ESPN Ombudsman's Latest Report Dissed by Exec--'We know best.'

• ESPN Ombudsman documents selling harmful opinion as fact, suggests consumers can turn it off, stop reading, stop listening:

"There are a lot of prices to pay for opinion-driven sports journalism --

• capriciously tarnished reputations and careers,

close-mouthed athletes and coaches protecting themselves by letting only the occasional bland cliché slip past their lips, fan rage at the media and, last but not least, the diversion of resources and reward from news reporting, which gradually undermines the very practice of journalism at its best.

• ...All I can say for sure is that factuality has been devalued in 24/7 sports media. If you look at the proportion of airtime and cyberspace devoted to reporting fact versus delivering opinion on ESPN, ESPN.com and ESPN Radio, it is clear that the main function of sports news is to serve as the molehill on which mountains of opinion are built. We don't have news cycles anymore. We have opinion cycles."

****The ESPN Ombudsman shows her latest report documenting rampant opinion winning over fact and changing the public's perception of truth. Predictable response from ESPN "executive:" we have ratings, we know what we're doing.*****(sm)

• "The rage is general all over the land of sport. Fans, not to mention coaches and athletes, are sick and tired of being subjected to a relentless media onslaught of opinion that is simultaneously overheated and half-baked.
• Unfortunately, in a kind of sports Stockholm syndrome, many of them have learned to imitate the rhetorical belligerence of the media masters they resent. The instigator of the Friday Night Firestorm in my mailbox was opinion about Notre Dame, inserted into a game fans simply wanted to watch for its own sake. The instigator of Gundy's Saturday rage was an opinion column couching itself as fact.
• I am not ombudsman for the Oklahoman, but through a week's ridicule of Gundy on ESPN, I never heard or read a clear account of the column that ticked him off. In what was supposed to be a balanced, give-both-sides-of-the-story report on ESPNEWS, I saw the full three-minute, 20-second videotape of Gundy's news conference for the umpteenth time, followed by a videotape of reporter Jenni Carlson's response on "Good Morning America," in which she says, calmly, "I stand firmly on the facts of the column." He looked bad. She looked good. "What facts?" somebody at ESPN should have asked before ridiculing the coach while giving the columnist a pass. In building her case against the benched quarterback, Carlson introduces her evidence of his no-can-do attitude with these phrases:
• "If you believe the rumors and the rumblings …", "Tile up the back stories told on the sly over the past few years …", "Word is …" and "Insiders say …". In my book, those are not phrases from the realm of fact; they barely count even as speculation by anonymous sources.

Those are all genuine questions to which I do not have the answers. Too many people are involved to attribute motivation, which at any rate is a dangerous activity.

• All I can say for sure is that factuality has been devalued in 24/7 sports media. If you look at the proportion of airtime and cyberspace devoted to reporting fact versus delivering opinion on ESPN, ESPN.com and ESPN Radio, it is clear that the main function of sports news is to serve as the molehill on which mountains of opinion are built. We don't have news cycles anymore. We have opinion cycles. And feel free to custom design the opinion of your choice out of rumor, speculation and twisted logic, as Tuesday Morning Quarterback Easterbrook did, not once, but twice,
• in manufacturing extended false analogies between Richard Nixon's Watergate and Bill Belichick's tapegate, as if stonewalling to the press is the same as stonewalling to congressional investigators, as if violating a league rule is the same as violating federal law, as if he didn't promptly hand over to the commissioner all the material that was asked of him and accept his punishment. Easterbrook is entitled to his opinion, to his logic, to his analogies, however strained I think they are, but what is not OK is cloaking opinion in the camouflage of reporting. In his Sept. 18 piece, "Dark days for NFL," Easterbrook indulges in several speculations about Belichick's spying, couching his imaginings in "perhaps" and "might have beens" and "the rumor mill says," which leads him to suggest "the Patriots' cheating might have been more extensive than so far confirmed." That "so far confirmed" is sneaky, implying there is only a small gap between his imagination and fact. Well, all right, sneaky implications are within bounds for a column.
• It is when he vaults from speculation to posing this question -- "What else is there about New England cheating that the team or league isn't telling us?" -- that he goes out of bounds. Not what might there be, but what else is there. That's where the line is -- the line between the grammar of speculation and the grammar of implied fact -- and he crossed it.

Ironically, in his next piece, written after commissioner Goodell had demanded not Belichick's head but $500,000 from the coach and a draft pick from the Patriots, Easterbrook accuses NFL spokesman Greg Aiello of trying to pull off a sneaky Nixonian "non-denial denial" by using the verb "is." "There is no such evidence," Aiello had written in response to Easterbrook's asking whether the Patriots' material had shown evidence of Super Bowl cheating. "But wait," Easterbrook writes, "three days earlier, the NFL destroyed the evidence." Because the NFL had shredded the tapes and notes Belichick surrendered, of course they could say there is no such evidence, but maybe there was evidence. This loophole of tense allows Easterbrook to continue speculating about the Patriots' cheating during the Super Bowl.

• Asked to explain his attitude toward the use of speculation and rumor, Easterbrook said, "I'm uncomfortable with dropping the barrier about rumor mills about purely private behavior, but in this case, the rumors were relevant to something that was on the league's plate, that was in the sports news. The way I approach it is to ask if there is some reasonable reason to believe the parties involved would be lying to avoid public disclosure, thus forcing people who want to talk to reporters onto the rumor mill.

Coach Gundy screams in rage about published speculation and rumor and gets ridiculed. Coach Belichick keeps his mouth shut about published speculation and rumor and gets labeled Nixonian. It's all grist for the next turning of the opinion mill.

• My concern, though, is less for Gundy or Belichick than for viewers and readers who grow fat on the fast food of opinion while starving for reported fact."

(They'll define it as their "take," and move along). sm

• "ESPN used to be a place where sports news was reported," wrote one of the many readers who complained about the two Easterbrook articles on Belichick. "Now it's just a factory for controversy. I guess in that way it's just a microcosm of America media in general, but that does not make it any less distasteful."

On ESPN excising a sliver of a lengthy McNabb interview and twisting it:

• ESPN did not create the McNabb controversy, not directly, but it fed on it, and as the Worldwide Leader in Sports, it is the prime mover in setting the agenda for what is talked about in sports and how it is talked about. Through its emphasis on opinion programming, ESPN has contributed enormously to the tendency to frame sports issues and nonissues alike as controversies. Within the constraints of its allotted half-hour, "Outside the Lines" routinely does its best to provide context through reporting, but that's not enough.
• The loss for fans is that there is progressively less reason for any athlete to speak thoughtfully, candidly or at length about anything because his or her words, like McNabb's, will only be mined for nuggets of controversy potential.

There are a lot of prices to pay for opinion-driven sports journalism -- capriciously tarnished reputations and careers, close-mouthed athletes and coaches protecting themselves by letting only the occasional bland cliché slip past their lips, fan rage at the media and, last but not least, the diversion of resources and reward from news reporting, which gradually undermines the very practice of journalism at its best.

• The ombudsman spoke to ESPN exec VP/Production, Norby Williamson about possibly correcting the problem, but he said,

"....it would be a mischaracterization for anyone to say ESPN feels like they have a journalism problem so now they are going to refocus. I think of it as the next evolution of the brand."

• (He continues), "....in the early 2000s, we evolved 'SportsCenter' and news overall to inject debate, informed opinion, the things you have concern over. And I think if you look at our growth -- in terms of households, ratings, digital, radio -- we hit on something there."

(Translation: We know, you don't, and we have a monopoly anyway).

• The ombudsman of course is left with nothing but to advise consumers they can just stop watching, listening and reading this garbage.

"That puts the burden back on viewers and readers, who can vote with their remotes and clicks. My vote on opinion-driven journalism is in. If anyone thinks the point of this column is that we should all be nicer, that is not it. I hope ESPN hits the issues hard with reporting. Let opinion, however heated, arise from that."

• From ESPN Ombudsman report by Le Anne Schreiber, "Fed Fast Food of Opinion, ESPN Audience Starves for Reported Fact," 10/10/07

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