ESPN May Not Be Huge Fans of Small Market Teams, After All
>> Thursday
Friend of YCS Brian sent me a really interesting (although sadly unsurprising) email today about the ongoing saga of the Yi Jianlian contract negotiations, specifically in re: ESPN's coverage therewith.
Brace yourself, this post contains accusations that ESPN may be engaged in irresponsible journalism. I'll give you a moment to collect yourself, I assume you just did a spit take followed by an exaggerated "WHAAAA!?!?!?!?!!" Good to go? Good.
The basic gist of what's happened is that ESPN.com's Mark Stein has run with a quote from Guangdong Tigers chief Chen Haitao in which he indicated that Jianlian would "never" play for the Bucks. Stein's blog story (sorry, it's insider) details the Yi "ultimatum" the Bucks face from the reluctant Tigers to allow Jianlian to play for Milwaukee. The story was on the front page of ESPN's NBA page for most of the day and remains prominently placed on the NBA page as of this post.
Sounds fine, right? On the whole, yeah, there has been some controversy over the fact that the Bucks took Yi dispite the fact that his people didn't want him in Milwaukee.
Well, there's a problem. The story apparently isn't true. Both the AP and fantasy sports site Rotowire have picked up the story and have clearly indicated that team officials in China are angrily denying that such statements (which first appeared in Chinese newspapers) were ever made.
Now, this isn't really a major issue on its face, because Stein or an editor at ESPN.com could simply throw a phrase into the article relating the way the story's validity is under review. The problem is, though, that they don't. To small market fans that don't get all their sports news from the WWL, this seems problematic. I'll let Brian elaborate and close it out in his own words, complete with plenty of passionate vitriol on behalf of Bucks nation:
I just wanted to point out that ESPN ran on their front page the sensational article that Chen Haitao said that Yi Jianlian would never play for the Bucks. When the AP puts out a story saying that the club is denying the story and the club is "very willing to work with the Bucks", where do you see it? Certainly not on ESPN's front page, they still have links to the original article that the Guangdong Tigers are denying.
As a Bucks fan and Milwaukee native this seems like a huge smear campaign by ESPN against the Bucks and the city of Milwaukee. Sorry we aren't in a big market, but the draft is the draft and no matter how many articles they run and how much negativity they spread, Yi will be playing for the Bucks.
I know the ESPN brass are probably already crying over the fact that the Brewers may be playoff bound, but they are going to have to deal with David Stern making them broadcast Bucks games now too. Well ESPN needs to suck it up and someone needs to be on the forefront pointing out this irresponsible journalism.
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13 comments:
nice catch fellas
Thank for posting my email without permission, jerks! hah, you can make it up to me by presenting a detailed article about my dominance in the Yellow Chair Sports fantasy baseball league. Sure, none of us are really attempting to keep our lineups current, but I've still got a 25 game lead. It must be my natural brilliance.
Hey, how's my team doing?
He is well on his way to getting a front page colunm at The New York Times.
Yesterday ESPN had a link to their Brewers/DBacks gamecast with the headline "Slumping Brewers take on D-Backs." By the way, the "slumping" Brewers had won four straight games before losing the previous night.
Thanks for posting this. I have a Bucks blog and follow them rather religiously (I'm very self-loathing as you can imagine). With ESPN and the Yi issue it seems every negative thing gets put in bold capital letters and then when something contradicts that they go largely silent on the issue. It's like they only want the controversy of Yi NOT wanting to play in like Milwaukee, because it allows their analysts to pick on an easy target. Aside from Stein, Sheridan has also said he thinks the Bucks cave...not for any specific reason, just because. And Bucher falsely said on draft night that the Bucks had never seen Yi and were only going on what Larry Harris' dad Del told him. Thanks, guys.
CNNSI has continuously been a lot more even-keeled with their coverage (OK, I'm biased), with their experts continually noting that there's essentially 0 financial/PR incentive for Yi and his people to keep him China or hold out all year. Follow the dollars and they lead to Milwaukee, no matter how small of a market it is. It's the only game in town.
http://bucksfans.blogspot.com
/rant
Yeah, cause ESPN is part of a wide ranging conspiracy to screw the city of Milwaukee - obviously.
I'm with the last guy... What's with all the world conspiring against Milwaukee anyways?
Eh, I don't think it's really much of a "conspiracy," I think that's an extreme worst case scenario that is highly unlikely. What's more likely is that ESPN is just being lazy and doing a shitty job of covering all the facts about the whole Yi thing. Yi hating the idea of playing here and going T.O. drama queen on everyone is way more interesting, so they're playing that up, facts be damned.
...and I agree with that.
uh...has anyone stopped to consider that the chinese govt lies a lot? like, all the time? they have every reason to claim that stein's quote is false, certainly more reason than for stein to make something up out of air and risk his journalistic integrity.
Stein didn't create the rumor, he just took the rumor and ran wild with it without bothering to do enough fact checking about its validity.
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