ESPN ombudsman recaps network's 'Spygate' coveragePosted by Mike Reiss, Globe Staff June 12, 2008
Le Anne Schreiber, the ombudsman for ESPN's various platforms, writes today on the network's coverage of "Spygate."
A significant part of the piece is dedicated to an ESPN special about "Spygate", which aired the day former Patriots employee Matt Walsh met with NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.
In the special, "NFL Live" analysts Mark Schlereth and Cris Carter apparently concluded that the Patriots were using videotapes during games, despite evidence to the contrary. Schreiber uses this as an example as to why ESPN "specials" can be dangerous programming.
Link:
http://www.boston.com/sports/football/patriots/reiss_pieces/2008/06/espn_ombudsman.html=====
'SportsCenter Specials' too often just hot air on hot topicsBy Le Anne Schreiber
ESPN Ombudsman
June 12, 2008
The big news from ESPN last month was the announcement that the network would begin televising live "SportsCenters" from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m., beginning in August. Ending the long practice of re-airing the previous night's "SportsCenters" during those hours has many potential advantages, but the one that most intrigues me is the prospect of saying goodbye to the "SportsCenter Special" as we have known it.
With certain exemplary exceptions, such as the day-long special devoted to the release of the Mitchell Commission report last December, the "SportsCenter" Special has been an unwieldy, artificially bloated, overused mechanism for handling major and not-so-major breaking news. When criticized as such by me or others, the bottom-line defense has been that a live-if-overblown Special is better than re-airs.
With that rationale removed, ESPN will lose its best excuse for asking its on-air talent to fill five gallons of airtime with a half-pint of breaking news. The liabilities of that practice were evident most recently in the "SportCenter Special" of May 13, the day NFL commissioner Roger Goodell met with Matt Walsh, the former New England Patriots videographer who at long last was to tell what he knew about the Pats' rule-breaking practice of spying on other teams.
The Spygate special, which began at 11 a.m., was handled by the "NFL Live" desk, anchored by Trey Wingo and flanked by NFL analysts Mark Schlereth and Cris Carter, both former players. Wingo's quick-witted grasp of fast-breaking news served ESPN well during previous specials, but on this occasion, the news broke slowly. When the Goodell/Walsh meeting lasted two hours longer than expected, delaying Goodell's planned news conference, there was a dangerous amount of air time to fill, live and unscripted.
Inevitably, talk among Wingo, Carter and Schlereth focused on the handiest new Spygate topic, the eight tapes from 2000-02 that Walsh had turned over to the NFL, and which the NFL had released to the media that morning while Goodell was still in his meeting. The question immediately put up for grabs was: What benefit might the Patriots have derived from these tapes?
As Wingo later told me, "We all, not only Mark and Cris but myself included, had a real visceral reaction to seeing those tapes for the first time, and their opinions were driven by their emotions. Before seeing the tapes, they weren't sure what benefit they might have, but when they saw the way it matched up -- with down and distance on the scoreboard, the coaches' signals and the formation all matched up -- they both were thinking, 'Holy Cow!'"
Fueled by that emotion, Schlereth imagined how such tapes might affect the outcome if film was shot, edited and utilized "during the course of a game" -- a practice Patriots coach Bill Belichick had consistently denied since last September, and for which there was no evidence. Never mind. The mere possibility that tapes could have been shot and used during a given game, with likely "amazing" effect on game outcome, got Schlereth and then Carter so riled up that pretty soon they had convinced themselves of the virtual certainty of their speculation.
"If it's not helping you during the course of the game, then why are you videotaping teams
that don't play within your division?" Schlereth asked, before providing his own answer. "Because you are using it during the course of the game. You are making adjustments during halftime."
Carter noted that the situation most likely to provide the opportunity for editing tapes for in-game use was the extra-long halftime of a Super Bowl. "To think that a Super Bowl might be slanted in a team's favor!" Carter fumed. For an hour and 15 minutes preceding the Goodell news conference, this "SportsCenter Special" was a runaway train of inflammatory speculation that had Schlereth and Carter placing asterisks on all the Patriots' Super Bowl wins under Belichick.
Several times, Wingo tried to remind viewers this was simply the analysts' personal opinion, but Schlereth resisted the notion that his opinion was debatable. Nothing short of a flashing red "speculation" sign filling half the screen for a full 75 minutes would have had any chance of counteracting the effect Schlereth and Carter were having.
Where were the calm heads? Even normally calm heads like John Clayton and Sal Paolantonio, ESPN reporters put on screen to comment from their remote locations, caught the fever. Clayton in Seattle offered the information that, with current technology, you could now burn CDs from videotapes at halftime and use them during the game.
"They obviously had some value within the game," said Paolantonio, in Manhattan at the still-delayed news conference. Wingo succumbed as well, echoing Carter's Super Bowl theory: "We would be naive to think (Belichick) did not tape the Super Bowl." In the realm of speculation, however, it is an anchor's job to remain neutral, even at the expense of seeming naive. When the Goodell news conference finally, mercifully started, the first question posed was whether Walsh had said anything about the Patriots' use of tapes during games.
"He was very specific that the tape remained in his possession the entire game," Goodell said, "and that they were not used during games."
Never mind.
When the special continued after the news conference, Carter and Schlereth still spoke with impassioned conviction about the game-changing, Super Bowl-changing use of tapes during games. On the 4 p.m. "NFL Live" show, Schlereth's last words on the subject were, "There is an asterisk by this football team for the rest of history."
At 5:30 p.m. on "PTI," hosts Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser had 90 seconds to sum up their reactions to the day's Spygate news. Wilbon called it "the final and bogus chapter" of the "absurdly hyped" Spygate story. Kornheiser said, "This was nothing!" Ninety minutes of one opinion, 90 seconds of another. That was the balance.
More: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=schreiber_leanne&id=3438752
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