To whom it may concern,
As a lifelong sports fan, ESPN has been a staple of my daily routine for as long as I can remember. For many, many years, your network provided excellent and unparalleled sports coverage, particularly during episodes of "SportsCenter". This "flagship" program was an hour packed with highlights, insights, witticisms, and analysis. If a viewer craved exposes, emotional stories, or discussion of the personal lives of athletes, "Outside the Lines" (often following "SportsCenter") provided a perfect medium to explore this side of the sporting world. This sort of investigative reporting provided a perfect complement to the action-packed, diverse hour that was "SportsCenter". Except in the smallest of markets, a viewer was practically guaranteed at least a few highlights of his favorite team taking the field/ice/court if they had played that night. It's what made the show so great: a broad appeal, brimming with highlights that were enriched by the commentary behind them.
I wish I could still talk about "SportsCenter" like this in the present tense. For several years now, however, the quality of this program has been steadily deteriorating to the point that I no longer recognize it as the bastion of sports videojournalism that it once was. I think I can pinpoint the first time I noticed the show beginning to fall off. It was the summer of 2008, and a swimmer named Michael Phelps was taking the Beijing Olympics by storm. It was undoubtedly a feel-good story, one that we could all get behind as Americans. His chase for eight gold medals was a series of inspiring televised moments that many of us will likely never forget. The only dark side to his success was the fact that sports programming began to feel oversaturated with coverage of the man. My friends and I jokingly started referring to ESPN as "PhelpsCenter", due to the unyielding focus on this Olympic hero. Interviews with people only tangentially related to the situation, and to the man, began to permeate your programming. The reporting on Phelps started to take on the breathless, hero-worshipping air of freshman girls who have been smiled at by the varsity football captain in the hallway. ("He's so funny!" "OMG his workouts are in-sane!" "He eats 12,000 calories a day and is still so ripped?? Ughhhh I must be dreaming!")
The Olympics ended, and eventually the Phelps talk began to recede into the distance, but we the viewers soon found out that "SportsCenter" had developed a taste for this kind of thing. You had gained viewership by capitalizing on this type of rabid, singular focus that deconstructs every possible angle of an athlete's personal life, body language, relationships, and possible flaws. It wasn't long after Phelps' moment in the spotlight that the specter of Brett Favre's will he-or-won't he retirement reared its ugly head. For weeks (in consecutive summers!), every morning's edition of "SportsCenter" seemed solely dedicated to scrutinizing the minutiae of Favre's life and decision-making process. Were Favre less hungry for the spotlight, he would have been justified in filing a restraining order against ESPN's own Ed Werder--the man practically camped out outside the quarterback's Mississippi home, reporting on the movements inside as well as wildly speculating about the end result of Favre's decision. We were even 'treated' to police chase-style aerial footage of Favre's black SUV taking him to and from airports as the situation played out. The man was a good quarterback, not OJ Simpson on the lam, and this coverage seemed to be ESPN's "crossing the Rubicon" moment: the die had been cast, the shark had been jumped. There was no turning back.
Since then, "SportsCenter" has devolved into a steady rotation of flavor-of-the-month stories that are beaten into the ground by day three, and yet are not given up on until weeks or months later. Tiger Woods' imploding personal life followed Favre's indecision; LeBron James' "Decision" special came less than a year later. (Yes, yes, that hour-long debacle raised $100,000 for the Boys' and Girls' Clubs of America. It also turned the sporting press into a group of fawning yes-men waiting for a handout from a benefactor elevated to divine status.) I need not remind anyone of the biggest story to follow LeBron's "Decision" and the ensuing season, in which his first title bid in Miami fell short. An oft-criticized, poorly-mechanized quarterback was given a chance to start for my beloved Denver Broncos, and his unconventional way of winning in the face of adversity (even when the adversity was his own poor decision-making) set your network newly aflame with endless material for the talking heads. Your media circus has barely let up in the nearly two years since Timothy Richard Tebow first started a game in the NFL, through his trade to the Jets and subsequent release, and it continues to this day as he dons the practice jersey of your favorite team to hate, the New England Patriots.
(Not-so-quick sidebar: What does your network have, exactly, against the New England Patriots? As a devoted supporter of a different AFC team, I could hardly be called a Patriots fan. But I feel compelled to defend them in light of recent events--namely, the Aaron Hernandez murder trial. Your coverage has repeatedly made it seem as though members of the Patriots organization, from owner Robert Kraft to coach Bill Belichick to quarterbacks Brady and Tebow, are somehow morally culpable for Odin Lloyd's death. Hernandez's choices were his own, and by all accounts most members of the team chose to have little to do with him outside of the team facilities. Had he made threats in the locker room, or suggested in the least that he intended or was capable of such a crime, then perhaps an intervention might have been necessary, or at least possible. But to condemn an entire organization for the actions of one troubled member is not only shoddy analysis, it's blatantly unfair. I haven't heard an iota of blame being levied against the Kansas City Chiefs for linebacker Jovan Belcher's murder-suicide, and your network's collective memory seems conveniently short in the case of ESPN golden boy Ray Lewis, who escaped a murder conviction by the skin of his teeth a decade ago. I suspect that your network's chosen Belichick-as-Machiavelli storyline stems more from the fact that he refuses to play your game, to embrace the era of TMZ-style guerilla journalism, than it does from any indiscretion he has actually committed.)
As far as Aaron Hernandez is concerned, the coverage carried out by 'SportsCenter' to date has bordered on the level of absurd reached during the Brett Favre years. At one point early last week, we were treated to three consecutive days of coverage of the police searching the lake near Hernandez's home. The lack of information being stretched into four-minute "news" bits became laughably apparent when the biggest piece of information delivered was that police had found a cell phone that was entirely unrelated to the case. I don't mean to be the bearer of bad news, especially since I have no background in sports journalism, but this is hardly the kind of "news" your viewers are clamoring for.
The most recent examples of this overexposure not named Hernandez are those of Johny Manziel and Alex Rodriguez. In the case of the former, I can only say that I am unsurprised. Not because I believe Manziel to be an out-of-control, irresponsible party boy (although recent leaks about his autograph troubles speak to some level of character issue), but because when someone is elevated to such an iconic, borderline mythical status at such a young age, they are almost guaranteed to disappoint. And regardless of how Manziel fares, ESPN will benefit. Either he salvages his reputation and repeats his record-breaking season, thereby proving the hype perpetuated by ESPN correct, or he is suspended, disgraced, and less than what he was last year, in which case your network will have months' worth of fodder with which to continue playing out the Johnny Manziel saga. Triumph or tragedy, you will capitalize, because you have established a perfectly closed feedback loop that one or two athletes a year are chosen to occupy. Oh, and in the case of A-Rod, I think most sports fans are tired of him in general. A few more concrete examples of what a self-serving, rule-bending prima donna he is will not change the emotional landscape for many. Enough.
Perhaps I should not allow the decline of one television program to negatively impact my life so severely. In the long run, maybe it isn't so important. After all, I am only twenty-two years old--nostalgia isn't something I should be cultivating too strongly when I plan on living for quite a while longer. And yet...I feel compelled to give in to that inner tug to complain about the fact that you were once great and are no longer. I will not call it sadness; I have experienced the shattering of too many of my illusions to get sad about them anymore. But in the mold of the cliched movie dad, I will say that I am disappointed in you. Disappointed that you used to stand for things, that you caved in and sacrificed your best qualities to try to be who you thought we wanted you to be. You were wrong. Those of us out there who truly do care about sports have no time and no attention for an hour of sports news that feels like an open comedy audition mated with the worst of HLN programming. But like Nancy Grace has done on HLN, so have you allowed circus clowns like Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith to dominate your airtime and rhetoric. They seize their time on camera to bring out the worst aspects of discussions on race, religion, and human nature, exploiting controversial viewpoints that no rational human being could support. They employ, as was once said of President Warren G. Harding, "an army of phrases moving across the landscape in search of a meaning". And we, your customers and viewers, are tired of the whole charade.
You have gotten lazy, ESPN, as all who achieve near-monopoly status are wont to do. Why should you change? You are, after all, the "Worldwide Leader in Sports". But I contend that you still hold this title only for a lack of competition, of better options. I, for one, hope that the new Fox Sports Network lights enough of a fire under your ass to force you to uphold basic principles of journalistic integrity, and revert back to giving the people what they want: fair, broad coverage of American sports leagues that provides insightful analysis and tough reporting, instead of inflammatory baseless analysis and spineless reporting. Scandal is easy, it is cheap. It is also the mark of hacks and those with little of import to say. As a lifelong lover of sports, I can only hope and petition that you find it in the collective conscience of your network to stop coddling reporters who do not report and analysts who do not analyze, and get back to what made you once great.
Sincerely,
Charles McKeever
