The real lesson of this whole Bruce Feldman brouhaha isn't that ESPN is stupid, or that Craig James is an obnoxious, hypocritical idiot and a bad announcer (we already knew both of these things). What the story really does, in conjunction with the Longhorn Network and its inherent violation of journalistic ethics, is to underscore the need for competition in the world of sports journalism. ESPN can act the way that they do because they don't have any meaningful competition. There's other options in any particular medium, of course -- SI has a website and a magazine, and there are other blogs, and there are other networks that show sporting events. But nobody has the kind of influence across the board that ESPN does.
I wish that one (or more!) of ESPN's competitors would step up with a serious combined challenge. Sports Illustrated is part of Time Warner, who owns CNN; they could start a cable news network, right? CBS, Fox, and NBC all have terrible sports channels right now, but there's no reason that any of them couldn't, you know, put some quality sports content on the air. What's the point of having massive consolidation of media power into a few multinational conglomerates if they can't give us good content?
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