 | Congressional hearings usually don't make for great TV ... unless someone starts pointing fingers. Mark Wilson/Getty Images News |
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Media criticism does not fall under the official job requirements of the President of the United States, but George Bush happily channeled his inner Howard Kurtz last October to offer his assessment of a certain cable channel. "C-SPAN is not what you would call exciting TV, though some of the call-in shows do have their moments," said Bush, whose remarks were part of a ceremony in which he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb. "C-SPAN has no agenda, and only one assumption: that interested viewers are intelligent, and can make up their own minds about what they see and what they hear."
Unfiltered and ESPN rarely appear in the same sentence, and viewers will have a distinct choice on Tuesday beginning at 9:30 a.m. ET, when both C-SPAN 2 and ESPN air gavel-to-gavel coverage of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform's examination of George Mitchell's report on performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, union head Donald Fehr and Mitchell are to testify before the committee. C-SPAN's coverage will air on CSPAN 2, C-Span Radio and through streaming video at www.c-span.org. "The viewers are essentially taking a chair in the hearing room and watching it as if they were there," says John Cardarelli, the network's media relations director. "It's unfiltered, and that's the difference between our coverage and what you would get elsewhere."
Where C-SPAN prides itself on unfiltered, uninterrupted and unedited coverage -- Stephen A. Smith would not be a good fit, for instance -- ESPN will gladly filter and interrupt whenever possible so it can bring you its army of baseball and legal experts. The coverage on ESPN and ESPNews (the hearings will air simultaneously on both networks) will be anchored by the always stout Bob Ley, who will play traffic cop for baseball analysts Peter Gammons, Buster Olney and Steve Phillips, legal expert Roger Cossack and the rest of the folks that make up Bristol's biggest law firm. Investigative reporter T.J. Quinn and two producers will be stationed at the hearings. Cable networks such as CNN and MSNBC plan to cover parts of the hearings live, depending on the breaking news of the day.
While Nielsen does not track C-SPAN's ratings, Cardarelli says that C-SPAN viewers were engaged via calling into the network's Washington Journal show when the network covered the congressional hearings on steroids in baseball in March 2005. Is mighty ESPN worried about losing viewers to C-SPAN? "Everyone airing it is a competitor, I suppose," says Vince Doria, ESPN's senior vice president and director of news and the sports editor of the Boston Globe when Roger Clemens was a twentysomething flamethrower with the Red Sox. "We have an audience that we hope will come to us for coverage. I guess they are competition, but I can tell you are we are not sitting here saying, 'How are we going to beat C-SPAN?'"
When sports and Congress intersect on live television, the results can be compelling (or even zany) theater. The last time baseball found itself in this chamber, Mark McGwire famously went mum on the past, Sammy Sosa went Spanish-only and Rafael Palmeiro turned indignant ("I have never used steroids. Period.") "The story has been a topic of constant speculation among fans, players and the media," says Doria. "Who did it? Who didn't do it? What was the impact? How widespread was it? While you have a general sense that sometimes fans and viewers are fatigued by this, whenever there is a new development on it, the numbers reflect interest on it from our end. It is one of these stories whose import goes beyond following the sport as a fan. It goes to the credibility of the sport."
ESPN rightly received high marks for its coverage of the release of the Mitchell Report but ran into some bumpy moments during coverage of the press conference called by Clemens on Jan. 7. On that day viewers saw messages from ESPN.com readers scroll across the TV screen, a multi-platform strategy to offer viewers a sampling of the feedback that was coming into its dot-com arm. One severe message (ROGER CLEMENS IS A CRIMINAL AND A CHEAT!! PLAIN AND SIMPLE!!) on ESPN2 drew criticism and opened up questions whether ESPN was prejudging Clemens. Doria said the quotes were snugly edited so they could fit for television and that the network should have done a better job of screening what made it to the air. "One of the initiatives here is try to cross-platform material as best we can," he says. "It's all an experiment and some things may work better than others. There was a comment which read ROGER CLEMENS IS A CRIMINAL and it was bouncing on the screen at the same time Clemens was talking at his press conference. I think we all believe that should not have run. It was a little too stark."
One person who will not be part of ESPN's coverage is Fernando Vina, the Baseball Tonight analyst and former major league infielder who was named in the Mitchell Report. "As far as [Vina working as] a Baseball Tonight analyst, where we are going next year, it's still undermined," says Doria. "It was unexpected when his name appeared in the report. We had no prior sense of that and there were some issues with getting him on the air...It just doesn't seem appropriate to put him on right now. Could he bring something to the table because his involvement? Yes, he could. But I think people would be skeptical and rightly so."
Richard Deitsch, SI.com's media writer, will live blog tomorrow's hearings on SI.com and FanNation.com starting at 9:15 a.m. ET.
