ESPN made right stand on Roethlisberger
We got a couple of creepy voyeuristic peeks into the sports media this week. Both stories, one involving a champion quarterback and the other involving a pretty sideline reporter, could make you teeter between feeling stimulated and feeling dirty. One involved a shameful peephole that undressed a popular sports figure. And the other involved Erin Andrews.
The Ben Roethlisberger and Andrews stories aren’t that different metaphorically, believe it or not. They involve what the public craves, and how much of that craving should be fed, and how this ever-growing appetite takes us into places we shouldn’t be sometimes.
Roethlisberger, for those of you who don’t know (and you wouldn’t know for more than a day if your only source of sports information is ESPN), is being accused of rape in a civil suit. Civil suit. Not criminal. It is an important distinction, if you care about fairness. I have no idea if this woman was terribly and criminally wronged or is insane. I just know she can say whatever she wants in a civil suit without making it so. The temptation is to report what she says, and file it under journalistic “fact-gathering” or “truth-seeking,” even though the media, allegedly fair and objective, is never as zealous or thorough in reporting the acquittal as it is in reporting the accusation.
Asking the media to slow down on Roethlisberger until he at least speaks or until police are involved is like asking piranha to be reasonable. Doesn’t help, either, that the voices gathering strength on the Internet are shouting for more bloody chum to be thrown in the water. The temptation as the crowd gathers around the peephole is to wander over toward the whispers.
Which makes what ESPN did kind of amazing in the modern media age. It totally ignored this Roethlisberger story before finally bowing Wednesday night. Everyone else was reporting it. Everyone. And consumers crave it. But predictably, ESPN was killed for protecting Roethlisberger. Covered for him instead of covering him. All ESPN was doing was waiting for him to speak or for police to get involved. But we want our gossip, even if it is not true, and our need for it makes TMZ and smut rags grow while books and newspapers and literary magazines die.
I’ll get accused of protecting a gravy train here, even though I criticize ESPN plenty and publicly, but ESPN tries not to cover civil suits. You haven’t heard about Dwyane Wade’s messy divorce on ESPN. A scorned woman accused Roberto Alomar of all manner of awful in the gluttonous New York tabloids, and that wasn’t on SportsCenter, either. Kobe’s rape case was different. It involved police. Isiah Thomas was different. It involved a trial.
It is a white quarterback’s alleged crime not being covered at the same time that a black quarterback, Michael Vick, gets an unholy and disproportionate amount of punishment and coverage for another crime. That one gets hard to explain to black people, journalism’s rules be damned, given America’s history of injustice and the baggage brought to any racial discussion.
Skin color always gets noticed at times like these, especially when a news organization or legal system can be accused of preferential treatment. Black people are going to wonder if Vick, Terrell Owens, Randy Moss, Barry Bonds or any other black media punching bag would be extended the same courtesy as Roethlisberger was here.
Consciously or subconsciously, we always absorb black-white. And you can imagine how the discussion would have sounded if Donte Stallworth had spent less than a month in jail for killing someone and had been white.
Regardless, the easiest thing for ESPN to have done with this Roethlisberger story was to merrily follow the crowd to the trough. There is no criticism in that. It is one of the many reasons following is so much easier than leading.