The Power of ESPN

Colin Murnan

colin.murnan@gmail.com

 

There's perhaps no greater power in the sports television world than ESPN, who has dominated the industry for years. Only recently has a common rival begun to rise as competition - the Fox child, FS1. 

For years, ESPN has instilled the strategy of many other gigantic corporations: buying up all rival competition before it starts to infringe on their revenue. 

As Richard Sandomir, James Andrew Miller, and Steve Eder write in their New York Times article, "ESPN's business strategy has been to aggressively buy the rights to as much programming as possible for as long as it can impede the growth of rivals, including Fox and sports channels owned by NBC and CBS."

In the early to mid-2000s, ESPN almost seemed to have too much money to know what to do with, as they bought up a plethora of college football games without the ability to broadcast them all. Many of them weren't aired merely because ESPN didn't televise them and no one else could. When they started to get heat from the Department of Justice, ESPN had a simple solution - make a new channel called ESPNU where all the games could be shown. 

Picture source: https://www.espn.com/

When a network gets this powerful, it's important to look at the ways in which money and growth affect journalistic integrities, and how conflicts of interest can get skewed by the almighty dollar. 

The more you look into ESPN's dealings, the more twisted and convoluted the money trail becomes. You become caught up in a web of dollars and contracts and start to question how this network really functions with any integrity at all. It should be noted that none of this seems overly insidious, but it does represent an example of a massive corporation wielding power and money with huge consequences. 

Dean Starkman's article in the Columbia Journalism Review details it nicely. "If ESPN chooses to televise something, that thing gains while untelevised rivals suffer in the competition for dollars and students. That puts ESPN the network in a unique position of powerbroker, to the point that it can help set game times, schedules, and even influence which college conferences live and which die."

The multi-billion-dollar contract with the NFL shows one of the difficulties in reporting when it comes to sensitive topics such as CTE. 

Maybe the real question, then, is not whether ESPN has a conflict of interest (it has many), but whether ESPN is regarded as a sincere, honest, truth-finding journalistic institution, or rather merely a just a launching pad for sports.