The Manning mini-cycle
On Sept. 9, Giants quarterback Eli Manning suffered a shoulder injury in the last quarter of the season opener against the Cowboys. The next day on "Monday Night Countdown," Chris Mortensen reported on the severity of the injury, saying, "There are two sides to this story." The Giants and Eli Manning were saying that the injury was minor, a contusion, and that Eli was likely to start the next Sunday. Mortensen's sources, however, said that it was a separated shoulder and that Manning would be out for at least a month. Mortensen stood behind his unnamed sources. ESPN stood behind Mortensen. Manning's medical status became "a controversy" in news stories throughout the week.
Mortensen, a veteran reporter with an impressive track record of being first and being right, had fallen into the opinion trap. Rather than reporting a divergence of medical opinion, which time and further assessment would clarify, Mortensen created a controversy with two sides that required stance taking. To his credit, when Manning was back in the pocket within a week, Mortensen went back on "Monday Night Countdown" to discuss how he had gotten it wrong. ESPN.com acknowledged the mistake forthrightly. Vince Doria, ESPN's senior vice president and director of news, issued a memo on how to handle injury reports properly in the future. A lesson was learned or, more exactly, remembered.
There are a lot of prices to pay for opinion-driven sports journalism -- capriciously tarnished reputations and careers, close-mouthed athletes and coaches protecting themselves by letting only the occasional bland cliché slip past their lips, fan rage at the media and, last but not least, the diversion of resources and reward from news reporting, which gradually undermines the very practice of journalism at its best.
Evolution
With these concerns in mind, I spoke with Norby Williamson, ESPN executive vice president of production, about two new ESPN initiatives -- the launch of "E:60," a weekly prime-time one-hour newsmagazine that will air for the first time Oct. 16, and the recently announced formation of an enterprise unit to coordinate investigative and long-form reporting projects across all ESPN's platforms.
Did this, I asked, represent a course correction?
"It's a refocusing of resources," Williamson said, "but it would be a mischaracterization for anyone to say ESPN feels like they have a journalism problem so now they are going to refocus. I think of it as the next evolution of the brand."
He talked about two previous evolutions.
"One was in the late '80s, when 'SportsCenter' evolved from scores and highlights to a news-gathering operation with reporting," Williamson said. "Then, in the early 2000s, we evolved 'SportsCenter' and news overall to inject debate, informed opinion, the things you have concern over. And I think if you look at our growth -- in terms of households, ratings, digital, radio -- we hit on something there. The challenge for us now is not to say the model we have now will be the model that continues to fuel us for the next two, three, five, 10 years.
"Opinion/debate will always be a key element," Williamson continued, "because it's sports, and I believe at the heart that's what people want and demand. But the question I have now is how dominant is that going to continue to be in driving the business? I don't know the answer to that, to be honest with you."
That puts the burden back on viewers and readers, who can vote with their remotes and clicks. My vote on opinion-driven journalism is in. If anyone thinks the point of this column is that we should all be nicer, that is not it. I hope ESPN hits the issues hard with reporting. Let opinion, however heated, arise from that.
Once again, E! SPN gets the national attention they crave, but gets the story wrong.
