How ESPN Ditched Journalism And Followed Skip Bayless To The Bottom: A Tim Tebow Story
I'm sure a lot of this is stuff everyone already knows about, but this piece does a nice job of putting it all together to show just how embarrassing ESPN has become:
My favorite part: SportsCenter Spends The Day Celebrating Tim Tebows Birthday
I'm sure a lot of this is stuff everyone already knows about, but this piece does a nice job of putting it all together to show just how embarrassing ESPN has become:
In October, Doug Gottlieb, a radio host and basketball analyst who'd decamped for CBS the previous month after nine years with ESPN, went on The Dan Patrick Show and dropped something of a truth bomb about his time in Bristol:
I was told specifically, "You can't talk enough Tebow." I would jokingly throw it into a segment. "I gotta find 15 seconds here to talk about Tebow, all right let's move on and talk about Major League Baseball."
Later, he said:
Is it ridiculous how much you have to talk about Tebow? Yeah! But for whatever reason people can't get enough of that story, and they kind of stoke the firethat's kind of what ESPN does.
...
This helps explain why, over the summer, ESPN dispatched veteran reporter Sal Paolantonio and a crew to cover Jets camp as if it were the run-up to the Super Bowl. ("ESPN embarrassed themselves," Dan Patrick, who spent 18 years in Bristol, said of ESPN's flood-the-zone coverage in Florham Park.) This helps explain why ESPN2's First Take referred to Tim Tebow more than seven dozen times in late May even though there was absolutely no Tebow news to report on. This helps explain why SportsCenter covered Tim Tebow's 25th birthday like a moon landing. This helps explain why it seemed perfectly reasonable to a SportsCenter anchor to ask in-studio guest Liam Neeson whether Tim Tebow should be the Jets' starting quarterback even though Liam Neeson had no clue what he was talking about. This helps explain how ESPN wound up breaking Tim Tebow news to, yes, Tim Tebow.
The story of how ESPN fell in love with Tim Tebow is really the story of a breakup, between ESPN and the business of reporting the news.
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The story of ESPN's Tebow obsession really begins last year. In September 2011, ESPN2's First Take, having gone through several different lives (a faint imitation of a morning TV show, a debate-cum-variety show), went to an all-debate format starring former newspaper columnist Skip Bayless. This new iteration wasn't all that popular with other producers in Bristol, a source said, but the decision was made after ESPN consulted a focus group.
"We focus-grouped it to people and realized pretty quickly that viewers wanted debate," hot-shot First Take producer Jamie Horowitz told Men's Journal. "In particular, they wanted to see Skip debate."
Producers around the network saw it the same way a lot of us do: as willful crap. Staged disagreement. On the show, Bayless would be pitted against another panelistoften a black counterpart, including Stephen A. Smith, who is now the full-time co-hostand "debate" him or her, Crossfire-style, on the sports topic of the moment. Around the time that Bayless become the country's most visible and outspoken Tebow supporterwhich ultimately spawned this abomination and the 4 million clicks that went with itratings for the show began to climb.
Before long, a source told me, higher-minded Bristol producers swallowed their pride and acknowledged that something was working. And the producers who really took notice? The ones who worked on the live morning edition of ESPN's SportsCenter, which runs opposite First Take. The morning SportsCenter's producers had a problem: First Take was eating into its ratings. In September 2011, the 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. editions of SportsCenter had 636,000 more viewers a day than the same time slot that First Take owned on ESPN2, according to data from Nielsen. Over the next six months, a period that stretched from Tebow's emergence in Denver through his trade to New York, First Take narrowed that deficit each month. By March, when Tim Tebow was traded to the Jets, the SportsCenter lead was down to 182,000 viewersless than a third of what its margin had been.
A programming battle ensued. Morning SportsCenter producers "noticed that First Take was killing them in ratings with Tebow stuff, so they made a conscious effort to deliver more Tebow," the source said. "ESPN is a competitive environment and the competition between SportsCenter and First Take is very real."
...
"Producers were looking to duplicate the success of First Take," said our Bristol insider. "Given what the ratings were, you would have been an idiot not to talk Tebow. Decisions to talk Tebow were conscious and deliberate."
A small, prideful ratings battle had metastasized around the network. ESPN had become the source for Tebow news, whether it bled into SportsCenter or into its various NFL shows or its Monday night pre-game show or its NFL reporters' Twitter feeds or its dot-com stories or its SportsNation polls.
And what dawned on a segment of the newsroom was something that would've seemed absurd even five years ago: Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith were indirectly setting the editorial agenda for the biggest platform in the sports world. As our source put it to me, First Take's ratings surge late last year "completely changed" the look of ESPN.
Meanwhile, there were smaller moments that, taken as a whole, suggested ESPN was long past caring about its news operation. A litany:
Our old friend, Sarah Phillips, was a weekly contributor to ESPN's website while also moonlighting as a sort of social-media huckster. The red flags were there when she was hireda lack of experience, a trail of accusations in the message boards of the betting website where she briefly contributedbut she was given a column anyway because, as she put it, "they thought I was pretty, quick witted, and knew my stuff."
Lynn Hoppes, an ESPN senior writer and former senior editor (he was the guy who recruited the scam artist mentioned above), was caught copying-and-pasting from Wikipedia and occasionally from press releases, too. ESPN called Hoppes lazy, but it turns out no editors over there could be bothered with updating any of his stories that we flagged. There are no editors' notes appended to Hoppes's stories; no corrections or links or attributions or clarifications. They exist exactly as they did before our initial story was published. He remains employed.
In July, a German soccer player Lukas Podolski claimed that an interview posted to ESPN's Soccernet never actually happened. The story was removed from the web, and all Bristol had to say was that the interview was conducted by a "freelance contributor," and that the company was looking into "sourcing questions." A few weeks after the incident, I asked ESPN for an update; a spokesman gave me the same statement that was trotted out after Bristol deleted the story. Was the interview made up? Was it conducted when Podolski thought it was off the record? Who knows?
Later that month, a SportsCenter anchor read on air, word for word, without attribution, something written by RealGM.com about Dwight Howard. An ESPN spokesman said steps were being taken to prevent it from happening again.
Three weeks later, it happened again.
In September, ESPN's soccer blog initially failed to credit an SI writer, who raised a small fuss over the omission. Poynter gave ESPN a slap on the wrist for that one.
The same month, ESPN scooped itself when a video posted to ESPN.com broke the news that prized college hoops recruit Demetrius Jackson had elected to go to Notre Dame. The video was quickly yanked. Why? Jackson's announcement was scheduled to be broadcast exclusively by ESPNU later that eveninga staged event that for obvious reasons was more important to ESPN than the news itself.
These cover the waterfront of journalistic malfeasance: plagiarism, fabrication, a hiring clusterfuck, business decisions masquerading as news judgment, business decisions overriding news judgment. Taken individually, none of these missteps is pervasively illuminating. All newsrooms screw up. But here's why the recent incidents tell us lots about how ESPN regards journalism: nothing happened.
At any newsroom around the country, these dust-ups would prompt a self-administered proctology exam. There'd be earnest committee assignments, standards-and-practices reviews, a "Letter to Our Readers" or two. None of the mea culpas really matter in the grand scheme of thingsmistakes will go on happening no matter how many seminars the Poynter Institute convenes on the subjectbut the point is to let your readers and colleagues know that you're deeply concerned about these things, that somewhere a standard is being upheld. But if any of this were happening in Bristol, it would come as a surprise to the rank and file in the newsroom.
"What's funny is that as soon as the Steve Phillips [sex scandal] went down, they were very proactive about informing us on company policies and all that jazz," said one ESPN insider. "This?" the source went on, referring to Hoppes, Phillips, and the quote fabrication. "Crickets."
My favorite part: SportsCenter Spends The Day Celebrating Tim Tebows Birthday
