Did you hear anything about Joe Torre on Thursday? Something about him not returning to the Yankees? It’s darn near impossible to get any news on the Yankees these days - or the New England Patriots, for that matter. Did you know they’re undefeated? They’re apparently in the process of going 16-0 and being declared the Greatest Team Ever in the NFL.
But we’re only six weeks into the season, you say? Don’t tell that to ESPN or Fox. In fact, don’t tell them anything. They’ll tell you what’s important.
In an age where the amount of information available to consumers is virtually limitless, the scope of content provided by national sports media outlets seemingly shrinks by the day. Long have such outlets as Fox and ESPN been accused of skewing their coverage to certain locations, sports or demographics, and assertions of East Coast bias in national providers are as old as national providers themselves. These days, however, it’s getting harder and harder to pass off those claims.
Thursday’s edition of the Joe Torre saga is a prime example. After word got out that the former Braves manager had turned down a 1-year contract offer to return as skipper of the Yankees for a 13th year, Yankee mania saturated virtually every one of ESPN’s main channels: ESPN carried a discussion by the “Baseball Tonight” crew on the drama, ESPNEWS carried a simulcast of Yankee play-by-play radio announcer Michael Kay’s radio show, and ESPN Classic showed an episode of “The Bronx is Burning,” the ESPN-produced melodrama of the 1977 Yankees.
ESPN2 offered some relief in the form of “NFL Live,” at least until you consider that ESPN owns broadcast rights to “Monday Night Football.”
The only other break in the Torre action on ESPN was a painful debate of the significance of the meaningless remarks by Red Sox enigma Manny Ramirez about the world not ending if Boston were to lose to Cleveland in Game 5 of the American League Championship series, provided by such baseball experts as John Kruk, NHL analyst Barry Melrose and former Washington Redskins offensive lineman Mark May. What about the Indians, who knocked off the Yankees and had the Red Sox on the brink of elimination as of Thursday? Nary a word, aside from their involvement in the latest episode of “Manny Being Manny.” As for the Rockies, who have won 21 of their last 22 games and have already won the National League pennant, don’t look for much coverage of them unless you can get Denver stations on your radio.
Fox did no better, at least on its Fox Sports Radio affiliates. Torre was the topic of conversation for much of the afternoon there as well, and though that can be forgiven when callers chime in with their opinions, many radio hosts make no bones about where their allegiances lie. Fox radio host J.T. The Brick often touts his Yankee fandom, as do others who are supposed to be the unbiased facilitators of debate. Granted, the only thing more nauseating than sports talk radio is political talk radio, but once the journalists on the air put impartiality aside, all credibility goes out the window.
Moreover, when fans know they can’t trust the so-called “major” outlets for objective coverage, the suspicion trickles down. Scarcely does a week go back when the Bristol Herald Courier isn’t accused of some sort of favoritism toward a certain school or sport, though you’d be hard pressed to find another newspaper of comparable size which covers more than 40 high schools, half a dozen college and auto racing to as large a degree. Even some local radio shows get muddled down by too much national discussion.
Both ESPN and Fox are equally at fault, however, for perhaps the biggest problem facing sports journalism today, that of self interest shaping what is covered and how. Fox, which has broadcast rights to the NFL as well, spends most of the week talking about pro football in the radio, even in the summer, when minor notes from training camps trump the regular season in MLB (which Fox also televises) and other sports. NASCAR gets a word in here or there, but the amount of note it’s given can be correlated to which network has broadcast rights in the ridiculously split Nextel Cup schedule.
Meanwhile, on ESPN, Monday night’s Game 4 of the NLCS, in which the Rockies clinched the pennant with their seventh straight postseason win, was given second billing on “SportsCenter” to the Monday night game between the New York Giants and the 1-5 Atlanta Falcons. Think self interest is at work there?
With the dollars networks shell out for broadcast rights, the bias can be understood, but not excused, nor is it exclusive to television or radio. The Associated Press is not immune, nor are many national-market print outlets. Only through modern blogs, it seems, can a broader spectrum been seen - if you can find it.
Certain teams getting all the publicity is nothing new. One reason the Yankees became America’s team in the mid-20th century is the fact that they were always on TV during the early days of television, especially at World Series time. The same can be said, to a degree, about the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s.
That isn’t the case, today, when fans are supposed to have the ability to pick and choose what they watch and about whom they read over various outlets. This is where the largest national providers are dropping the ball, and where such favoritism comes dangerously close to shaping the stories rather than covering them. Not that sports journalists trying to become as famous as the topics they cover is anything new, either.
The correlation of air time to popularity isn’t exclusive to sports, of course. Ask the average voter to tell you a presidential candidate not named Obama, Clinton, Edwards or Thompson and you might get a short list, and if you remove the former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson’s role on “Law & Order” or his film career and he’d be equally unrecognizable. Ask any political scientist and they’ll tell you the about of face time in the media often relates directly to how a candidate does in the polls.
While it would be naive to say the national media doesn’t influence or skew the news headlines, the events of the day can’t be shaped the same way sports coverage can. That’s why the burden has increasingly become the consumer’s what is and isn’t important. A backlash has grown against ESPN, but their rights to the country’s most popular sport give the network the ability to overcome it. The problem, however, is that no national outlets seem to be stepping up to provide an alternative. That such platforms as blogs are the future of journalism is rarely disputed simply for technological reasons. More and more these days, the need for them is growing, if only to provide fans more options.