The Affari Edge Blog

One of my all time favorite pastimes is college football. There’s just something about the atmosphere, the competition and the buzz it creates every Fall that gets me excited! Of coarse, when it’s football season, I am in my super sports fan state of mind. I watch as many games as possible, constantly hit sports web sites and chat it up with other fans on a pretty constant basis.

I had a conversation yesterday with one of my best friends whom I talk college football with daily. We were talking about college sports betting and he sent me a link to an article about sports betting in today’s society. The article suggested there be a SportsCenter-like show on ESPN that talked solely about game lines and sports bets. I replied, “anything but the same programming running over and over again reporting the same news every hour,” when it hit me. ESPN is in the middle of what I call ‘The MTV Effect’.

The MTV Effect is a new wave movement in television programming that happens slowly over time. We all remember when MTV was MTV - music television. Music countdowns, endless videos and Matt Pinfield (now that’s music television). Now it’s nearly impossible to squeeze a video in between The Hills and the two millionth episode of The Real World. Still, the station is successful, but as most of the old-school MTV fans would agree, MTV has officially ’sold out’ and turned its back on what it really was meant to be.

Now, I’m not saying that ESPN has reached a stage as severe as MTV, but I definitely foresee ESPN taking the same steps. For example, ESPN has aired several reality shows such as The Contender and Dream Job. As a huge sports fan, it is my opinion that this is not the programming that I want to see on ESPN. I could tolerate it if they had these programs on a separate ESPN channel - even running them on ESPN 2 would be fine with me, but running these reality shows (and sitcoms such as The Bronx Is Burning) during prime ESPN hours is unbearable. Honestly, who watched The Bronx Is Burning besides Yankees fans?

ESPN started as a fair, balanced sports broadcasting channel that reported sports news, scores and highlights. Anchors used to be reporters who actually reported the news in an entertaining way - periodically throwing in jokes, one-liners and catch phrases.

Now, many of the personalities on ESPN are sports reporters. Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue, but the sports reporters that are actually on the air don’t report - they preach their opinions and tell viewers what to think and believe - the objective view is gone. If an athlete isn’t very cooperative with the sports media, he/she will most likely be bashed on sports programming. Barry Bonds is the perfect example. His standoffish way of cooperating with the media eventually led to his demise. Once they got a whiff of steroid allegations, they crucified him. Bonds will go down as one of the greatest homerun hitters of all time, but thanks to the sports media (especially ESPN), he will be most remembered as a ‘cheater’.

Even ESPN’s programming has taken a biased approach at delivering the news. If it’s baseball season, the entire country will only hear about 4 of the 30 teams: the Yankees (NY), Mets(NY), Red Sox (Boston) and Cubs (Chi). (Notice any coincidence in those three cities?) Regardless if these teams are 20 games under .500 or 20 games ahead in the pennant race, they will get more publicity and screen time than any other team. The same goes for every other sport - ESPN only cares about who is popular. ESPN would rather air a 10 minute segment on the shading and pigmentation of the Green Monster’s paint job than spend 15 seconds showing two highlights from a White Sox/Indians game.

There’s ESPNU (that broadcasts college sports), ESPN News (that’s 24/7 news) and ESPN 2 (that seems to only broadcast poker these days). I suggest they create ESPN Bandwagon. This is where the SportCenter that plays 20 times a day should be broadcasted. Ratings would be through the roof in all of the major markets like New York, Boston, Chicago and LA. Then ESPN’s SportsCenter would actually be able to make time to show highlights of every game instead of mentioning the rest of the scores during the last 5 minutes.

Maybe I’m just bitter because I saw a similar change happen to MTV. Maybe I don’t want to cross ESPN off of my favorite channels list. Maybe I’m tired of staring at the scored on the ‘BottomLine’ to get my sports news. It’s just disappointing that ESPN has gone mainstream and left fans across the country in the dark. The MTV Effect has already begun at ESPN. Maybe I’ll write the programming director a letter asking for a ESPN Nick to launch in 2008…

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 9:41 am and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.