Thursday, November 18, 2010

Soon ESPN will employ every newspaper journalist

You can't blame Mike Wilbon for leaving the Washington Post. Heck, any journalist in America would jump at the chance to work for the World-Wide Leader. ESPN actually needs more respected writers like Wilbon instead of athlete analysts that have no real teeth when it comes to what a media source should do.

In fact, more people like Wilbon should be working for ESPN. In the past decade, have you felt like the sports leader has become less and less of a sports writing entity and more and more of a flash in the pan? They've thrown ethics out the window (Read: The Mike Leech saga with Texas Tech), they shamelessly plug and promote the sports they carry on their network and they've replaced journalists with Michael Irvin and Steve Young. Sure they may know more about the minute specifics of a game, but what they don't know is how to be a valid and fair news source.

Wilbon worked for the Washington Post for over 30 years, and he knows how to do that. But who else at ESPN has the same credibility? Bill Simmons might actually be the winner of that question because even though he blatenty plays the role of a homer, he still lets you know where his loyalties lie.

Who else would you trust? ESPN is notorious for nabbing stories from other entities and then saying their own writers broke them.

I'm fine with the World Wide Leader getting bigger, they promote sports well. However, I can't remember the last time I watched SportsCenter and took it seriously. Heck, I may watch SportsCenter a handful of times a month. It's gone from a highlight reel from the best of sports that day to a weird collage of graphics, promotions and talking heads. No real substance.

(You should have seen this abomination of an article on ESPN.com about how Kobe Bryant's appearance on the latest Call of Duty commercial sends a bad message to kids. I wonder how often that commercial runs on ESPN. A horribly written and logically bankrupt article.)

I compare it to the cable news channels. Instead of talking to sources and people who are actually involved in a story, they talk to analysts, or studio people who don't really have a grasp of whats going on. They're the Fox News of Sports.

My three favorite people at ESPN are Wilbon,Simmons and Cowherd. I'm glad Wilbon is moving to the WLL full-time and wish more credible writers would work for them.

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