Thank Goodness for ESPN’s ombudsman, LeAnne Schrieber. She has the courage to be the voice of the Great American Sports fan (much like Steve Czaban).
Here is one of her latest articles, discussing how deeply offended we get when ABC sitcom and drama highnlights show up in Top Ten Lists.
Transparency Alert! The anchor has no clothes!
From the piece:
When everything on ESPN points us toward something else on ESPN, as it so often and relentlessly does, viewers (or is it just me?) start feeling trapped in the sports equivalent of “The Truman Show,” a claustrophobic bubble world that substitutes its limited contours for the whole of external reality. But for 17 days, the Olympics punched holes in the false horizon, letting us glimpse sports as if they had an existence independent of ESPN. (Seeing Phelps in his first “SportsCenter” commercial, I thought, “Oh no, swim away before you run out of oxygen.”) If my allergic response to cross-promotion were only a product of ombudsman’s overdose, I would have no business raising the issue here, but there is plenty of evidence I am not the lone sufferer. “We do carpet bomb you with information about what you can see here,” said Vince Doria, ESPN senior vice president and director of news. “And we’ve got the reputation, in part from newspaper critics, of being the big bad TV guys that want to capture your mind and tell you what to do and when to watch and where to go — go over to dot-com now, go to radio now, go buy the magazine and then come back here, we got four networks; wait a minute, radio’s on, go back there.”
Trust me: nobody likes the knucklehead, know-it-all sports fan ESPN tries to breed. Just think of the idiot in those “Yeah, I’d say all that makes calvin Johnson next.” Thank God they didn’t do “Who’s Now,” thing single most hated ESPN piece of garbage. Continuing:
“The problem might not be cross-promotion itself, which does have its uses for viewers, but a degree of multiplatform corporate synergy that often feels so relentless and all-encompassing that ESPN’s heaviest viewers go berserk from time to time. Often, what drives a viewer over the edge is some slight, gratuitous bit of corporate promotion that the viewer can’t imagine being of use to anybody — such as the “Wipeout” highlight — but “Wipeout” rage is just a last straw reaction to a chronic condition. The chronic condition is rights-driven programming. The endlessly swirling synergy of events programming continuously reinforced by pre- and post-event shows, by preseason and postseason shows, by news shows that cover those events and by opinion shows that derive their topics from those events is a business model both extremely effective and extremely transparent. Call it cross-promotion or synergy or just serving the fan to surfeit, ESPN’s self-reinforcing practices have the effect of implanting ESPN’s business interests — especially the recouping of rights fees — too much at the forefront of too many viewers’ minds. And that awareness can drain the fun out of sports. ESPN has been so successful at building a better fantrap that viewers who look to sports for escape now often tell me they need to escape ESPN to enjoy sports.”
Folks, I think LeAnne has found herself a candidate for a Jazzy Award…
