When ESPN was founded in 1979, it was considered a bold experiment. Today it is a media conglomerate unto itself, with a web of TV networks ranging from ESPNEWS to ESPN Classic, a radio operation with about 300 full-time affiliates, a potent online presence, and a magazine that is pushing 2 million in circulation. (The network says that up to 88 million people a month watch its signature news show, SportsCenter.)
In the Boston radio market, the big commercial success story has been sports talk station WEEI. In a recent Globe piece noting that the station has led the ratings in the crucial 25–54 demographic for seven of the past eight quarters, Talkers magazine publisher Michael Harrison described those numbers as “nothing short of phenomenal.”
In the minds of media executives, there may be a spoken — or even unspoken — fear of killing that golden goose with the kind of tough reporting and unforgiving scrutiny that could turn off fans.
Some experts acknowledge that the sports-addicted public may not have much of an appetite for digesting serious — meaning unflattering — news about its favorite teams and players.
John Nicholson teaches television sports reporting at Syracuse University, where such famous sportscasters as Sean McDonough, Marv Albert, and Bob Costas were once enrolled. There is no investigative sports-reporting class at Syracuse. Says Nicholson, “The business of broadcasting is the business of making money. I don’t know that many people that would watch” serious sports TV journalism.
Shorr voices a similar, if debatable, thesis: “The public wants one of two things ... They want to see Barry Bonds hit home runs ... and they don’t care whether he’s taking steroids or not.”
Jeffrey Marx won a 1986 Pulitzer Prize at the Lexington Herald-Leader after a grinding investigation that uncovered cash payoffs to University of Kentucky basketball players. Despite that achievement, Marx — who was a business staffer brought in to work on the story with a Washington reporter — describes the public’s reaction to the expose as “overwhelmingly negative,” with only “pockets of positivity.” According to the paper’s projects editor, citizen reaction included a bomb threat and shots fired at the pressroom.
In Olney’s Saturday Times column, he explains that a decade ago, he once asked a prominent player if he was using steroids. When Olney received the requisite denial, he wrote, “I didn’t print a word about the exchange. I had no proof.”
As in the case of Olney, sports journalistsinsist that a large obstacle to investigative reporting is the inherent difficulty of nailing down sources and confirmation.
“There are plenty of things we ‘know,’ but we haven’t reached a standard [that allows us] to put it on the air,” says Vince Doria, the former Globe sports editor who is now director of news at ESPN.
Doria recalls the internal conversations at the Globe in the late ’80s when the lurid details of Wade Boggs’s relationship with mistress Margo Adams surfaced — some of them in the pages of Penthouse magazine.
