ESPN

ESPN, the self-proclaimed (yet rarely disputed) “Worldwide Leader in Sports”, has long realized it was much more than an entertainment company. Acknowledging that with great power comes great responsibility, ESPN assigned George Solomon the title of first “Ombudsman” in 2005, functioning much like a referee ensuring that sports journalism exhibited the standard of being accountable to the ethical norms of the profession. For 13 years, six ESPN ombudsmen collectively served in this role. On May 2018, however, the company discontinued this position, arguing it had outlived its usefulness against the real-time feedback provided by social media. With the role of ombudsman discontinued, the last three ESPN Ombudsmen/Public Editors were interviewed to ascertain their impressions of the impact of their role and the changing status of ESPN. Kelly McBride is a writer, teacher and media ethics expert at the The Poynter Institute for Media Studies (St. Petersburg, Florida); as part of the Poynter Review Project, she served as ESPN ombudsman between 2011 and 2012. Robert Lipsyte is a sports journalist who started his career in 1957 as an editorial assistant for The New York Times; throughout his career, he has written for The New York Post and USA Today and has been a correspondent for CBS and NBC, serving as the ESPN ombudsman in 2013-2014. Jim Brady is a former sports and executive editor at WashingtonPost.com and editor-in-chief of Digital First Media. More recently, he serves as the CEO of Spirited Media; he served as the ESPN Ombudsman from November 2015 to March 2018. These interviews, conducted between August and September 2018, provide insight into the presumed value of this role, the prominent issues each ombudsman tackled, their relationship with ESPN staff, and the challenges that the organization faces in the current media landscape. Altogether, these conversations capture a greater idea of the value that this unique position delivered as well as reflect on what was lost after ESPN decided to eliminate it. Interviewed separately, the three responses are nevertheless combined here for better thematic flow and word economy.

Trabalho de conclusão de curso realizado em 2020, encerrando a graduação de Jornalismo na Cásper Líbero. A monografia busca entender a capilaridade da análise tática nos veículos de comunicação a partir de duas bases teóricas: o infotenimento e o jornalismo de dados. Além disso, há um breve estudo de caso sobre o DataESPN.

The genre of sports is immensely popular culturally in both national and international settings and often times boosts the morale of relatively large communities mired in tragedy and strife.  Consumption of sports media in U.S. culture has grown significantly by almost every conceivable measure, with trends showing that the demand for it continues to grow.  Applying the theories of gatekeeping, framing, and agenda setting, this study explores the role of sports journalism in the traditional media landscape, reinforcing its notion as a DVR proof format with increasing financial profitability within the traditional journalism business model.  An in-depth look reveals the ethical quandaries of sports journalism, as members of sports media are often forced to compromise their journalistic integrity due primarily to a lack of leverage with the entities they’re assigned to cover.  This study shows that sports journalism typically receives denigration from the traditional news media field despite playing an integral part in serving as the gatekeeper of significant news events of cultural and social significance.  A comparative contextual analysis is implemented using the analytical-descriptive methodology to research the sports media’s coverage of two historical events of vast cultural significance: Jackie Robinson breaking MLB’s color barrier, and Jason Collins and Michael Sam becoming the first publicly outed gay athletes in the NBA and NFL, with subtle bias, a clear agenda, and unethical journalistic practices found in their media coverage.

The existing literature on ESPN tends to explain the network’s phenomenal success as a function of savvy executives, charismatic talent, and Americans’ insatiable appetite for sports. Each of these factors has certainly been important; however, ESPN did not achieve its dominance in a vacuum. This chapter identifies several key law and policy developments that since the 1960s have shaped the sports, cable, and satellite television industries in ways that were fortuitous for ESPN. Yes, ESPN’s executives recognized Americans’ demand for live sports and witty banter; however, there is nothing natural or inevitable about the markets for sports or media. They are products of struggle over law and policy, and ESPN has been a clear beneficiary of those struggles.

Keywords: ESPN, Political Economy of the Media, Cable Television, Media History, Media Policy

The growing body of scholarship on sport scandals focuses on how media cover these incidents, how scandalized parties disrupt expectations and repair their images, and the circumstances under which punishment and forgiveness are issued. This article uses Deadspin, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN’s coverage of the 2013 Manti Te’o hoax to suggest that sport scandals also compose instruments through which media outlets fashion their brands, critique competitors, and compete for market share. It demonstrates how these outlets used the Te’o incident to negotiate their positions in the sport-media industry and, more broadly, how sport scandals and coverage of them can reshape that increasingly digital industry’s established hierarchies.

ESPN, the self-proclaimed (yet rarely disputed) “Worldwide Leader in Sports”, has long realized it was much more than an entertainment company. Acknowledging that with great power comes great responsibility, ESPN assigned George Solomon the title of first “Ombudsman” in 2005, functioning much like a referee ensuring that sports journalism exhibited the standard of being accountable to the ethical norms of the profession. For 13 years, six ESPN ombudsmen collectively served in this role. On May 2018, however, the company discontinued this position, arguing it had outlived its usefulness against the real-time feedback provided by social media. With the role of ombudsman discontinued, the last three ESPN Ombudsmen/Public Editors were interviewed to ascertain their impressions of the impact of their role and the changing status of ESPN. Kelly McBride is a writer, teacher and media ethics expert at the The Poynter Institute for Media Studies (St. Petersburg, Florida); as part of the Poynter Review Project, she served as ESPN ombudsman between 2011 and 2012. Robert Lipsyte is a sports journalist who started his career in 1957 as an editorial assistant for The New York Times; throughout his career, he has written for The New York Post and USA Today and has been a correspondent for CBS and NBC, serving as the ESPN ombudsman in 2013-2014. Jim Brady is a former sports and executive editor at WashingtonPost.com and editor-in-chief of Digital First Media. More recently, he serves as the CEO of Spirited Media; he served as the ESPN Ombudsman from November 2015 to March 2018. These interviews, conducted between August and September 2018, provide insight into the presumed value of this role, the prominent issues each ombudsman tackled, their relationship with ESPN staff, and the challenges that the organization faces in the current media landscape. Altogether, these conversations capture a greater idea of the value that this unique position delivered as well as reflect on what was lost after ESPN decided to eliminate it. Interviewed separately, the three responses are nevertheless combined here for better thematic flow and word economy.

This essay undertakes an analysis of ESPN’s coverage of the “Penn State sex abuse scandal” during the first week following the release of the November 2011 Grand Jury presentment, which indicted former Penn State college football defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky on 40 counts of criminal sexual abuse. Understanding ESPN’s coverage–its particular framing of this story–is important and instructive, for it reveals how the news media shape public attitudes and opinions, pressure public officials, and model agentive citizenship in response to public traumas. Specifically, it is argued that ESPN’s visual-narrative framing of the scandal perpetuates a hypermasculine (and heteronormative) fantasy of violent vigilante justice that reduces political agency to personal and private acts.

This study draws from crisis communication literature focusing on image restoration management and audience-based message strategies. In this case, the officials in the NDSU Athletics Department were cast as an intermediary between ESPN and the local me- dia and stakeholder groups. Using a survey and interview design, this analysis explores how the stakeholders perceived NDSU’s role in the decision making process to stage the show, College Gameday away from the campus, and how NDSU simultaneously negoti- ated with ESPN. This study looks at NDSU students, staff, and faculty, and evaluates their perceptions about how the athletic depart- ment handled the crisis and how ESPN displayed the University and the city of Fargo. By doing this, the aim is to reveal perceptions of the tensions inherent in the decision-making process; the goals of ESPN, the university, and the stakeholders; and the relationship between an intermediary decision-maker and two external entities vying for priority.