I was watching the “Mike & Mike Show” on ESPN 2 the
other day and one of the co-hosts, Mike Greenberg, was responding to a
complaint on social media about that day’s topic – Tim Tebow’s announcement to
attempt to play professional baseball.
Now, I’m not one to make a huge deal about a television
station’s decisions on which topics they want to discuss during a talk show. It
has always been my opinion that those talk shows that don’t focus on relative
and interesting topics aren’t going to be very popular anyway, and they will
eventually go away due to the inevitable bad ratings.
What stood out to me on this particular show was the reason Greenberg
gave for talking about Tebow’s decision as the lead story. He said it was a
“trending topic” on social media and that made it relevant.
Sorry, ESPN, but I’m not buying it.
The thing is, ESPN has grown into a sports broadcast
industry leader. They have broadcast rights to almost all the major events and
sports and they are undoubtedly the leading sports broadcast network. The
problem I have with Greenberg’s statement is that he tries to convince us that
we are idiots.
It is not a coincidence that the “trending topics” on social
media tend to match up with the lead stories on ESPN. Sometimes it is obvious
such as when Kevin Durant announced on July 4th that he was going to
Cali. It wasn’t surprising that Joey Chestnut’s hot dog-eating feats weren’t
the lead story that night and the next morning on ESPN. Some stories don’t need
a lead.
But on this particular day, any story from the Olympics
would have trumped the story of a former NFL player and current broadcaster
attempting to play baseball. Everything Tim Tebow does is not worthy of a
trending topic on its own. Most people couldn’t even tell you what his role as
a broadcaster is or who it is that he works for.
No, ESPN, this time you got called out for driving the news
in the direction that best fit your ability to get guests to talk about it and
to fill space. Apparently the Olympics weren’t appealing enough to draw in the
numbers and we had grown somewhat tired of talking about basketball. This time,
ESPN blew it. They attempted to get into the business of public relations and
as it turns out, they just aren’t very good at it.
Is ESPN powerful to drive tending topics? Yes. Does ESPN
deserve the benefit of the doubt when it comes to attempting to tell us what is
and isn’t news? Definitely not. Shame on Mike Greenberg or whoever it was
attempting to pull his strings. Don’t shove a non-story down my throat and
pretend like it is more than it is. There are enough stories out there that
industry leaders shouldn’t have to make them up.
No comments:
Post a Comment