Much ado about ombudsmen

This week I learned what the word “ombudsman” means. An ombudsman is an official who investigates maladministration, and perhaps unsurprisingly, ESPN has one. They’ve actually had several ombudsmen, and the current one, Robert Lipsyte, published a piece last Tuesday. Lipsyte’s latest article is titled “Probing the gray areas of ESPN's journalism,” and it discusses some of this column’s favorite motifs. If you’ve ever read my column, you’ll find the ombudsman blog over on ESPN’s webpage worth your time. It is good to see that ESPN is asking itself the same questions that many consumers of sports media are asking. However, Lipsyte’s takes tend to be soft, and can read pro-ESPN in a way that makes me a little suspicious of all this ombudsman business.

In his article, Lipsyte opens by talking about interactions he had with ESPN executives at the beginning of his term. Apparently, two different ESPN executives told Lipsyte that asking “conflict of interest” type questions with regard to the role of journalism in ESPN’s business model wouldn’t be worth his time. Thankfully, Lipsyte was persistent enough to work past the advice of those two gentlemen. For example, Lipsyte points out that ESPN has spent more journalistic energy on the NBA’s handling of former Clippers owner Donald Sterling than it has on the NFL’s struggle with concussion-related health issues. The first storyline portrays a league and its commissioner in a positive light, whereas the second storyline does the opposite. As long as ESPN exists, there will be questions about which stories are easiest to get green-lighted and which stories do the least to annoy ESPN’s business partners. Lipsyte does a good job of highlighting that problem.

When it comes to suspensions of ESPN staff, Lipsyte falls a little flat. He has written about the Bill Simmons suspension in the past, but for some reason he brought it up again in his article on Nov. 4. Lipsyte continues to defend ESPN’s suspension of Simmons on the basis that Simmons did not have sufficient evidence to call NFL commissioner Goodell a liar. The more you examine that claim, the harder it becomes to believe. Other pieces on ESPN have accused the NFL of “a pattern of misinformation and misdirection,” making the exact same point. There seems to be enough evidence about the NFL’s mismanagement of the Ray Rice case where calling Goodell a liar has some root in truth. Therefore, the suspension of Bill Simmons for his rant was due to Simmons’ insubordination, not his journalism. Lipsyte’s suggestion of the opposite is a bit unsatisfactory; it makes ESPN look like they are doing a good job of holding their journalists to standards, and does some to distract from the concern about standards at an institutional as opposed to an individual level. For someone who claimed at the beginning of the article to be interested in exploring ESPN’s conflict of interest, it is strange that Lipsyte does not identify the Simmons suspension as part of that bigger problem.

As a whole, the concept of an ombudsman at ESPN is still a bit foreign to me. I’ve been going to ESPN’s website every day since I was in fourth grade, and until recently I had never come across such a feature. I suppose it is a sign that more people care about the legitimacy and quality of sports content, which is something to be happy about. Let’s continue to follow Robert Lipsyte’s investigations to make sure he is asking hard questions and not existing simply as a more subtle ESPN yes-man.