On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 3:05 PM, Mark Jeffries <[email protected]>wrote:
> "League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis," about players with head > injuries, was a collaboration between the Worldwide Leader's "Outside the > Lines" and the PBS doc series --it's scheduled to air on PBS Oct. 8, but > will do so without the ESPN co-branding--Deadspin claims that the league > pressured ESPN to drop their branding (they being the net of "Monday Night > Football," that show that consistently pulls OTA net-size ratings almost > every week in the season and a franchise one assumes FS1, NBCSN or Turner > would love to have), but the NFL says no--who do you trust?: > > > http://www.thewrap.com/media/article/espn-pulls-branding-nfl-concussion-doc-league-denial-112881 > This of course is the problem with ESPN's whole model. Even if somehow they are telling the truth here (which I absolutely do not believe they are) their credibility is completely compromised. Half (I use "half" very loosely here) of what they do looks like it is delivering sports news, the other half is making money selling advertising space around athletic telecasts it has spent BILLIONS of dollars for. They have always claimed there was a firewall between the two, but a firewall that melts at the first touch of flame is not worth very much. The NFL is the largest of the sports ESPN makes money from. The single biggest challenge facing the NFL - and make no mistake, this is a potentially existential threat - is the concussion issue. Almost everything the NFL has been doing the last three or four years has been aimed at avoiding, or at least minimizing, HUGE, tobacco-industry caliber sanctions from a range of lawsuits in the pipeline or on the way. If there is even a 5% chance that the Frontline documentary is going to suggest that the NFL knew, or should have known, about the risk of long term consequences from concussion before it took steps to address them (or knew that there are no steps that can be taken to counter some of the more serous consequences), then there is no way ESPN would be part of it. The real question here is why ESPN allowed itself to get involved with this project at all. I do believe that there are journalists at ESPN who want to do good work, and they may sometimes get out in front of their corporate masters. It seems likely that the Frontline people came up with some unexpected hard evidence that will imply liability for the NFL, and the suits at ESPN called it off. -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
