ESPN reaches for credibility on LeBron James story, but it’s too late
By Dan Le Batard / McClatchy Newspapers
Sunday, August 1, 2010
MIAMI - Because the blurry lines between sports and entertainment and journalism keep shifting, and because how we chronicle our athletes has evolved at the same bigger-stronger-faster rate as athletes themselves, and because the Internet and Twitter and cell phone cameras have forever changed the speed of the news game, you actually had the following happen last week:
One of ESPN’s many tentacles published a story about LeBron James ... and then it didn’t.
And, because mighty and messy ESPN is seen in some circles as the foulest four-letter word in the sports lexicon, the spiking of that story became more interesting than the story itself.
Seems that, without properly identifying himself as a reporter, an ESPN.com writer made his way into a Las Vegas nightclub with James that included dinner and a club. I’d like to say the story was totally benign, but nothing that involves a King, a flying waiter dressed as Peter Pan, and two nude women in a nightclub bathtub filled with rose petals can accurately be described that way. Hey, it’s Vegas. The only real surprise here is that there weren’t more nude women in that club tub.
Point is, James didn’t do or say anything wrong, or even unusual. The writer just wrote about the swirl of madness around a sports star, a swirl that wouldn’t have been a lot different for any rich VIP in that club, but that somehow passes for inside intimacy in The Fake-Reality-TV Generation because there is so much protective packaging fraudulence around celebrity. One of the most shocking things about James’ shocking "Decision" is that we all learned together, in one televised hour, that he wasn’t quite as polished as all those commercials made him seem. He just looked, understandably, like a scared 25-year-old.
Last week’s ESPN.com article was voyeurism, not journalism. It wasn’t meant to be investigative. And Journalism 101 tells you that, in that kind of piece, a credible news outlet doesn’t quote a subject who doesn’t know he’s being quoted by a journalist. Write what you see about a public figure in a public place, but you can’t quote him if he doesn’t know he’s being quoted.
Spiking the story got ESPN undressed, and what fell on the sports-media empire didn’t smell much like rose petals. ESPN, a journalism entity, accidentally gave off the scent of protecting James from bad publicity. But when you have drawn nearly 10 million viewers by doing a recent infomercial with James, perception drowns reality, circumstantial evidence and cynicism merging to choke credibility. No matter how fair your intent, nobody is going to hear or believe "We weren’t in bed together!" when they already have watched you so recently star in porn.
ESPN made the correct ethical decision in spiking that story, but did so using an outdated journalism ideal that the marketplace has pushed to the cusp of extinction. It’s a newspaper’s standard, actually, but those newspapers are wheezing in the frenzied race to keep up because things move too fast now for today’s business plan to be throwing yesterday’s news on your front lawn (or asking you to buy in print what we give you online for free). It’s like a single typewriter trying to keep up with all of Twitter. Anyone with a camera now is a reporter, if not a journalist, and the pressure to be immediate keeps encroaching upon the duty to be fair and right.
ESPN’s content is run by a lot of former newspaper legends who have been making these decisions for a long time, but journalism is so slippery and subjective and shifting now that a giant as unwieldy as ESPN is guaranteed to fall in it sometimes. Of course, journalists should identify themselves. That’s pretty basic. But ESPN didn’t apply that standard when publishing damaging photos of a drunk Josh Hamilton that weren’t taken by an identified journalist. And ESPN didn’t apply that standard when leading SportsCenter with video of a drunk Jerry Jones ripping Bill Parcells into a cell phone camera that didn’t belong to an identified journalist.
So, of course, ESPN is going to look like it is protecting James here, even though it isn’t, even though there’s nothing damaging here to protect him from, and certainly not at the risk of a news company’s integrity. But it is hard to get that argument heard as ESPN sells its own product with minute-long and hourlong commercials featuring, um, LeBron James.
That kind of inconsistency hurts credibility, and gives birth to conspiracy theories, but difficult journalism decisions aren’t made flippantly by one bearded wise man in a white robe holding a scepter (he actually has just a mustache, and prefers to work in the nude). ESPN is a sprawling empire. No media company dominates its niche like this one. The giant trips over thousands of feet sometimes because no one can possibly oversee this much product. Questionable, inconsistent decisions happen because different people decide different things about similar stories. Maybe one choice is made by a print guy, one by a TV head, one by radio, one by Internet, one by magazine, one by marketing, and one by the jolly and rotund mascot for the Syracuse Orange.
Internet middlemen published the original ESPN.com story; it got spiked upon arriving at higher management applying more journalism. But, fairly or unfairly, those management types are also perceived as having more interest in protecting James. And you can’t complain about that perception when you do commercials with him.
The irony here is that, in reaching for fairness, ESPN created exactly the opposite impression. The mistake happened in trying to do better, be better. The easier path, the less-criticized one, would have just been to let the story be, but this is how things get distorted with fame and size, and it is good that ESPN feels the same unforgiving scorch it applies to the people it covers.
Let’s be transparent, though. Objectivity is a lie, an illusion. All humans can do is aspire to it. We all have our biases. A journalism entity can’t give off the scent it is being objective a subjective amount of the time, only when convenient, without harming its reputation, but you ought to know that my entire business is built atop a mountain of conflicts.
All traditional journalists are partners with teams and leagues in some way. We eat their food and accept their free bags and bask in their glow and get paid to write and talk about their business.
ESPN partners with leagues while also questioning players, teams and leagues. Partnering to air games is an inherent conflict, but it’s also what ESPN does best. Those games drive cable fees because you’ll scream if your TV provider dumps ESPN. That gives ESPN pricing pressure, and these partnerships make ESPN a financial behemoth. And being on ESPN helps leagues, though football and baseball are trying to break free of reliance by creating their own networks.
This isn’t just journalism, clean and unconflicted; it’s the journalism business.
And this kind of giant should be scrutinized. It’s our main source for sports news, bigger than all sports it covers. It’s natural that we form opinions on its actions on and off the field like we do with athletes. Doesn’t help the perception of conflict, though, that ESPN has turned so many sportswriters like me into programming, appearing to buy so many of the watchdogs with a little sugar. That’s not why they hired us, but TV is about how things look, and the appearance is enough to raise credibility questions. I can’t complain too much about being seen as a cartoon when some paychecks also have Disney’s name.
Should ESPN have declined to make "The Decision" with James? In a perfect world, yes. But the network that rejects 10 million viewers on a moral stand is the network that loses to one that doesn’t. CBS - morally, journalistically - declined to interview Tiger Woods after his scandal because he put a time limit on questions. What did that get the network other than fewer eyes than all the other entities that didn’t care? Expecting morality in this new muddled environment is like turning on TMZ’s TV show and expecting the kid reporters to still be wearing old-timey fedoras that read "Press."
But here’s how much the landscape has changed, and how fast credibility erodes in my business: ESPN, Newsday and Stephen A. Smith reported early that James was coming to Miami.
A few years ago, that would have been enough to make it so. Three viable news entities reporting the same news made it fact, period. And yet, somehow nobody believed a syllable until they heard it from James.
James, a King, partnered with ESPN, a giant, to damage both kingdoms - and that’s the trade when journalism and business get in bed and televise their pleasure for our voyeuristic joy.
Remember, the "E" in "ESPN," an "E" that comes before even the "S" in "Sports," always stands for Entertainment.
And it is, in every sense of the word, capitalized.
Wish Ferry and Co. realized that from day1. Things may be a lot different here.
