I'm more interested in hearing how ESPN's MR people came up with the idea that scandal, no matter how sensationalized and manufactured, would be the key to attracting more women? No doubt you'd need a strong line up to compete with Days Of Our Lives and Oprah.
Look, this isn't brain surgery. Sports programmers play up human interest themes to attract female viewers. ESPN admitted this openly when they launched "Playmakers" a few years back -- they were trying to teach women to be football fans by introducing them to the sport via a serialized, soap-opera style drama fueled by controversial themes. If you think it's an accident that that show's storyboards read like an issue of Us Weekly -- centered around infidelity, drug use, sexual identity issues and so on -- fine. Or you can take the company at its word when it said it used shows like Playmakers to try to bring in more casual female viewers. ESPN's NFL broadcasts for years have attracted higher percentages of female viewers than Fox, NBC or CBS, and that's because they work hard at that crap. And while I'm sure there was no prime directive ordering Sportscenter to hammer Bill Belichick in order to drive up female audiences, it's just basic common sense in the media business -- where I happen to work -- that you expand your audiences by hooking readers/viewers on sensational storylines. TV is always looking to create heroes, villains and black-hat/white-hat psychodramas out of news stories. Is this really so hard to understand? Are you really going to argue that TV programmers don't try to attract new viewers by sensationalizing their news content?
Oh, yeah, and by the way, I am a Patriots fan, and have been my whole life. I'm also a fan of the Celtics and Red Sox. Call me a troll if you like but I'm sick of hearing so-called "fans" whine about how the media is ganging up on them, like there's some kind of conspiracy or something. I mean OBVIOUSLY Tom Jackson has a problem with the Patriots -- that dates back to the pregame show before an Eagles game years ago when he said that the Pats "hate their coach," a statement which caused Belichick to completely blackball ESPN for the rest of the season. But Tom Jackson is one guy and he's entitled to his opinion, just like Bill Simmons is entitled to his.
And just to be clear, I could care less about ESPN. They're a giant, ruthless, completely amoral media company owned by an even bigger and more amoral company in Disney. They were totally wrong about Spygate and a lot of their reporting was irresponsible. But they didn't do it because they have an "anti-Patriots agenda." They did it because they could. It was a sports story that became a breaking, crossover news story that probably scored them tons of new viewers and they always hammer those to death. They didn't go after Barry Bonds because they hate the Giants. They didn't cover the Clemens steroids/infidelity story because they hate the Yankees or the Astros. They did it just because they're a bunch of money-grubbing media creeps and that's what they do.
My problem is with these fans who think part of supporting their team is whining every single day about how the rest of the world hates them so much. Even today, you had people on this board getting on ESPN for reporting the story about the Rams complaining about the officiating, about how this was a "wet dream" for ESPN. I mean, come on! Listen to yourselves! If some Chiefs fan said to you that Larry Johnson getting busted for hitting women was a "wet dream" for ESPN, you'd think he was crazy, wouldn't you? If a Knicks fan said he thought ESPN just couldn't wait to report the news about Isiah's overdose, that that was just a stroke of luck for the anti-Knicks crowd at ESPN, you'd think he was nuts, wouldn't you? Right?
