SOONERGUYS Blog

The whole Mike Leach/Craig James affair in Lubbock raises many questions, but one that has gotten little notice is whether ESPN has acted ethically in its reporting of the controversy.

After James’ allegations against Leach became public, ESPN re-assigned the color analyst to work the Nebraska vs. Arizona Holiday Bowl game, instead of the Texas Tech vs. Michigan State Alamo Bowl game to which he was originally assigned. The game had a color analyst already, but ESPN put James as the third man in the broadcast booth.

It gave James the platform to argue that Leach was threatening his son’s health, an appealing argument that was not balanced by any contrary facts reported from other sources by the network. That same day ESPN had interviewed its own employee and broadcast his story on all its network channels. For two full days all ESPN broadcast was James telling us how awful Leach was for making his son stand in a dark room.

ESPN, without any attribution or verification, then broadcast a Youtube video uploaded by a high-powered Dallas public relations firm (likely hired by the James family) that purportedly showed Adam James giving us a tour of the “closet” which was his punishment.

The word “orchestrated” comes to mind.

Then, when Leach did surface to give interviews claiming that James was a badgering Little League dad, the response to that came not from James but from an ESPN spokesman answering for James and denying the counter charges.

That’s like Fox News reporting, “A FOX news spokesman said today that President Obama is lying.” As blatantly biased as Fox News can be, it at least goes through the motions of appearing “fair and balanced” and often relies upon some non-network employee political hack that you can see and evaluate without doing it themselves.

In the first place, the ethics of ESPN in allowing the central figure to this controversy to continue his work during bowl week is highly questionable. James should have been suspended from working any college bowl game. Likewise, ESPN should have played no role in responding to Leach’s counter charges. The response made it sound like ESPN was James’ public relations firm.

By doing so, the network has compromised its integrity and given the appearance of playing favorites to one of its employees, instead of fairly reporting the news. Whether the actual treatment was equal or not, the appearance of partiality undermines not only the trust in ESPN, but the trust in the profession.

I wrote ESPN’s ombudsman Don Ohlmeyer about the network’s poor handling of this matter. I got this response:

“I cannot respond personally to all the mail I receive, but I do read and take note of all complaints. When the complaints are specific to a show or to an article on espn.com, I forward them to the producer or editor in charge of that content. When there are several complaints on the same topic, I do a weekly tabulation that becomes part of a report sent to all of ESPN’s top management. (I do the same for positive comments.) I cannot assure you that your complaints or mine will result in action, but I can assure you they are not lost in some cyberspace void. They are read, thought about, disseminated.“

OK.

Meanwhile, the ESPN errors have not gone entirely unnoticed. See:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-cutbirth/leach-incident-shows-espn_b_409270.html