For all of my adult life, ESPN has been a great spot for me to get my sports news and info. Its had reporters that love sports, and a splash of banter to keep it entertaining. Yet when you look right at it ESPN stands for Entertainment Sports Programming Network… If you break that shit down, 50% of it is Entertainment & Programming, literally in the title. This became ridiculously apparent that ESPN is the biggest hype machine in all of sports when they decided to air a special solely for letting LeBron James pick his new team.
Basketball is right near soccer in my interest level of sports for a majority of reasons. Unless the game is in a cartoon alternate dimension and Bill Murray happens to be around, I don’t really care. So to have an entire primetime special dedicated to Lebron James choosing a team he will play for is fucking retarded. It got so ridiculously hyped that they even had a flavored water commercial paying tribute to Lebron James and his “EPIC DECISION”. AAAAAAHHHHH, I want to cuss until my head explodes and shoot a hole in my TV! What the fuck is going on!?! And you know the little ticker that runs across the screen on certain channels, with late breaking news? During this shows commercial break, a ticker actually came across telling you that Lebron was on stage ready to make his decision. A TICKER NEWS BREAK, ABOUT THE SHOW YOU ARE WATCHING!!!! JESUS CHRIST I HATE THIS WORLD!
ESPN took a piece of news that should have been a news ticker during sportscenter, and made it into an hour long “licking Lebron James’ ass” special. ESPN duct taped sandpaper around a 20 inch dildo and rammed it into the asses and ears of people dumb enough to buy into this hype. Good reporting, solid journalist work, and reporting integrity were sacrificed all to get a big audience to tune into a bullshit special that wasn’t worth 5 minutes of my time, let alone an hour. The main concern behind this special, was getting people to tune in to advertisements for ESPN specials, and sports coverage like the World Cup and Homerun Derby. Delivering pertinent information, and providing a journalistic service took a backseat to this garbage and tarnished my views of ESPN forever.
Any executive or “brain” behind Lebrons special should feel dirty for the rest of their lives. ESPN clearly stated to me that entertainment and programming will trump sports and journalism at all times. I don’t consider myself a naive person, and realize any media outlet needs ratings to survive and profit. Yet to do it in this way is just disgusting, and any producer involved in this gag should be stoned in a public area with feces and rocks.
