Framing ( Part 1)

During the first week of the new MLB season, the sport was struck by tragedy. Young Nick Adenhart, a 23 year old Pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, was killed in a car accident, along with 2 of his friends while driving home from his first "start" of the season where he pitched 6 scoreless innings and played fantastically. It really was a sad incident. ESPN, being the self proclaimed "World Wide Leader in Sports", jumped all over the story, and rightfully so. They really did a lot of work investigating, telling and re-telling the story to the public, every day for nearly a week and a half. What I thought was interesting however is how many different ways in which the story was told.

ESPN is constantly in a difficult spot with these type of stories. First and foremost, their responsibility is to cover sports, in all its forms, be it analysis, opinions, reporting, broadcasting, and portrayal. So when tragedies like this one strike, it is their job to still cover this, while also fulfilling these other duties. I found this particularly interesting with the Nick Adenhart story. Firstly they covered it from a pure reporting standpoint. While watching ESPN during the night of the accident, I began seeing little headlines scroll across the "ESPN Bottom Line". Over the next day or two, I began seeing those stories morph into even more elaborate and detailed headlines, about newly revealed details on the accident, like how they were killed by a drunk driver, then how there were 4 people in the car that Adenhart was in, then about how 3 of those people died, and one was in critical condition. More and more of these little headlines crawled across the screen, but I noticed the tone of the headlines changed a little bit. Some I remember, were about how the driver and his passenger were ok enough after the accident to flee on foot afterwards, and how the driver had been drunk during the crash, and most notably, how he had been convicted of DUI before, and was driving on a suspended license. The stories got more and more grim.