By MJD
Yahoo Sports
Tom Brady made an appearance on WEEI in New England yesterday, and the hosts of "The Big Show" asked him about the media's treatment of Spygate. Brady, in a smooth, not-at-all angry tone, sort of called out the Worldwide Leader in Sports. Here it is, via
Awful Announcing.
Well, yes and no. I see where Tom's coming from, and if I was in his shoes, I'd be likely to see it the same way. Is ESPN guilty of overreporting the whole Spygate thing? Maybe. Probably.
But they're ESPN. That's what they do. Accusing ESPN of overreporting a story is like accusing popsicles of being too cold.
There's SportsCenter, NFL Live, Pardon the Interruption, Around the Horn, Outside the Lines, the Sports Reporters ... they've all got time to fill, and obviously, it's a story of great public interest. There's a very decent argument to be made that ESPN overreports everything. It's a 24-hour sports network. It's kind of their job.
Barry Bonds thinks they're making too big a deal about his involvement with steroids. Michael Vick thinks they made too big a deal about dogfighting. O.J. Mayo thinks they're making too big a deal about his ownership of a plasma screen TV. O.J. Simpson thinks they made too a deal about that whole double-murder thing.
Brady's right when he says it's the environment. It is. And it's an environment that we've created by being ravenous sports fans who crave a ton of information, opinion, analysis, and columnists (and ex-columnists) and TV personalities yelling at each other. The market insists that it exist, and it does. It's the nature of the beast.