More Cuts at ESPN

Phyllis cranks it up a notch or two in this one ...

 

Phyllis smoke 1 or 2 packs a day?

Either way, Finebaum is an asshat.

 

To the poster who was asking a month ago about watching highlights on the internet:
I missed the Angel game the other day and wanted to see highlights. I go to mlb.com and each highlight, which consists of one play and a replay of that, is preceded by an 18 second commercial that is not skippable. Are you f****** kidding me?
Going to the internet to find your highlights is terrible

 

This is the first morning I have ever watched any extended amount of get up!

I am sure that John Skipper was as high as a kite when he devised this show. Michelle Beadle is a complete zero and I have no idea who thinks she's a star. Jalen Rose is likeable but his syncopation of talk is kind of distracting to me when he talks for any length of time. Good guy and I like hearing him talk about the NBA. I hope he can do it for other sports.

Mike Greenberg's dyed hair is totally distracting when they do a close up of him. He's got the Gray beard stubble and a deep Brown in his hair and he looks like the guy at the airport bar trying to pick up the 29 year-old flight attendant.

The it factor in this show is about at zero.

 

They have game recaps that are a bit better, but I’d still rather just have Quick Pitch on in background than click on 15 of those every night.

I also prefer this website to mlb.com, although it uses same clips.

Baseball Theater

 

I was the poster about watching highlights on the internet.

My understanding to you went on-line because you could get exactly the information you needed immediate access rather than waiting for a more attractively produced product, in this case a highlight show. You are not alone.

In the last ten years I can not think of a single example where the ratings or circulation of a media outlet providing straight news or sports coverage has not seen a marked decline because consumers have shifted to on-line. Can you?

 

I'm not saying that people aren't going online. I just think it is an extremely inferior product and to be used only as a a last resort, not the go-to.

I also understand mileage may vary with each consumer.

 

I don’t think there’s yet a full appreciation of just how many disasters Skipper created to satisfy whatever cultural urges pulsed inside of him and ESPN. Grantland collapsed. 538 was a whiff. The scary thing about The Undefeated isn’t some of the hot take writing - that site frankly needs Jemele Hill to write every day, it’s so boring - but the peculiar superficial bent of the site that often reads like a PR email. “How Harold Varner III signed with Jordan Brand.” The 6 didn’t work because, well, many things, not the least of which was...it was on at 6, after a day full of opinion shows.

Get Up doesn’t work, either, and I’ve watched it a few times. The spark, the humor, the possibility of disagreement isn’t really there. Beadle doesn’t really like to debate, because good debate - fun debate - takes a little bullshit, and she doesn’t appear to be able to conceive of taking a position she doesn’t actually believe in. (LeBatard, can, and sometimes does, which helps his show.) Get Up is about as bad as the current Ripa\Seacrest pairing. (Which is Seacrest’s fault.)

 

I completely agree with this. One of the segments I saw was a review of the All NBA team.

Rose wanted to talk about player X, and Beadle said they were talking about that player later. Rose continued to talk about him, and Beadle said they would discuss him later. It went on a third time! Not good banter!

I'll go one step further. I didn't hate Mike and Mike. It seems pretty clear in the ensuing time that the Mikes weren't looking for a breakup.

 

There ought to be a law that states any video content shown on the Internet cannot have an ad that lasts longer than one-tenth of the video content.

 

Good Ringer piece on the new Torre/Jones show High Noon.

Trusting the ESPN Process: Can Bomani Jones and Pablo Torre Create a New Version of Sports Talk TV?

I like Jones. Always have. I like his delivery and I think he's funny. Torre, meh.

Deep into the piece, there's an interesting section about whether the show will be political. Torre gives a take:

Not surprisingly, High Noon turns out to be different from the fever dreams of Clay Travis, who has already dubbed the show Everything Is Racist. What’s surprising is that the media has abetted such bad-faith attacks. In March, when Get Up!’s Jalen Rose gave The Hollywood Reporter an anodyne answer about covering Trump’s sports tweets, the paper reported the show would “wake up woke.” Mike Greenberg had turned into Alex Pareene. Last month, a Wall Street Journal headline claimed ESPN was “consumed by politics.”

“We’re labeling stuff ‘politics’ that really isn’t politics,” Torre said. “As Bomani has put it to me, ‘Do you want someone on-air who may authentically stand up for issues of human dignity that are personal to them?’ … As triggering as that might be for people, and uncomfortable as that might be for people, that’s not a political thing. That’s just being who you are in 2018 in this country.”

Torre added, “It’s not going to happen every day, with a ‘break glass in case of human dignity violation.’” Torre and Jones are confident they can figure out which stories work on High Noon. Last week, they rejected a segment about the booing of Rudy Giuliani at Yankee Stadium because they felt the discussion would be one-note. They talked about a video of a monkey drop-kicking a man in India instead.

Torre said he’s most bothered by people who cast every socially conscious person at ESPN as a member of a single, undifferentiated, liberal bloc. “That’s the thing that actually does rankle me—somehow I am Jemele [Hill],” he said. “For many reasons that Jemele should want, I am not her. We’ve all been flattened into teams.”

My thoughts here:

*Curtis is a liberal. He's said as much on podcasts and in a few pieces, I think. So Curtis' take on what is and what is not "bad faith" or what is or is not "liberal" is framed, to some degree, by things he obviously agrees with as it relates to certain political issues.

*Torre's definition of what isn't political would be someone else's definition of what is political. Because, when Torre says it - and you wish Curtis had pushed him to further explain it - I suspect most readers know exactly what he's talking about: Human dignity revolves around identity-related matters that are liberal in nature. Which is fine. ESPN can be that. But to repackage it as non-political...it is political. It's called "identity politics."

*Torre is bothered that he's been lumped in with a team, which I can appreciate, and we'll see how the show runs counter the pretty consistent progressive drumbeat at ESPN. This is a network that just hired back Keith Olbermann - who I rather like when he's on sports, but has made zero bones about what he thinks politically about a variety of issues.

 

Where’s the white voice on this show? I’m only half kidding. I think a lot of people are gonna give this short shrift for the same reasons they gave short shrift to hill and smith on the 6 pm SC.