Regarding Sports

ESPN Going Downhill ...

Is it just me, or have things been going steadily downhill ever since Disney bought ESPN? The biggest thing that bothers me have been the attempted cross-promotions between ABC and ESPN sporting events. Last season every time ABC talked about a Monday night game, they would always throw in a mention about the ESPN Sunday night game, and vice versa. Now, when it's during football broadcasts or during commercials, I think that's annoying, but OK. Disney owns both stations, they want to promote the other channel's show, fine.

But they also started doing it on SportsCenter. I have a real problem with that, because SportsCenter is supposed to be a news show. It should strive to be impartial and not favor any particular sports or teams or events, but instead now it's slowly skewing toward its own programming. It's gotten even worse this year, with weekly segments that plug "Monday Night Football" in the form of highlight clips and "rememberances". When the new NFL schedule got released, they did an entire segment on favorite MNF moments during SportsCenter, and also highlighted interesting MNF matchups.

Like with all news reporting, there's a big problem when the content of news programs starts to be driven by marketing concerns rather than legitimate news concerns. SportsCenter is a news program first and foremost, in my opinion. The mood might be lighter, they might crack jokes and do funny segments, but the bottom line is for most of the past decade they've done a damn good job of reporting sporting news. What was the score? Who got traded where? Who made an amazing play?

But now that they've started schilling for their own programs, the idea that they're "reporting" news has become tainted. Instead, they are clearly trying to create news, trying to generate buzz for their own events. instead of just reporting the news. It started with the X-Games, when they devoted lots of time to covering the athletes in those events even before people really cared that much about it. Then came their own "original programming", such as PlayMaker, which they plugged towards the end of SportCenter. And now it continues with the whole Monday Night Football thing. SportsCenter is slowly turning into a platform for ESPN to advertise its own shows.

That really bothers me, because I love SportsCenter. It was the one place where I could get a great overview of everything that's going on in the world of sports in just one hour, and for the most part it was impartial. It didn't favor any particular sport over any another, and it didn't favor any particular team over any another. It just presented the news in an entertaining way. Now that's slowly going away, as they become partial to their own programming. That makes me sad.

posted by Chris @ 10:54 PM