from its earliest days — there are plenty of episodes on YouTube from every era of the show — and you will see a show that bears all resemblance to a local newscast, or even its analog equivalent. “We’re trying to emulate the sports section of a newspaper,” the show’s news director said in a 1987 profile.
Even as SportsCenter developed into a borderline comedy show in the 1990s, it retained that newscast aesthetic. Yes, there were always highlights, but when news warranted, ESPN could hold its own.
The network proved its journalism mettle in the aftermath of the 1989 World Series earthquake, when Bob Ley anchored coverage from the network’s production truck, which was using generator power. Ley and Chris Berman received compliments, even if backhanded; “Ley did a very passable imitation of an on-the-spot newsman in the first hour following the quake,” wrote the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Others were kinder. SportsCenter, a young Glen Macnow wrote at the start of that year, had become “critically acclaimed as the best sports journalism on television.” This was a theme of several retrospectives published on the network that year, ESPN’s tenth of existence, and it was understood by the particulars. “In the early days, our goal was not to go to black (a blank screen),” a SportsCenter coordinating producer told UPI in September, “Now we are trying to push the boundaries of journalism.”
“I come from a classical journalism background,” Ley said in the previously-referenced 1987 profile, written by Pete Dougherty. “I’ve written for newspapers. I take more satisfaction in covering a good NFL antitrust trial or NFL strike than necessarily a game, per se. We take a very good hard news edge. Where in the past … there were a lot of highlights, now we question what’s more important in a day, what are the key issues. It’s that classic formulation: Do you tell people what they want to know, like USA Today, or do you tell them what they need to know, like the New York Times? We have a tendency toward the second part.”
From Ley — who was the face of the network’s journalism efforts on “SportsCenter” and “Outside the Lines” — to Jeremy Schaap, the Fainaru brothers and a litany of others, ESPN’s journalistic efforts have long been a point of pride, or at least of defense, within the company. These efforts have not always been convenient, putting the network at odds with high-profile figures (Barry Bonds and Bob Knight come to mind) and to the point of this article, with league partners.
A decade after “Playmakers,” ESPN and PBS partnered on the documentary “League of Denial,” an extension of the book of the same name written by ESPN’s Fainaru brothers. “League of Denial” was one of the seminal works of the NFL concussion crisis, and its impact in publicizing the scandal cannot be understated. According to reporting at the time by Jim Miller and Ken Belson in The New York Times, the NFL expressed its displeasure with the project in a “combative” meeting between commissioner Roger Goodell, then-NFL Network president Steve Bornstein, then ESPN-president John Skipper and then-ESPN EVP/production John Wildhack. The NFL, as it had from the era of Bert Bell to the era of Paul Tagliabue, “denied that it had exerted any sway,” but the message was once again clear. ESPN removed its branding from the documentary.
By 2018, Ourand reported in Sports Business Journal, “NFL executives privately described the relationship as the worst they’ve ever seen.” ESPN’s sins, recounted on this site previously, centered on the network’s journalism — specifically stories on ESPN.com and “Outside the Lines” that covered issues like the concussion crisis, the commissioner’s salary, the then-ongoing national anthem protests and the Patriots’ ownership situation. The league’s response, also recounted previously on this site, was to saddle ESPN with weak Monday Night Football schedules, give it unprecedented NFL Draft competition, and threaten its annual playoff game.
That is now all water under the bridge. ESPN is about to become the NFL’s most important partner — the steward of its league-branded network and an asset in which it has a literal vested interest. “To predict that we might be broadcasting Super Bowl 10 years from now seems a much less bold prediction than it once did,” Berman said in 1989. He was off by a bit, 28 years to be exact, but the network will finally get its Super Bowl in 2027.
What did it take? There is of course no more “Outside the Lines.” Moreover, the kind of stories being reported by ESPN directly, or by its personnel, have by and large not been of the type to merit a confrontational lunch meeting of executives. That is not to cast aspersions on the reporters who are still there, but it would seem pretty hard to dispute that the headaches ESPN’s reporting once caused for the league have died down. If ESPN’s reporting has already become less aggressive than a decade ago, one can only imagine the impact of the NFL becoming a part-owner of the network.
Then again, perhaps the impact will be minimal. The simple fact that the NFL trusts ESPN enough to have this kind of relationship is a sign that the desired outcome has already been reached.
ESPN, even if it is just a minority stake, will soon be a partially ‘league-owned’ network. It remains to be seen if the network can retain even a hint of independence regarding its biggest business partner, its part owner, and the most powerful cultural entity in American life.
“The media functions as the handmaiden of the NFL, going through its paces for the league, and confirming the league’s high opinion of itself,” a critic by the name of Howard Cosell wrote in his syndicated column after the 1987 Super Bowl. He had not seen anything yet.
Thoughts on last week’s shooting at NFL HQ
The deadly mass shooting last week at 345 Park Avenue is another reminder that the sports world is part of the real world. While the NFL did not suffer the most severe impact of the shooting last Monday — one employee was injured — it was by all accounts the target, spared only by the random chance of the shooter getting into the wrong bank of elevators and ending up on the wrong floor.
It is not yet possible to know the merits of the shooter’s apparent motivation. One need only look at the shooting of Minnesota lawmakers over the summer to find a ‘motive’ that was instead the rambling of someone suffering from mental illness. In a note found on his person, the shooter referenced “League of Denial,” specific cases like that of Terry Long, and specific doctors well known for their work on the topic. He also asked for his brain to be studied for CTE.
The concussion crisis was at one point thought to be an existential threat to the NFL — and was even the subject of a Will Smith feature film — but like many of the social causes of the 2010s, it fizzled out of the national consciousness. Perhaps the shooter’s suspicions were entirely fiction, but the idea that four people were killed by a man seeking vengeance upon the NFL does not seem like the kind of story that should easily slip into the back of one’s mind.
