ESPN Has History of Having Conflicts of Interest

Dan Justik
dj204915@ohio.edu

When anyone talks about sports media, the first media organization for almost everybody is ESPN. Since ESPN was founded in 1979, they have become the number one place to go to when looking for anything involving sports.

No matter what sport, ESPN has usually been able to get stories. The company grew because of how thorough their reporting was, including the amount of sports that they would cover. But as the company grew and money became a bigger factor, things began to change for ESPN.

For most media networks, the best way to make money in the current landscape is to land a big TV deal with sports leagues. By owning the TV rights to a league, most viewers will have nowhere else to go to watch big games except for the network that owns the broadcasting rights to that league.

Over the years, ESPN has been able to land TV deals with many different sports leagues, including the NFL, NBA, the College Football Playoffs, the SEC (a conference of different colleges that are known for their strong football programs), and most recently, the UFC.

Image courtesy of UFC.com

As ESPN lands more of these TV deals, they begin to have conflicts of interest in what they report and how often they give air time to those leagues.

For example, ESPN has a large deal with ESPN. ESPN has the TV rights for Monday Night Football, which usually airs one of the biggest NFL games that week. With ESPN having rights to arguably the biggest sports league in the United States, they would not want to risk damaging the relationship.

The Huffington Post showed that back in 2013, ESPN backed out of a documentary that was explaining the NFL potentially covering head injuries. The belief is that ESPN backed out of the documentary because the NFL was not happy with the direction this documentary was going.

So instead of showing a report that could have sent shock waves through the NFL offices, ESPN backed out of the report in order to preserve its relationship with the NFL.

ESPN was so concerned that people believed the organization was full of conflicts of interest that they had one of their editors write about the reporting at ESPN and why there are no conflicts of interest in the organization.

No matter what the company says, there will always be the belief that the company is operating with some sort of conflict of interest. ESPN will decide to air or give attention to NFL or NBA games because they either have broadcast rights or attempting to acquire more broadcasting rights to that league.

Just a few years ago, ESPN had broadcasting rights to some NASCAR races. During that time, NASCAR would be a frequent conversation on any of the shows on ESPN's schedule. But once they lost those broadcast rights, NASCAR is hardly ever mentioned on ESPN.

Until ESPN decides to give more air time talking about sports and leagues that they do not have broadcasting rights to, the more people will believe there is some type of conflict of interest going on at ESPN.