Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [372]
In the time I’ve been running The Magazine I’ve never been asked to hold back. Honestly, sometimes I think, “What the hell are they doing, letting us do this?” I was a business writer before I came here, and from a business perspective a lot of the serious journalism we do doesn’t make sense. This is a television company. Our principal business is entertainment, and our partnerships with leagues, even though we’re paying them, are complex and fragile. Our bosses don’t really need to let us do the type of journalism we do here, because the stories can lead to headaches for them, and as a magazine we’re not going to make that much of a difference to ESPN’s bottom line. But I think they recognize that good journalism enhances the brand.
In addition to the magazine and the newsroom itself, ESPN’s journalistic mission takes many forms—among them Outside the Lines, E:60, and the Enterprise Unit, which serves as a cross-platform group devoted to long-form reporting and investigative journalism. With a steady output of stories, many investigative, each division has worked to disprove what they consider a common misperception: that ESPN’s coziness with rights holders—the leagues—can compromise and even cripple its journalism, and that the real business of the network is sucking up to commissioners and league officials.
Even though examples like the Roethlisberger incident have intruded from time to time, plenty of evidence exists in the form of well-reported stories that have validated the independence of the news teams (often coordinated with work by ESPN.com). Despite huge and lucrative deals with the NCAA, for instance, the Enterprise Unit produced a multipart series about ways that commercialism has crept, or plunged, into college sports. Among the examples cited were Florida State football’s suspiciously malleable academic standards, a lawsuit involving the NCAA and the issue of who owns player likenesses used in video games, and even ESPN’s own role, along with other TV networks, in the phenomenon.
As part of the buildup to its World Cup coverage, the network dove into the prickly issue of human trafficking in South Africa, even questioning whether FIFA and the South African government were taking enough steps to thwart this form of twenty-first-century slavery. Undercover work in the brothels of Johannesburg and Cape Town was an important facet of the reporting.
In the something-to-anger-every-league department, ESPN offered a disconcerting piece on stadium food—and what may be “lurking” inside it. Reporters examined health-and-safety violations facing every NBA, NFL, and MLB team in 107 facilities throughout the U.S. and Canada. Also on the health front, Enterprise continued its years-long investigation into concussions suffered by players in the NFL, interviewing the doctor assigned to oversee the ongoing problem and discussing the league’s reluctance to confront it openly.
At ESPN.com, in addition to stories that originated in other units, high-impact pieces on modern times included a July 2010 examination of a dilemma facing MLB as its annual All-Star Game approached: whether to play that game in Arizona, as scheduled, despite the state’s infamous, Draconian, and, some said, outright racist immigration legislation. In October of the same year, ESPN.com carried a very strong opinion piece by Howard Bryant on the matrix of crises and controversies facing the NFL, with Bryant assailing football as a “death sport” that will have to change radically in the decade ahead to ensure its own survival.
For its part, OTL took a look at the strange phenomenon of sex addiction in an Ides-of-March piece that aired a month after Tiger Woods’s televised statement about the charges of incredible