I don't understand why this is in the Bears forum, either. It has nothing to do with the Bears.
Clearly, this is all about ratings, and a whiney hockey fan. ESPN can charge it's sponsors (advertisers) more money when it has more viewers, and it gets more viewers when it covers sports that viewers are interested in. That's mostly football and to a lesser extent, basketball.
The writer may feel that if ESPN covered hockey more, the sport would become more popular, or that hockey isn't that popular because ESPN doesn't cover it. That's not necessarily the case. This is kind of a "chicken-and-egg" argument. The fact is that many people who watch a hockey game don't understand it or find it boring ("like soccer on ice").
I watched most of the NHL playoffs and the Stanley Cup in bars here in Topeka and nobody was even the least bit interested; not even local Bears and Cubs fans! During the Cup, most people didn't even know it was a championship series that was being televised.
There is a reason cable tv has an NFL network and no NHL network. Broadcasters will give the viewers what they want to see, and most viewers don't want to see hockey coverage. If you ran a network would you put on programming that would cause your viewers to turn the channel? I wouldn't.
Those are all valid points, points that one would think could be foreseen and preempted by a writer whose thoughts extend further than "dah, dey should cover da hockey more". Unfortunately, it seems that is the place this writer seems content to stop his argument.
Which, like I said, is fine, and I'm not in a position to say one way or the other definitively whether the sport is covered on a level commensurate with what coverage it should be getting, and I'd even go so far as to believe that there is a definite, tangible disparity in the amount of coverage hockey receives versus how much it should receive from a "reputable" [sporting] news agency (mainly because I hate ESPN, as they are way too overpopulated with unworthy hacks, namely Golic and Greenberg).
That being said, there was no discernible effort made in the article to identify that disparity objectively, nor was there any discussion about how a reputable media outlet should divvy up its coverage, much less the leading media outlet in the world for a given topic.
These would have all been fantastic and interesting arguments and thoughts, but they are nowhere to be found inside the article itself, nor are they being heard from the writer. The comments on a piece should never be decidedly better and more interesting than the article itself, so I renew my claim: article blows.
Please. You made a stupid, just admit it and move on. Also, you have a full keyboard in front of you, fucking use it, you hack.
