How ESPN Ditched Journalism And Followed Skip Bayless To The Bottom: A Tim Tebow Story

In October, Doug Gottlieb, a radio host and basketball analyst who’d decamped for CBS the previous month after nine years with ESPN, went on The Dan Patrick Show and dropped something of a truth bomb about his time in Bristol: I was told specifically, “You can’t talk enough Tebow.” I would jokingly throw it into a segment. “I gotta find 15 seconds here to talk about Tebow, all right let’s move on and talk about Major League Baseball.” Advertisement Later, he said: Is it ridiculous how much you have to talk about Tebow? Yeah! But for whatever reason people can’t get enough of that story, and they kind of stoke the fire—that’s kind of what ESPN does. Advertisement Gottlieb was referring to the network’s yearlong infatuation with Tebow, a player who hasn’t made much actual news since he was traded to the Jets in March. Bristol executives have decided that what we want—or what we should want—is Tebow. “They want to own the Tebow story,” said Jim Miller, the author of the ESPN oral history Those Guys Have All The Fun. “They want to put their watermark on it.” This helps explain why, over the summer, ESPN dispatched veteran reporter… Read full this story

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