THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Friday, October 12, 2007

ESPN Ombusbman v ESPN

I don’t know who she is, but I like her already:

Fans… are sick and tired of being subjected to a relentless media onslaught of opinion that is simultaneously overheated and half-baked. Unfortunately, in a kind of sports Stockholm syndrome, many of them have learned to imitate the rhetorical belligerence of the media masters they resent.
... If you look at the proportion of airtime and cyberspace devoted to reporting fact versus delivering opinion on ESPN, ESPN.com and ESPN Radio, it is clear that the main function of sports news is to serve as the molehill on which mountains of opinion are built. We don’t have news cycles anymore. We have opinion cycles.