Framing (Part 2)

Even in headlines, you could tell that ESPN was starting to frame the story. Then the longer form stories started cropping up on ESPN.com. The stories started to place Adenhart and his friends as martyrs of drunk driving and really emphasized the fault and blame that should go to the driver. They essentially made him out to be a monster, and I'm not saying he's not, but this is the way all of the stories were framed. They tend not to mention how the driver, although he had a DUI arrest before, tried to get some help as recently as the night of the incident, but was turned away. Or how he was kicked out of rehab.

Amy Nelson of ESPN was one such reporter who really tried to circumvent this company wide framing, and tell the story from an alternative angle. She wrote one story that was particularly striking to me. She essentially did a count up to the accident, with timestamps of what every person involved in the accident was doing, except for Nick. She wanted to get every other side of the story. So she narrated the 3 other victims, and the driver's day leading up to the incident, going deeply in to the driver's motivation for getting behind that wheel, knowingly intoxicated. I thought this was a great job by her.

She essentially took the sports out of an ESPN story. She removed the loss of a budding young Pitcher, and didn't once mention it from that angle. The problem that ESPN was having is that at the end of the day, it has to come back to sports. Sooner or later, there have to be awkward sequences on Baseball Tonight about how "Although the death is the real tragedy, and we're not trying to make light of that, but this really hurts the Angels' rotation now.", and if "This hurts the Angels' chances at winning the division this year?" Then there's the weird fantasy baseball moment where it gets mentioned that "if your team was relying on Adenhart, here are some pitchers you can pick up to replace him."

ESPN's unique situation as the chief sports news entity, puts them in weird situations when it comes to this stuff. Since they have to frame it 3 or 4 different ways, the company can come off as a combination of insensitive, oversensitive, grandstanding, or even telling an incomplete story.