ESPN: Portrayal of Sports on Television Essay -- Television Media TV

ESPN: Portrayal of Sports on Television Sports have played a big in role throughout the history of television. Without the television, sport fans would not be able to tune into NFL games on Sunday and Monday nights. They wouldn’t be able to sit at home and watch every basketball game played during March Madness. The television has given everybody around the world a chance to watch some of the biggest and best sporting events that have ever taken place. However, for a long amount of time there was no television show that was dedicated towards just sports. One would be able to find everything they wanted to know about sport statistics in magazines and newspapers but the public could not sit down on their couch and visually recap all of the major events that took place the last evening. ESPN changed how sports were portrayed on television forever. ESPN debuted to 1.4 million homes at 7 p.m. Sept. 7, 1979 and it was from this point that television and sports history was about to be made (Faye). ESPN gave all sports fans a chance to view sports all week long 24/7. Before the only thing that people could view was what the local news clips of games but ESPN dedicated every week to sports. ESPN was an instant hit for that very reason and kept growing throughout the years. Today ESPN has two networks ESPN and ESPN 2. Both of these are dedicate to sports attract many viewers. EPSN reaches 76.2 million homes while ESPN 2 reaches 65 million homes. ESPN is by far the biggest sporting network ever created on television (Faye). The show only started off with 70 employees and has now grown to 2100 employees (Faye). The show has an estimated worth 15.4 billion dollars and is continually growing each year (Shea). The show delivers 4,... ...und. With the atmosphere of sports being such a huge role in peoples lives ESPN gives the sport fans a chance to get sporting news 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. For many this is the best thing that has happened since the television first premiered. Without the invention of the television ESPN as the public knows it would never be how it is today. Without ESPN a name such as Dick Vitale would not be what it is today and we would be stuck watching the 3 minute clips of sporting events on the local news. This show, ESPN, has emerged into the sporting king of television. Works Cited Faye, John. "ESPN changed history of Sports." The Cincinnati Enquire. 5 September 1999. www.enquirer.com/editions/1999/09/05/spt_espn_changed_history.html Shea, Jim. "The King: How ESPN Changes Everything." Columbia Journalism Review. Jan/Feb 2000. www.cjr.org/year/00/1/king.asp