ESPN has discarded brilliant journalism for squirts of memebrain swill

For a certain segment of American sports fans, all change is automatically bad – especially when it comes to their favourite shows. Minor tweaks to beloved theme songs, shuffles to commentary booths and analysis teams, new scoreboard graphics, even changes to the duration and placement of ad breaks: all of these can trigger days, sometimes even years, of volcanic debate. For a certain type of sporting masochist it’s possible to plug into corners of the online sportingverse that are still litigating, say, the chyrons from the 2010 NBA finals, or ESPN’s decision – originally made in 2011, reversed in 2017, then reinstated in 2020 – to cut ties with Hank Williams Jr and his legendary All My Rowdy Friends Are Here on Monday Night intro song for Monday Night Football.

The outrage prompted by the latest upheavals at ESPN certainly fits the pattern of involuntary fan resistance to change, but on closer inspection this is more than a case of a few disgruntled cable TV subscribers reenacting the “old man yells at cloud” meme. In August ESPN announced it was bringing on Katie Feeney, a recent Penn State graduate with 14 million followers across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat, to produce sports and lifestyle content – offering “a blend of on-site access, fashion, and culture”, as the press release put it – for the network’s main broadcasts and digital channels.

Feeney’s hiring is the latest move in ESPN’s drive to appeal to younger viewers, all those sewn-to-their-phones and (presumably) lifestyle content-hungry Gen Z and Gen Alpha hordes unenthused by the stuffier news-and-dad-banter offering of ESPN mainstays like SportsCenter and Pardon the Interruption. In 2020 the network brought on sporting influencer Omar Raja, founder of the House of Highlights, as a digital commentator, and its in-house “creator program”, a kind of year-long fellowship for promising young influencers that acts as a beachhead for ESPN into the burgeoning creator economy, is now in its third iteration.

On its surface, the new ESPN looks innocent enough, and the network is hardly alone in trying to get down with the kids and freshen its output with a spritz of youthful rizz: the NBA and other leagues have introduced creator programs, MLB has invested in the podcast network Jomboy Media, and Fox Sports is collaborating with Barstool Sports. (The founders of Jomboy and Barstool are hardly young – Dave Portnoy, for example, is in his late 40s – but the material these networks produce is designed to go big on social media and rope in younger fans.) On the one hand, this is just the way sports broadcasting operates now: what fans see on their screens emerges from a series of “partnerships” with off-the-shelf online brands and personalities, rather than reflecting something more innate and homegrown about the journalistic metabolism and personality of the network itself.

The output from influencers like Feeney and Raja, only a small fraction of which makes it to air on ESPN’s cable programming, is a mix of fan interviews, “crazy” scenes live from the tailgate, sideline clips that reveal nothing surprising from the sideline (the general tenor of which is, “The game is about to start!” or “Wow, can’t believe I’m here!”), get ready with me reels, behind the scenes footage of famous ESPN broadcasters standing around looking at their phones, and minute-long “hot takes” that are so thumpingly uninteresting they seem designed to instantly kill any debate. (“My hot take is that if your favorite teams aren’t all from the same city, you’re not a real fan” was a recent offering from Raja, to which the only reasonable response is: OK?)

This stuff is all trivial and expendable by design, but it’s hardly offensive: anyone who consumes sports on the internet is inured to this type of garbage, and the social media platforms are awash with sugary, under-one-minute video hits of players building their ideal teams or pronouncing their own names or trying to execute the perfect dap or naming their favorite pasta. It’s not as if creators like Feeney and Raja, however much noise ESPN has made about hiring them, enjoy the kind of prominence on air during live broadcasts that a fellow influencer like Dave Portnoy, say, commands over on Fox. For the most part, these figures feel like summer interns in a world still dominated by the big beasts of gameday.

On the other hand, influencer creep symbolizes a broader rot at the heart of ESPN. It’s important to set these moves in their proper context. In just the past 12 months the network has inked a new $100m, five-year deal with Stephen A Smith that allows him to be even louder than usual; it’s snapped up Inside the NBA, perhaps the most universally admired talk show in American sports broadcast history, from TNT; and most tellingly of all, it’s reached a deal with the NFL, an organization it is nominally supposed to cover critically, that will see the league take a 10% equity stake in ESPN in exchange for the rights to the NFL network and the league’s popular RedZone channel.

Taken together, these deals herald a major shift: away from the adversarial tradition of reporting that the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network once stood for, toward a much more accommodating and insider-driven approach to covering sports. ESPN’s embrace of the creator economy is part of this broader push for a cozier relationship with power. For years, ESPN has managed a conflict between its dual function as both a broadcaster and a news service, screening professional sports even as its in-house reporters subjected those same sports to aggressive journalistic scrutiny. That tension was always difficult to negotiate, but the disruptions of the smartphone economy, which has blitzed attention spans, pushed the epicenter of sports talk away from cable TV to social media, and handed more power to individual leagues, teams and athletes to shape and influence media narratives to their liking, have made live sport the absolute business priority for networks like ESPN.

Several highly regarded journalists have left ESPN in recent years, as the paramount importance of live programming to the network has become clear and reporting has come to be seen as a privilege, or a burden, or sometimes both. Among those who have left are excellent reporters and writers such as Zach Lowe and Pablo Torre, who recently reached a licensing deal to produce Pablo Torre Finds Out, his excellent, eponymous investigative podcast, for the New York Times. This continues a decade-long exodus of similar talents from ESPN, including Colin Cowherd and Dan Le Batard, extending all the way back to Bill Simmons’s acrimonious departure from the network in 2015.

Does ESPN care that they no longer have these personalities, all of whom have gone on to have successful careers after leaving the network, to enrich their programming and “content” around game days? Did the studio executives look on in envy as Torre unspooled his string of summer love scoops, from the Bill Belichick-Jordon Hudson romance to the hectic coupling of Kawhi Leonard and a tree-planting company? It seems unlikely. When they have Katie Feeney locking in the youth demographic with sponcon for Neutrogena Hydro Boost (“my go-to for hydrated, juicy skin”) and bringing viewers exclusive, behind-the-scenes footage of what @SAWEETIE, “the first ever female curator for Monday Night Football”, would do as her touchdown celebration dance, what need does ESPN really have for the fussy old business of journalism? The stories all come from inside the locker room now, or directly from the players themselves: questions, criticism, scrutiny are anathema to ESPN’s fresh mission as a souped-up PR agency. There is still worthy reporting that comes out of the company’s creaking news arm but it’s clear that ESPN’s priorities now lie elsewhere.

Increasingly, it seems like the old media model, in which the networks that broadcast live sport could do double duty as aggressive excavators of those same sports’ ugly truths, has passed. From now on, sports coverage is divided between two camps. On one side are the insiders, the broadcasters, the image-fluffers, fabulously well resourced and operated for mutual benefit in partnership with the sports world’s most powerful entities; on the other are the outsiders, the journalists, the critics, perpetually strapped for cash and digging for revelatory nuggets around a sporting-corporate PR machine that’s built to withstand the apocalypse. Where it once tried to keep a foot in both camps, ESPN now stands irrevocably on the side of the powerful: a company that once set the news agenda in sports is now just another sweaty social media setup fishing for quick clicks. With occasional noble exceptions, whatever sports “content” it produces from this day forward will be necessarily soft-focus and unchallenging.

The vapidity of the new ESPN captures the crisis of modern sports media. In the attention economy, what exactly is the role of broadcast media during the lulls when sports are not being played live? For a shrinking corner of the professional commentariat, sport in its “dead” time is still something to subject to sustained critique and discussion, a topic appropriate for serious journalism and analysis. But for ESPN, sport has become fluff, visual candy cotton, an inexhaustible source of sugar in a contest for viewer-consumers’ addiction as endless as the feeds on our phones. Rather than pushing back against the easy tyranny of the vacant scroll, ESPN is giving in to it, trying to ride it – and the vision of a zonked-out, lobotomized viewership is captured perfectly in the network’s Black Mirroresque new slogan, “Sports Forever”.

By chasing dollars, ESPN is betraying the very fans on whose passion it has built its success, trading away its journalistic credibility for a diminished status as the glorified Pravda of the modern American sportscape. The network’s approach to covering sport now is properly post-journalistic, built on player access, highlights, fan experiences, viral squirts of memebrain swill skimmed from the trough of online trend culture, and zero contestation. It’s a strategy that elevates narrative management over entertainment, teams over viewers, money over truth. And increasingly, it feels like the future – a reality that should trouble anyone who cares about sports and the real stories that shape them.

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