Is There News on ESPN?

This is a bit off the beaten track, but I was driving home from a brief trip yesterday, listening to Faux News on XM, specifically to the media criticism show they do on the weekends--the one with Cal Thomas, usually, but he was on vacation, thank godness. And they were discussing whether ESPN has a conflict of interest when it covers stories like the Michael Vick-dogfighting story. Because, you know, ESPN has an interest in promoting NFL football, which might mean that the network goes easy on players when they are in trouble. (Of course, none of the panelists thought ESPN was going easy on the Vick story, so the question was a bit academic, even in their discussion.)

One of the panelists (Jane Hall, I think) brought up Playmakers, the series on the seedy side of pro football that ESPN pulled after one season because of pressure from the NFL.

I was thinking about this, and I've concluded that there really isn't any news on ESPN. That isn't to say that there aren't some real journalists who work for the network. But it's basically impossible for ESPN to have a conflict of interest when it's really an entertainment network, not a news network. The E in ESPN is for entertainment, after all. A great deal of what looks like news on ESPN is actually promotional material for other ESPN products, like MLB and NFL games that the network shows.

The key point, I guess, is that even if it looks like news--and SportsCenter and some other shows do, and there is the whole ESPNNews network--it isn't necessarily journalism. But, hmm, I would think that folks who work for Fox would grok that.