For those of us who are as addicted to ESPN as Rosie O'Donnell is to Ding-Dongs (the cake kind), the last few days have been a whirlwind of Brett Favre coverage, the likes of which we haven't seen since, well....actually last season. Coverage and reports from the "Worldwide Leader in Sports" have run continuously since initial reports came out Tuesday that Favre was leaving football for good.
ESPN analysts talked about the legendary career, and the even more legendary 3 retirements of one of the greatest QB's in history like there was nothing else going on in the world of sports. Including Alex Rodriguez's chase for 600 HRs.
Come to find out, the reports out of Bristol revolved around alleged text messages that Favre sent to annonymous teammates. Think about that. What kind of sports reporting are we expecting of ESPN if we're permitting the Mouse Ears to run with a story about the retirement of a legend based on unconfirmed reports?
It got worse. After Favre confirmed on Wednesday that 1) he sent no text messages to any Vikings players and 2) he would play in 2010 if his ankle allowed, ESPN commentators and reporters spent the day blasting us with coverage about how Brett kept "us hostage" with his decision, how he's an ego-maniac, how the Vikings can't move on until he lets them go from his grasp. Basically, they cried out how unfair it was that the reporting they did the previous was shabby, and Favre called them out, and they had to deal with egg they flipped onto their own face. It was an embarrassing moment in sports journalism, and a warning what the modern world of technology can do. In a world of instant access, facebook, twitter, textings, emails, and mobile device updates, it's becoming more important even to the most trusted sources to be the first to break a story, whether it's right or not.
On a similar note - keep your eye on team specific pages taking over large, broad based sports news agencies in the coming years. Sites like Orangebloods.com, which led the way for reporting in regards to the NCAA football realignment story of 2010, may become the driving source for breaking news - that is actually reliable. Large scale operations like ESPN don't want to be trumped on breaking news by some guy like Chip Brown of Orangebloods, despite the fact that Brown had what turned out to be a reliable source within the Longhorn network. (On the day ESPN reported Texas had a done deal with the Pac-10, Brown reported that the Big 12 would remain in tact, with just 10 teams).
In today's instant access world, the resources with team specific duties are far more likely to be the source of the breaking news. Orangbloods proved it by dropping the Notre Dame vs. Texas football series yesterday, a day before the big boys.
It's quite a statement when a local, pay per user website, proves itself more reliable than the world recognized leader in sports programming in trustworthy news reporting.
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