Golden State Warriors Coach Steve Kerr was asked recently about LaVar Ball’s comments. Ball stated that the Lakers players, which includes Ball’s son Lonzo, don’t like playing for Coach Luke Walton. He stated that Walton has no control over his players.
Kerr responded as he usually does: Thoughtfully, eloquently, and poignantly. We agree with what Coach Kerr had to say. Below are some of Kerr’s statements (in bold) and our analysis. First, here’s the press briefing:
“This is the world we live in. I was thinking about ESPN and they laid off, I don’t know 100 people? . . . Many of which were talented journalists covering the NBA. So this is not an ESPN judgement, it’s a societal thing more than anything. But where we’re going is away from covering the game and we’re getting closer to just sensationalized news, and it’s not even news, it’s just complete nonsense. But if you package that irrational nonsense with some glitter and ribbon, people are gonna watch.”
Steve Kerr is exactly right. You could do The Real Housewives of Reykjavik, Iceland and as long as you had some crazy people yelling at each other, people would watch the car wreck. And media entities have taken notice. For ESPN, it has meant that every show has some form of “EMBRACE DEBATE!” to it. They’ve moved on from Skip Bayless but the Bayless-itis is still infecting the Mothership.
When you turn on ESPN, unless it’s SportsCenter or a live game, there’s a panel of people “debating” one topic or another. Aside from Pardon The Interruption, it’s not pretty. ESPN is basically aping the CNN shows where four people sit at a desk and scream opposing viewpoints until your television set becomes a cacophony of ear piercing nothingness. But CNN, and now ESPN, keep airing the shows and giving us this content because we keep watching and clicking. If the viewers weren’t watching people arguing about LaVar Ball or clicking on the LaVar Ball articles online, they’d go away tomorrow.
“So somewhere, I guess in Lithuania, LaVar Ball is laughing. People are eating out his hands for no apparent reason. Other than he’s become like the Kardashian of the NBA or something and that sells. That’s true in politics and entertainment and now sports. It doesn’t matter if there’s any substance involved with an issue. It’s just ‘Can we make it really interesting.’ For no apparent reason. There’s nothing interesting about that story . . . Yet we’re sticking a microphone in front of his face because apparently it gets ratings. I don’t know who cares, but people must care or ESPN wouldn’t be spending whatever they’re spending.”
Damn right LaVar Ball is somewhere in Lithuania laughing right now. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. LaVar Ball is trying to turn his family into the basketball version of the Kardashians. This isn’t a drill. The Kardashians (including the Jenners) make over $100 million per year when you add up their salaries. How many NBA players make that kind of money?
So LaVar Ball keeps up his schtick because ESPN does his bidding. He’s the most covered person not named LeBron James. And why? Again, LaVar Ball gets ratings and clicks. The people in charge at ESPN, and its parent company Disney, have a duty to their shareholders to get those ratings and clicks. You want LaVar Ball off of your television screen or computer? Well, not to make this simplistic, but it is pretty simple: Turn the channel when he comes on and don’t click the articles. You, the viewer, have the power over what an entity like ESPN airs and writes about. If you take the ten minutes to read ESPN’s well-written, long-form journalistic pieces, there’d be more of those and less of the “GUESS WHAT LAVAR BALL SAID TODAY?!” articles. You have the power.
“I’ve talked to people in the media and said ‘Why do you guys have to cover that guy.’ They say ‘We don’t want to. Nobody wants to. But our bosses tell us we have to because of the ratings and the readership.’”
Despite all of the above, here is why Steve Kerr is only half right. Yes, it is the public’s fault for consuming this crap; however, the media is complicit. Now, there is a huge difference between ESPN and the news media (e.g. Fox, ABC, CNN, NBC, CBS, etc.). ESPN stands for “Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.” The word “entertainment” is the first word in their company name. That “E” doesn’t appear in any of those entities in the parenthesis in the line above.
If people find something entertaining, then ESPN is going to air it. Now, the flip side of that coin is that if ESPN covers LaVar Ball 24/7 then it has little to no credibility as a journalistic entity. Regardless, there is no reason why we should be holding ESPN to the same standard as we do the news media charged with covering our nation’s news of the day. And that bring us to our final point.
When our Founding Fathers contemplated the 1st Amendment’s freedom of the press, it was the news media covering Washington that they had in mind. The freedom of the press is a check on the powers that be in our government. The Founding Fathers were not worried about 24/7 sports news coverage, no matter what an infantile President thinks of Jemele Hill and her tweets.
Steve Kerr is only half right because comparing the media that covers sports to the media charged with keeping our nation’s leaders honest creates a false narrative. People are railing against Trump for his assault on the news media. However, what has the media done to deserve our protection?
Was the media standing up for the people when it showed Donald Trump’s empty podium for 45 minutes during its election coverage? How about when the media gave Donald Trump over $5 billion in free airtime before the election occurred in November of 2017? No, the news media cared about ratings, not about holding a hate spewing liar to answer for the filth coming from his mouth. The news media entered the entertainment business and stopped being the news media. And due in large part to the media’s complicity, we got President Trump.
Think about every Presidential election since Kennedy vs. Nixon. The more entertaining candidate has won every election since the advent of television. The entertainment factor has become even more magnified now that social media has come into the fray. The blame does lie with us, the public, for consuming this “sensationalized news, and it’s not even news, it’s just complete nonsense” as Steve Kerr put it. But we are abetted by a willing cohort in the news media, a group more interested in clicks and ad buys than in continuing to deserve its 1st Amendment rights. Shame on all of us. And go ahead and add that “E” for “Entertainment” to the beginning of Fox, ABC, CNN, NBC, CBS, etc. They’ve earned it.