A Critical Examination of ESPN and Major League Soccer

Over on The Situationist, Jason Chung offers a very provocative thesis: "ESPN's hype machine is aggressively pushing Major League Soccer in the face of American apathy in order to push their own agenda."

This piece, entitled "Manufactured Hype: Can ESPN’s Agenda-Setting Behaviour save Major League Soccer?," is partly a follow-up to his piece last month in which argued that ESPN is killing Hockey. Here is an excerpt from his new piece:

Most journalists and editors, particularly in the realm of sports (and specifically ESPN), tend to deny or ignore the role that they play in agenda-setting. As ESPN vice-president of studio productions Craig Lazarus claims “There is this notion that we drive a sport’s popularity . . . but I think we reflect it.” During a radio interview on Toronto’s FAN 590 in which I defended my previous article, sportscasters and producers Doug Farraway and Gerry Dobson also advanced that very same “consumer is sovereign” line of thinking when defending ESPN’s NHL coverage. They asserted that it is viewers and listeners that determine their news priorities. The claim is that consumers or fans have fixed preferences, and the media simply competes over viewers given those (exogenous) preferences. The viewer’s disposition controls while the situational influence of the media is irrelevant.

As logical as that simple model is, it is also wrong (or, at least, vastly exaggerated). In their 1999-2000 series of articles on the problem of “market manipulation” (see Westlaw and SSRN), Doug Kysar and Situationist Contributor Jon Hanson detailed how sellers — from gas stations to grocery stores — manipulate consumer perceptions and preferences routinely. McCombs and Shaw, as already noted, came to a very similar conclusion with respect to news coverage. Can it be that sports media and the selling of sports is somehow different and immune from manipulation? Quite the contrary. To an extent nearly impossible with hard news, sports journalism seems open to manipulation given its relatively trivial content (at least in comparison with hard news) and highly subjective nature in measuring the “newsworthiness” of stories. It is hard to believe that editorial control does not yield, even subconsciously, to corporate interests.

For the rest of the piece, click here. It is a great read.

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