ESPN’s bias boosts Northeast, bullies the rest

With the San Diego Padres vying for the lead in baseball’s tightest division contest, every game is a big deal. And since I’m away from home, I have to rely on national broadcasting, largely ESPN, for any coverage of the team that I’ve loved since childhood. But there’s a problem. Sports syndicates overwhelmingly fail to provide the coverage that sports fans like me need when we are displaced by, well, let’s call it an educational diaspora. Finding TV coverage of the Padres that goes beyond a mere score update is nearly impossible, thanks largely to the East Coast bias in sports broadcasting.

Fans who support teams far from the Eastern seaboard have long cursed the East Coast bias that haunts the sporting world. San Diegans like myself often grumble about the continuous limelight showered upon the New York Yankees. Fans from St. Louis complain about how sports networks think of baseball teams as if there was an East Coast, a West Coast, and everywhere else, and fans of talented teams like the Rays and the Twins balk at how underexposed their teams are compared to mediocre ones like the Mets. We all blame the East Coast bias, especially its main perpetrator, ESPN.

Since it was founded in 1979, ESPN has become the leading voice in national sports news, with “local” coverage online in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, New York, and Los Angeles. Baseball, due to the sheer number of games teams play, has been affected more than any other professional sport by ESPN’s dominance. Though ESPN reports the scores of all MLB teams, its commentators, particularly on shows like Baseball Tonight, have routinely been accused of blatant bias towards East Coast teams and popular franchises, such as the Yankees, Red Sox, and Phillies. Heath Bell, a pitcher for the San Diego Padres, has adamantly criticized ESPN’s geographical and financial bias, saying, “I truly believe ESPN only cares about promoting the Red Sox and Yankees and Mets—and nobody else.”

There’s hard evidence to substantiate Bell’s claim and fans’ complaints. Consider the MLB games that ESPN chose to air on its flagship channel during the 2010 season. Out of the 62 games it broadcast, nearly half were games played by teams from the East Coast, with West Coast teams playing in only six of those games. ESPN aired eight games played by the New York Mets, New York Yankees, and Boston Red Sox, while almost every team in the West, except the Los Angeles Angels Dodgers, went overlooked. The schedule was clearly not determined by the success these teams had the previous year either. The Mets, who were tied for the most games aired on ESPN this year, came second-to-last in the National League East last year, while teams that led their divisions, like the Minnesota Twins in the National League Central, were omitted from ESPN’s schedule.

It might seem possible that ESPN’s broadcast schedule is based on population. New York, which received the most coverage, is America’s largest city. But teams from cities like Tampa Bay, Atlanta, and Milwaukee—all with populations of only about half a million—receive modest coverage at the expense of some of America’s largest cities, such as San Diego, Dallas, and San Francisco, none of which were featured in ESPN’s MLB broadcasts.

Even so, you could still argue that casual fans care most about the big baseball powerhouses. Isn’t ESPN just giving the fans what they want? Maybe, but ESPN is responsible for deciding the who’s who of sports. By guiding the national sports conversation, ESPN decides which teams people watch—especially casual fans. A traditional viewpoint holds that good teams produce lots of fans, which leads the major networks to shift their attention to these popular teams. But ESPN covers teams it expects to be good, gets people talking about those teams and attending their games, and fills their coffers, not the other way around. ESPN’s chosen few will never be out of the picture. But every team deserves equal coverage, even the poor ones, because ESPN, whether we like it or not, plays a pivotal role in hyping teams and fueling attendance, thus propping up their fiscal dominance.

So on Oct. 1, when the Padres enter their final series against the Giants to decide who advances to the playoffs, I won’t be watching the games on TV. I’ll be frantically refreshing the MLB.com home page for score updates.