Defending ESPN

I never thought I would say this: Ease up on ESPN.

Once the spunky, irreverent sports network defined by the great combination of offbeat humor and sports reporting, ESPN is now an ubiquitous presence in all things sports.

Certainly things have changed since the mid-to-late 1990s when “SportsCenter” was product-placement-free, Keith Olbermann was not yet a liberal twit and Geocities was still alive and well on the Web.

Now the “World Wide Leader” more or less sets the sports agenda every day, raising ethical questions like “If Ben Roethlisberger is accused of sexual assault and ESPN doesn’t cover it, did it really happen?”

And there’s also Chris Berman and Stuart Scott, who suck.

However, even as someone who frequents sports blogs every day, I think ESPN has been given a raw deal. Major blogs like Deadspin and, to a lesser extent, The Big Lead seemingly take great pride in publishing random rumors and half-truths about ESPN talent that would make Perez Hilton blush.

And while a number of the stories end up being at least partially true – like in the recent case of baseball analyst Steve Phillips’ sordid affair with an ESPN production assistant and subsequent drama involving a restraining order, panicked 911 calls from Phillips’ wife and ultimately Phillips’ firing – the damage done to ESPN’s image is too harsh. 

Yes, Phillips’ situation is sad for his family and disappointing for a company that has faced issues like this previously with other on-air talent like Harold Reynolds and Sean Salisbury, but the projection of an image onto ESPN based on the actions of a select few isn’t quite fair.

Sexual relationships between co-workers are not to be taken lightly but what worth does the knowledge really have to us? How is ESPN supposed to control the actions of all its employees, especially when they are scattered all around the world at all times? It’s not as if these sorts of melodramatic inter-office dramas don’t happen elsewhere (which still doesn’t make it right), and yet no media outlet gets criticized as much as ESPN.

Thus, while so many Web sites focus on the off-air comings and goings of the “World Wide Leader,” they fail to recognize how ESPN is slowly changing its actual content. Take the 30th anniversary-celebrating documentary series “30 for 30”:  The usually hands-on media power gave 30 filmmakers the chance to make whatever sports documentary they wanted as long as it was about something that happened since 1979 and clocked in at less than 52 minutes.

The results so far have been fascinating; far better than any documentaries ESPN has done in the past and exponentially better than the 25th anniversary celebration that gave us Stu Scott preaching about how awesome ESPN was – or in other words, everything we had grown to hate about them.

So sure, Chris Berman is still awful, the incessant Yankees/Lakers/Brett Favre coverage is vomit-inducing. But ESPN is doing some good things, and even if it was not, we should spend more time criticizing the on-air product instead of the off-air drama.