ESPN Rex: The Worldwide Leader in Eye-Gouging Viewers

While trying to watch ESPN's coverage of Barry Bond's triumph over AT&T Park's shallow right-field wall, I couldn't help but think back to an article I meant to comment on a couple weeks ago. Newsweek ran a piece questioning ESPN's journalistic integrity in light of its increasing coziness with the professional sports leagues and their various members. I thought the article was pretty fair and, for me at least, it really touched on a number of things that have led me to all but banish the worldwide sports leader from my favorite channel roster. I'll still tune in for the occasional baseball game or special event, but most of what the boys (and girls) of Bristol U are selling, I'm not buying. (The obvious exception of course being Mike in Mike in the Morning, but that's really a radio show with a video feed.)

I've totally given up on SportsCenter, especially after this morning's tired exercise. What used to be an entertaining box-score rundown has, over the past six or seven years, turned into an athletics-based Access Hollywood, focusing less on the games and more on the athletes, providing viewers with rumor, innuendo, way too many "anonymous sources" and details I don't care about. Not only that, but it's obvious the producers are pushing it towards the MTV demographic. I personally can wait to see what story is coming up next, I don't need the "helpful" rundown on the side distracting me further from the program's main content along with the scrolling banner and unnecessarily loud (perhaps just plain unnecessary?) background music. I'm obviously no longer the type of viewer SportsCenter is courting, so I will bid them adieu and get my scores from the web.

The same goes for other past favorites like Baseball Tonight. I think Devin Gordon (author of the Newsweek piece) is spot-on when he maintains that the network relies far too heavily on "underqualified ex-jocks to fill its analyst ranks". We're not talking about public policy or anything else that really requires open debate, so why do I need to listen to not just one, but several second-string athletes "break things down" and argue their points with excruciating redundancy and little added insight?

I like to mark the network's downfall from the moment they did that live behind-the-scenes SportsCenter broadcast a few years back. While it was an interesting and enlightening event, it really did, on a certain level, display the hubris of the network as well as the the runners of it's flagship show. This was an organization at the top of its game, one that had recently become a pop-culture icon. These guys were cool and they knew it. That always spells trouble. Since that broadcast it feels like everything at ESPN has been done for the sake of cool, thus substance has suffered and in my opinion at least, things have been trending downward, like they do for the star of any Greek tragedy when his waistline begins to exceed the dimensions of his britches. If that is in fact what they wear under those togas.