ESPN and the Sandusky sex case

The Patriot-News, and that's about it. They've owned this story.

 

Anyone who has been on the receiving end of a phone call, and a lecture on journalism ethics, from one of their smarmy PR bastards knows how seriously ESPN takes its journalism when it suits their purposes.

 

Good point. Reminds me a lot of of Chuck Klosterman's chapter in Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs about how the "media bias" readers often interpret actually often results from rather innocuous set of events, such as a reporter missing a phone call because he left his desk to go to the vending machine.

 

It is perhaps the biggest fallacy in a business full of them, and it involves the "liberal media bias" and everything else: That everything you see in newspapers and on websites is the result of carefully orchestrated plans designed to advance an agenda or avoid pissing off a business partner or whatever. When it's mostly about moment-by-moment decisions made by a diverse group of people ranging from extremely talented down to not very good, with an age range covering 50 years and the commensurate range of experience, and under fluid circumstances from a lazy afternoon to the pit of deadline hell.

 

SF, you need to stop making so much sense. You're going to start drowning out the black helicopter crew.

 

I understand that and agree entirely. I work for a newspaper that gets accused of these things more than enough, often in very public settings. And it is unjustified often, though not always. But I have seen ESPN's coverage of reputation-tarnishing things for other major college football programs in the past, most recently the Ohio State scandal. It makes me leery.

 

Yeah, I want to be clear. I can't state for a fact that business doesn't affect their play of stories, perhaps this one (or the play of stories at other places, either). But it has long been my bitch, far beyond this deal, that people from Rush Limbaugh on down give big corporate media entities way too much credit for being able to get together on anything, either internally or with each other.

 

All you need to know about ESPN and its commitment to journalistic integrity can be found in 30 seconds.
The 30-second commercial that has Berman shilling for Applebee's is only Exhibit A.

 

If it's not a conscious decision to not spend resources and their own people to work this story (including columnists, bloggers, etc.) because they don't want to put a business partner in a bad light, what's the other explanation to the little attention they are paying to it?

Look at what Yahoo! Sports had from Dan Wetzel about it yesterday afternoon. And it appears he wrote that from Tuscaloosa, where he covered LSU-Alabama ...

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/news?slug=dw-wetzel_penn_state_child_sex_case_110511

And more than a day later, still nothing beyond straight AP wire copy on ESPN's site. They've got blog entries on Missouri joining the SEC linked on their homepage, but can't manage any blogging or opinion pieces about the Penn State story?

Whether it's a business decision or an editorial decision, either way I think ESPN is looking bad on how they are covering this.

 

Wetzel's work on the road was outstanding. As usual.

 

I still say there are (good) editorial reasons while piling in with the opinion on this particular story right now might not be the best thing, but reasonable folks can disagree.

 

I keep reading about the number of journalists the WWL is hiring to cover college football, but, like in our discussion of the Fiesta Bowl scandal, are they hired to break stories like this, or break down Nebraska's offensive line? Same business, different skill sets.

About all ESPN can do now is send someone from "Outside the Lines" out to Happy Valley with a crew, run all the stock shots we've seen of Sandusky's perp walk, a few stock shots of Paterno, and get the "We're shocked, he seemed like such a nice guy" stories until the story starts going though the various stages of the court process. But this also raises the question, why isn't ESPN tapping the resources of Disney tag-team parter ABC News?

All of this, however, does not absolve ESPN from writing a vague headline and not giving this more prominent display, even using an AP story.