Southern Illinois University Carbondale OpenSIUC Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 5-1-2013 Mediating the Bubble: ESPN's SportsCenter's Coverage of the NCAA men's Basketball Bubble Scott aD vid Lambert Southern Illinois University Carbondale, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations Recommended Citation Lambert, Scott aD vid, "Mediating the Bubble: ESPN's SportsCenter's Coverage of the NCAA men's Basketball Bubble" (2013). Dissertations. Paper 685. This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at OpenSIUC. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of OpenSIUC. For more information, please contact [email protected]. MEDIATING THE BUBBLE: ESPN’S SPORTSCENTER AND COVERAGE OF THE NCAA MEN’S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT by Scott Lambert B.A., Southern Illinois University, 1988 M.S., Southern Illinois University, 2007 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy Department of Mass Communication and Media Arts Southern Illinois University Carbondale May 2013 DISSERTATION APPROVAL MEDIATING THE BUBBLE: ESPN’S SPORTSCENTER AND COVERAGE OF THE NCAA MEN’S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT By Scott Lambert A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of Mass Communications and Media Arts Approved by: William Babcock, Chair William Freivogel John Pearson Aaron Veenstra Deborah Tudor Novotney Lawrence Graduate School Southern Illinois University Carbondale April 8, 2013 Copyright by SCOTT LAMBERT, 2013 All Rights Reserved AN ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION OF Scott Lambert, for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Mass Communications and Media Arts presented on October 25 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: MEDIATING THE BUBBLE: ESPN’S SPORTSCENTER AND COVERAGE OF THE NCAA MEN’S BASKETBALL TOURNAMENT MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. William Babcock This dissertation examines ESPN’s SportsCenter’s coverage of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament bubble. The dissertation examines the differences in coverage between average teams from the six major NCAA Division I men’s basketball conferences and teams from the other 25 conferences. The dissertation examines SportsCenter’s coverage from an effects method, questioning whether SportsCenter sets the agenda for other news media in terms of national sports coverage, in this case coverage of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament bubble. The dissertation also takes an effects method in terms of framing, examining the narratives SportsCenter uses to describe tournament teams and the attributes that SportsCenter chooses to use depending on the conference affiliation of the team. Finally, the dissertation examines SportsCenter’s coverage in terms of political economy, concentrating on ESPN’s financial ties to the six major conferences and the importance of maintaining a status quo in terms of promoting the superiority of teams from the six conferences compared to teams from the other conferences. Combining the three approaches provides evidence that SportsCenter does tilt its coverage in favor of teams from the six major conferences in order to promote its financial priorities. SportsCenter works to emphasize a perception of superiority among average teams from the six major conferences in order to ensure that its top teams are easily and often exposed to ESPN’s coverage and to maintain consistent ratings. i DEDICATION To Jamey, without your support, this wouldn’t have been possible. All my love. Thanks. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, thanks to my wife Jamey, who made all of this possible. I would also like to thank my dissertation chair, Dr. William Babcock for his help and his guidance, and Bill Freivogel for his ability to always find common ground with people, I learned a lot from him. Thanks to my committee for helping pull this together. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... i DEDICATION ............................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS….…………………………………………………………………….iii CHAPTERS CHAPTER 1 – Introduction.................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 2 – Literature Review………………………………………………………...6 CHAPTER 3 – Historical Overview……………….…………………………………….32 CHAPTER 4 – Methods ....................................................................................................44 CHAPTER 5 – Analysis ....................................................................................................52 CHAPTER 6 – Conclusions.............................................................................................105 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………………....127 VITA ………………………………………………………………………………………….139 LIST OF TABLES TABLE PAGE Table 1………………………………………………………………………………………….55 Table 2………………………………………………………………………………………….56 Table 3 …………………………………………………………………………………………58 Table 4………………………………………………………………………………………….89 Table 5………………………………………………………………………………………….96 Table 6………………………………………………………………………………………….98 Table 7………………………………………………………………………………………..100 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The success of Butler University and Virginia Commonwealth University in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s national men’s basketball tournament during the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 seasons brought forth claims of parity in men’s basketball from national sports media. Both schools advanced to the NCAA Final Four in the 2010-2011 season, and Butler University qualified for the national championship game in both 2009-2010 and 2010-2011. The success of the two schools from non-traditional power basketball conferences reinforced the argument that the NCAA men’s basketball tournament is fair. But to say the NCAA men’s basketball tournament selection process is fair is not true (Litos, 2007). Despite the narrative of parity arriving in the NCAA, the playing field tilts considerably in favor of six specific conferences. The Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big Ten Conference, the Big East Conference, the Big 12 Conference, the Southeastern Conference and the Pac-12 Conference have considerable advantages over teams from the other 25 NCAA Division I men’s basketball conferences (B. J. Coleman, DuMond, & Lynch, 2010). One advantage is tradition. The powerhouses play in these conferences. Universities with programs that have won multiple national titles – universities such as the University of North Carolina, the University of Kansas, the University of California at Los Angeles, Syracuse University, Michigan State University, Duke, and Ohio State University – play in these conferences. These programs have won national titles and garnered attention through the years as national powerhouses. These universities make the six major conferences powerful. 2 At the same time, these conferences also are filled with teams such as Wake Forest University, the University of Illinois, Virginia Tech University, Northwestern University, Rutgers University, Oregon State University and Baylor University. These universities all have large alumni bases, large fan bases and traditions of being good at times. These universities also benefit from the success of the major powerhouses that reside in their conferences. The college basketball teams from these universities enjoy the benefits of constant media exposure and a perception that their league is strong because the top teams in the league are strong. These universities also have the advantage of television. Television rights packages in basketball provide billions of dollars for the coffers of the NCAA. The NCAA men’s college basketball tournament is the NCAA’s largest income source. The NCAA has no control over college football’s television revenue, so basketball is important for the institution. The basketball revenue from television represents 80 percent of the NCAA’s operating income (NCAA, 2011). Keeping the six conferences that control the majority of college football’s television revenues satisfied is important to the NCAA. The six conferences that control the revenue in football receive more than 60 percent of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament’s television rights disbursements (NCAA, 2011). They receive the vast majority of airtime and an even greater amount of national coverage from the press. The most powerful force in sports media is ESPN. ESPN’s main sports journalism program, SportsCenter, reaches more than 90 million sports fans a month, and athletes, coaches and sports journalists watch it. SportsCenter concentrates its college basketball coverage on the teams from the top six conferences ("ESPN Corporate Information," 2010), and ESPN concentrates its coverage and pays millions of dollars in television rights fees to these six conferences, which makes it difficult for ESPN to avoid conflict-of-interest questions. 3 This dissertation examines that conflict of interest and questions if this leads to a bias in coverage. The overall question this dissertation asks is this: Does ESPN, through its major sports journalism vehicle SportsCenter, contribute to an unfair advantage for teams from the six major NCAA Division I men’s college basketball conferences as compared to teams from the 25 other NCAA Division I college basketball conferences?