What Bill Simmons Showed About ESPN
Would a political reporter be suspended by his news organization for calling the President a liar? It’s practically in the job description. Bill Simmons, of Grantland and other ESPN enterprises, called Roger Goodell, the N.F.L. commissioner, a liar in a podcast and challenged his bosses to tell him he couldn’t say so.
.. ESPN has a financial relationship with the N.F.L.—Monday Night Football, to start with, for which it pays $1.9 billion a year in a contract, worth $15.2 billion in all, that runs through 2021—but it also, one would think, has an interest in its own journalistic identity. That, ultimately, has to be a more essential asset than the integrity of its game-broadcasting contracts; it’s what it has to barter. Without some assurance that they are getting fair, critical coverage, viewers might as well be watching the N.F.L. Network ..