The Sports Media Thread

[Digby]

1 hour ago, Red Comet said:

Ask Drew Ortiz at Sports Illustrated. If anything, encouraging diversification of skills of workers in at-risk fields of being taken over by AI is more relevant now than in 2017.

 

It is funny to me that "learn to code!" is still being shouted (with schadenfreude, and with dubious faith) at a time when, as you surely know, the bottom has fallen out in tech, without any real sign of turning around. Everyone DID learn to code during the Covid recession and now the job market's oversupplied, even if you're senior. If anything, the makework of mid-level management in comms is a safer bet for an ex-journalist, because there always seems to be a need for more publicists, somehow.

 

Never mind coding, way more important to learn organizing right now. And maybe the trades.

[ManillaToad]

1 hour ago, Cujo said:

headdresses at KC games.

 

headdress at LV game*

[Cujo]

  

16 minutes ago, ManillaToad said:

2 hours ago, Cujo said:

headdresses at KC games.

 

headdress at LV game*

 

**Headdresses at KANSAS CITY CHIEFS GAMES.

[ManillaToad]

headdress at Arrowhead West*

[Red Comet]

3 hours ago, SFGiants58 said:

I just feel like sic-ing the online army on people is in bad taste after 07/30/2021. Those who know that date know what I’m talking about.

 

Did you have to cite a site called RetroMothership for that image, lol?

[TrueYankee26]

Brad nessler signing off on SEC on CBS

 

 

 

[The_Admiral]

Ethan Strauss wrote about the NFL taking Christmas away from the NBA:

 

Quote

Last year, the NFL flooded the zone with three Sunday Christmas games for the first time ever, roughly 5X’ing the NBA’s viewership. This year, the NFL flooded again with three Monday Christmas games, roughly 10X’ing basketball’s viewership. Or, as Sports Media Watch put it, “NBA Christmas viewership sacked by NFL.”

 

. . .

 

In 2015, 11.17 million people tuned in to watch Steph Curry’s Warriors play LeBron James’ Cavs. Why am I highlighting this? Mostly because that Christmas happened on a Friday, with no competing NFL games slated. Also because the NBA getting 11.17 viewers on one network channel seems almost unthinkable right now (Lakers-Celtics led the NBA pack with 5 million in audience on Monday). If you identified Christmas of 2015 as the NBA’s post Jordan peak, I wouldn’t argue.

 

Since this point, the NFL, once deferential to the NBA’s turf when Christmas fell on a weekday, has started to encroach on basketball. Why the change? First, because the NBA started to weaken, ceasing to produce eight figure marquee games on Christmas. After interest in the NBA dropped, the NFL was less worried about scheduling games against it.

Second, because, back in 2020, Nielsen started smoothing in Out of Home viewing (OOH) to its overall audience numbers.

 

. . .

 

The NBA was certainly thankful for the newly juiced numbers as it attempted to rebound from reports of lost audience share. Unfortunately for the league, in an odd twist of fate, the inflated counting they craved came at the cost of their premier regular season event. Two decades of branding NBA Christmas is now down the drain, largely because of a quirky Nielsen reform.

 

Interesting stuff about the vagaries of "out-of-home viewing." Feels like an easy way to fudge numbers, sort of like how the NHL started pushing "tickets distributed."

[Cujo]

Q: So tell me why the McAfee Show is on ESPN again?

 

Days after his show started that Rodgers/Kimmel fiasco (which I's sure ESPN/Disney was loving), he goes on-air to call an ESPN VP a "rat".

 

 

[pmoehrin]

13 minutes ago, Cujo said:

Q: So tell me why the McAfee Show is on ESPN again?

 

Days after his show started that Rodgers/Kimmel fiasco (which I's sure ESPN/Disney was loving), he goes on-air to call an ESPN VP a "rat".

 

 

 

I don't know.

My experience has been if you call out an executive at your company for having it in for you, you might as well start packing up your desk right then and there. Especially if it's someone who's been there for over 30 years, and you've been there all of five minutes by comparison.

Even if they weren't actively looking for a reason to get rid of you before, they sure are now.

 

Maybe McAfee thinks he's untouchable. Maybe he is. But we're still in the F around part. The find out part will be coming in the next week or so, I'm sure.

[The_Admiral]

There is literally no precedent for a media personality calling out his boss on the air. No one has ever done this before. This is not normal. Anyway, Jim Spanfeller is a herb.

[The_Admiral]

ESPN has a long history of palace intrigue between meddling executives and on-air talent that has captivated media observers for years, only this time the on-air talent used to work for Dave Portnoy, sworn enemy of all good people, so now everyone is acting like this is a capital offense and not, I dunno, the same gimmick Howard Stern worked with Mel Karmazin and Pig Virus all those years. And yeah, whatever Mcafee is saying about "some people not wanting him on the air" or whatever is absolutely true. I think there are a lot of people who are very upset that this guy stormed the castle and prevented ESPN from just being Mina Kimes and Bomani Jones making inside jokes to each other for eight hours a day. Maybe Norby Williamson is trying to sneakily engineer McAfee's demise, or maybe it's a worked shoot to get more attention and take the heat off the Jimmy Kimmel thing. Either way, not worth the pearl-clutching; ESPN executives suck.

[GDAWG]

Apparently Norby Williamson disrespected the late Stuart Scott back in the day and he was the reason LeBatard left ESPN.  

 

Odds are that Dan Patrick and Rich Eisen will not bring this up.  If they do though and they don't say nice things about Norby Williamson, it won't be a good look for Williamson or ESPN.  

[The_Admiral]

And yet I'm sure it would have been perfectly acceptable if Le Batard had trashed Norby Williamson on the air, because Le Batard is in good standing as a right-thinking member of the media class and Pat McAfee is not.

[MJWalker45]

JD: "Where do you think we are"?

 

[Cujo]

14 minutes ago, MJWalker45 said:

 

Is Al Michaels in charge of the graphics department?

[Cujo]

After another crazy rant about Kimmel and covid, McAfee has thrown Kaaron off his show.

 

[pmoehrin]

Pat lost some capital with me with how he handled this. Not that I had a strong opinion of him either way before any of this went down, but he could and should have shut this before effectively being told to. I still don't hate him, but I did lose some respect for him.

 

If you want Aaron Rodgers to talk sports on the show, that's fine. ESPN is a sports network, and that's what they should be focused on. They shouldn't be discriminating against who they have on their network based on political beliefs.

 

But when you start moving outside that lane, and it's not contributing to any meaningful conversation in a constructive way. And you're a national television network? Regardless of whether I'm watching that show or not, I got a problem with that.

 

I'm not saying ESPN couldn't or shouldn't ever talk about social issues. It's inherently engrained into everything. But it should be through the lens of sports. Jimmy Kimmel and what's going on with the fallout over Jeffrey Epstein has nothing to do with anything sports-related. At all. And that's not the only issue at play here.

 

I have family members who took demonstrably false information at face value, and it cost them their lives. That's why it's personal for me. That's where my anger over this comes from, and I direct as much of it as I can at the people I hold responsible for spreading that garbage. Aaron Rodgers is one of the names on that list. He ain't at the top, but he's there.

 

With McAfee, I hope that he learned some lessons here and that this is the worst thing that ever comes out of his show during his tenure at ESPN. I still don't have any ill will towards him. I'm just disappointed because I thought he was better than this.

[BBTV]

5 hours ago, Cujo said:

After another crazy rant about Kimmel and covid, McAfee has thrown Kaaron off his show.

 

 

cannot get that video to play in any browser on any machine.

[The_Admiral]

3 hours ago, pmoehrin said:

If you want Aaron Rodgers to talk sports on the show, that's fine. ESPN is a sports network, and that's what they should be focused on. They shouldn't be discriminating against who they have on their network based on political beliefs.

 

But when you start moving outside that lane, and it's not contributing to any meaningful conversation in a constructive way. And you're a national television network? Regardless of whether I'm watching that show or not, I got a problem with that.

 

I'm not saying ESPN couldn't or shouldn't ever talk about social issues. It's inherently engrained into everything. But it should be through the lens of sports. Jimmy Kimmel and what's going on with the fallout over Jeffrey Epstein has nothing to do with anything sports-related. At all. And that's not the only issue at play here.

 

What I've taken from this whole situation is that there are three different visions for ESPN that are at war with one another here, but all of them seem to be bad, or at least not particularly good.

 

The first is the allegedly enlightened era of the channel as ushered in by Dan Le Batard and his friends, based on deconstructing the entire concept of "sports talk" and reimagining it as an infinitely self-referential Show About Nothing that could also pivot to a  battlefield for the greater culture war, but anything but simply talking about the ol' sporpsball. This content is created by people who attended expensive schools for the benefit of others who also attended expensive schools and any other attention is incidental.

 

The second is what normal, non-media-savvy people want it to be, which is basically Barstool as embodied by McAfee and his band of doofuses: bro talk, loud arguments, and lots and lots of gambling. Barstool is ascendant while ESPN loses relevance by the billing cycle, so it only makes sense. However, it's anathema to the overamplified media class and they want to destroy it the only way their people know how to do anything anymore, which is by appealing to a powerful central authority/adjudicator--in sports terms, working the refs. Barstool itself was almost on the network until journalists successfully worked the refs, and now they have this ersatz Barstool to get rid of.

 

Then you have Disney/ESPN senior leadership as represented by Norby Williamson, who doesn't seem to care for either of the warring clans and would prefer to be rid of both. Nullifying both of these insufferable groups of people sounds good on its face until you realize what that would mean, which is 24 hours a day of Mike Greenberg. I think right now they're at like 15. This is not appealing to anyone except maybe Mike Greenberg. When you see the list of people who ran afoul of Norby Williamson--Jemele Hill, Dan Le Batard, Michelle Beadle, Bill Simmons, Dave Portnoy, Keith Olbermann, Bob Ley, Pat McAfee--the only conclusion you can draw is that he doesn't want anyone to do anything remotely interesting anywhere on the spectrum. I don't know what the right path is for ESPN, but it can't be one that disposes of that wide a cross-section of people.

 

Oh and by the way, Kimmel's business partner was Epstein's chef and head charm-offensive guy, so suspecting Reformed Blackface Comedian #603 landed on Little St. Jeff's was in no way unfounded and so pinning Rodgers with slander would be like catching a greased pig.

[MJWalker45]

https://theathletic.com/5193316/2024/01/11/espn-emmys-fake-names-college-gameday/

So apparently ESPN won several Emmys using false names, then handed them to their on-air personalities. 

 

"In March 2023, Shelley Smith, who worked 26 years as an on-air reporter for ESPN, received a call from Stephanie Druley, then the network’s head of studio and event production. Druley said she wanted to talk about something “serious” that needed to stay between the two of them, Smith recalled. She then told Smith that Smith needed to return two sports Emmy statuettes that she had been given more than a decade earlier.

That request was one of many ESPN made of some of its biggest stars last year after the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS), the organization that administers the Emmys, uncovered a scheme that the network used to acquire more than 30 of the coveted statuettes for on-air talent ineligible to receive them. Since at least 2010, ESPN inserted fake names in Emmy entries, then took the awards won by some of those imaginary individuals, had them re-engraved and gave them to on-air personalities.

Kirk Herbstreit, Lee Corso, Chris Fowler, Desmond Howard and Samantha Ponder, among others, were given the ill-gotten Emmys, according to a source briefed on the matter, who was granted anonymity because the individual is not authorized to discuss it publicly. There is no evidence that the on-air individuals were aware the Emmys given to them were improperly obtained.

“I think it was really crummy what they did to me and others,” said Smith, who worked at ESPN from 1997 until her contract expired last July.

The fraud was discovered by NATAS, which prompted an investigation by that organization and later by ESPN. Those probes resulted in sanctions beyond the return of the trophies. While it is not known who orchestrated the scheme, Craig Lazarus, vice president and executive producer of original content and features, and Lee Fitting, a senior vice president of production who oversaw “College GameDay” and other properties, were among the ESPN employees NATAS ruled ineligible from future participation in the Emmys.

In a statement, ESPN said: “Some members of our team were clearly wrong in submitting certain names that may go back to 1997 in Emmy categories where they were not eligible for recognition or statuettes. This was a misguided attempt to recognize on-air individuals who were important members of our production team. Once current leadership was made aware, we apologized to NATAS for violating guidelines and worked closely with them to completely overhaul our submission process to safeguard against anything like this happening again".