A few weeks back, The New York Times ran a story about what they called a “sports tax”, which basically boils down to this:
But ESPN is also far costlier than any other channel, earning about $4.69 a month for each cable and satellite household in the United States, according to the research firm SNL Kagan. Next year the firm expects ESPN to cross the $5 a month threshold for the first time (the next highest is TNT, at $1.16 this year).
Every household in the country that pays for television service also pays for channels that they don’t ever watch. ESPN though, is the only one that’s so expensive that it could qualify as its own line item on your bill, which is why the Times basically felt it was okay to use the word “sports” as a synonym for “ESPN”.
Five dollars a month isn’t nothing, especially at the low end of the economic ladder, but it’s a minor cost overall. But the culture of sports is something that people spend a lot of time and thought on, something that affects pretty much everyone directly or indirectly to the equivalent of a lot more than a fiver per month. ESPN is more than a pricy channel, it’s a private company that enjoys an unparalleled primacy over the sprawling and complicated public pastime known as “sports”. And in terms of culture rather than cash, ESPN is practically a monopoly.
ESPN, which began as merely a cable channel, is now a gargantuan attention machine that will use anything that can vaguely be described as athletic competition to generate revenue. Beyond that, they’ve taken the art of talking about sports to new heights. In these days of hour long pregame shows and endless afternoon gab fests that seems as natural as can be, but it was once considered nuts.
People watched sports, why would they want to watch other people just talk about sports? But it turns out that a lot of people do want to watch others talk about sports. It’s the “soap opera for men” idea that’s kept professional wrestling going all these years applied to non-scripted events. There’s drama, revenge and redemption; old friends falling out or competing against one another.
They’ve made sports as much about personalities as it is about points, and in the meantime have made themselves into the indispensible conduit for both. That in turn means that they’ve done something more impressive than simply pile up an all but uncountable stack of money. (Though they’ve done that too). It means that they’ve constructed an unending fountain of cash, of which that $5 per household head tax they’ve levied on the entire country is just one component.
However financially impressive that achievement, it does raise two troubling and ongoing problems. The first is the obvious conflict of interest in both covering and promoting the same subjects. The second is the inevitable question of what does and doesn’t get coverage, and the implications that has for both sports and for culture more generally.
The most spectacular recent instance of the first remains last year’s “The Decision”, an unwittingly voyeuristic display of ego stoking crassness on the part of both its subject and its producers that is unlikely to be equaled any time soon. But incidents of lesser visibility happen all the time, and they’re the primary reason ESPN goes through ombudsmen at such an astonishingly fast clip that earlier this year they elected to outsource the entire fig leaf production department to a Florida non-profit precisely no one cares about. This is what happens when an institution plays at journalism while paying its bills courtesy of its own subjects. Remember, once upon a time legitimate news organizations had a strict rule about not paying for stories. Well, all ESPN does is pay for stories, which makes it, in effect, the world’s largest tabloid.
The second problem is related to the first, but more troubling in its long term implications. Not only does ESPN have enormous influence over who and what gets coverage, but they’re in bed financially with basically all of them. In the short run that means giving fluff coverage or simply ignoring unflattering stories about systemic stories. (Hello NFL and concussions!) In the longer run though, it means ESPN has a billion dollar plus financial investment in the success of certain leagues and sports at the expense of others.
Eighty years ago, boxing and horse racing were American sports royalty. Today boxing is a niche sport and horse racing is the exclusive provenance of silly rich people who like to get dressed up and drink together. Both faded from the scene for a variety of reasons, but neither of them had an ally as powerful as ESPN to prop them up when the public began to yawn.
That’s a very worrisome long term effect because it cuts both ways. ESPN not only pays for and promotes sports that are profitable, but sports that are profitable to ESPN. To take just two recent examples, the last fifteen years or so have seen the rise of both mixed martial arts and Major League Soccer from nothing into endeavors that are profitable and self sustaining. But both have received only minimal attention from the self proclaimed world wide leader in sports. That’s a problem, because any new sport isn’t necessarily in ESPN’s interest if it has the potential to cut into existing ones.
By so dominating “sports”, ESPN has accrued to itself the power of cultural arbiter that used to be diffused across the entire country, from local papers and television stations to simple conversations about what matters when two people are shooting the shit. That is an enormous change, akin to replacing the relatively freewheeling culture of books with the top down monoculture of television or movies, and it’s happened virtually without public comment or notice.
ESPN star Bill Simmons has joked on occasion that he’d like to be made “sports czar” or some such, and it’s kinda funny. But in effect ESPN already is the sports czar. They dictate which opinions and stories get the most play, which sports are deemed important, and, just as importantly, which ones don’t and aren’t. Given the importance we place on sports, that’s an awful lot of power for a single group of people. At the moment it doesn’t show any signs of abating, but it’s worth keeping an eye on, and it’s worth remembering that what’s good for ESPN isn’t necessarily good for sports. The two aren’t actually synonyms.
