First and foremost, I am the biggest ESPN supporter on the planet. Or, at least, as supportive as any other sports fan out there. Here’s my beef.

In the past month and a half alone, ESPN has resorted to almost TMZ-like tactics in some of their reporting. All were situations with high profile teams and that needs to be noted.

At a time in modern media, where most companies are faltering, ESPN is succeeding, and expanding. But if this is the future of the Disney offchute, I am going to be one sad panda.

Ed Werder hammered the Dallas Cowboys on their ‘locker room chemistry’. Romo said this, TO was pissed, Romo and Witten love each other and hate TO, and TO just loves him some him – it was like a bad MySpace application. There was literally 10 or so continuous scrolling screens on the supposed Cowboys locker room tiff – while not showing anything on hockey whatsoever.

Second, Scott Pioli finally announced that Herman Edwards was fired as coach of the Kansas City Chiefs after three years. Quite expected (Herm, build on that!) But within the hour, Chris Mortensen was reporting that the Chiefs were “close to signing ex-Broncos coach Mike Shanahan” to be their new coach. In reality, Shanahan had never even talked to the team about the open position. Alledgedly, Mortensen had a ‘source’ in KC that the team ‘was interested’ in Shanahan to be their new coach. Mortensen then says it was imminent that a deal would be signed. Shanahan has said he will sit out 2009 while his ex-boss Pat Bowlen pays him the salary for 2009 his contract demands. EPIC FAIL MORTENSEN!

Third, this absolute horrendous crap on Mr. Torre’s book with Tom Verducci entitled The Yankee Years. ESPN ran bottomline updates 7 or 8 continuous lines with such propoganda as ‘Torre calls A-Rod ‘A-Fraud’”, ‘Torre says Cashman ‘disgraced’ him”, and other crap. Look this book is a third person narrative written by Verducci through Mr. Torre’s experiences. I will not say Joe didn’t get a crap deal in NY, he very much did, but the way ESPN jumped on it was like they were Jose Canseco ratting out anything he could to make a buck. I hate conspiracy theories, in the media anyway, but ESPN is just about as anti-Yankee as a media organization can be. That’s fine, much of America is anti-Yankee, but they aren’t exactly breaking any rules in the league. And for ESPN to pimp out a rival’s book (Verduccui writes for SI) like that was 100% unneccessary in my book.

This isn’t a big deal at ESPN right now, they’re a fantastic organization. But these are three examples in less than 60 days that legitimately pissed me off. By no means is this indicative of a larger problem, but the quick pace of these three ‘Tabloid’ like stories angers me.

So stop it Bristol. Cover sports the excellent way you do. Don’t cater to big market gossip and ensure your reporters have real leads before reporting ‘Breaking News’. Thanks.