Inside the ESPN Empire
When ESPN named legendary sports journalist Robert Lipsyte its ombudsman in April 2013, the decision was cheered by Deadspin, the Worldwide Leader’s chief antagonist. Calling on Lipsyte was a surprising decision for ESPN, whose broadcasting entanglements with sports leagues mean that turning athletes into heroes is sort of the company’s business model. The former New York Times columnist, by contrast, made his name by straying from the pack of sportswriters he charged with “godding up” sports stars.
On Monday, to mark the end of his ombudsman tenure, Lipsyte did an exit interview with Slate’s Hang Up and Listen podcast about his role with the network. When asked if ESPN’s journalism—which Lipsyte says is the only aspect of ESPN’s operations he felt qualified to criticize—met his standards, he said, “No, absolutely not. I think that ESPN could be better.” But he also acknowledges the difficulty of walking the line between the network’s two jobs as a presenter of live sports entertainment and as a media organization that digs into things that sports leagues might not want us to know.
ESPN’s primary job has always been, as Lipsyte describes it, “putting up those pretty pictures, buying rights, promoting games … selling the spectacular.” ESPN is relatively young and has grown quickly “without any kind of traditional journalism heritage,” Lipsyte says. It has used its considerable piles of money to “buy some really good journalists,” but the network, he believes, “is still trying to figure out how to use them properly.” He calls ESPN a vast empire, and points to the SEC Network as the most mind-blowing part of that empire. “Extensive investigative reporting into the exploitation of college athletes, and the legal battles around that, would seem to conflict with ESPN’s business model,” he writes in his final ombudsman column. “How do you turn over the rocks in the Southeastern Conference, for instance, while owning the SEC Network?”
ESPN is the best in the business, Lipsyte says, at transactional reporting: breaking the news that helps us watch the games it will broadcast later, telling us “who is going to be traded, who’s hurt, who’s going to actually start on Sunday.” But Lipsyte believes that “where they have to go is the transgressions: the evil that the leagues do.”
The tension here isn’t just between ESPN and its business partners in the NFL, NBA, and MLB. It’s between ESPN and its viewers, who mostly don’t seem to care whether the leagues are doing evil.
Lipsyte says he received close to 20,000 emails during his time as ombudsman. Lots of viewers complained about specific on-air issues—why is this person still on the air, or why does ESPN hate my favorite sport, particularly if that favorite sport is hockey. But what really bothered ESPN’s core audience, Lipsyte says, was “the intrusion of what they called societal issues into what was, in a way, kind of a sacred place. People so often come to sports as this sanctuary from the real world, where they can sit in their living room with their family and not be assailed by anything that will upset them.” For some, that upsetting thing was the sight of football player Michael Sam kissing his boyfriend to celebrate being drafted.
http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2014/12/robert_lipsyte_an_exit_interview_with_the_espn_ombudsman.html
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