Sports
Trump Shows Up To A Game And ESPN Goes Dark While Fox Sports Stays On Air
By Michael Yappaport, . BSN Network. Satire.
ESPN, the self-declared worldwide leader in sports, experienced a full broadcast failure during a presidential visit Sunday, going dark at the exact moment the most recognizable man on earth walked into the building and leaving its production truck looking like it had been managed by the same people who schedule the Jets.
Fox Sports, which costs less, complains less, and apparently has its wiring done by adults, carried the moment without interruption.
The failure, which ESPN has described in a written statement as a "temporary signal disruption consistent with large-scale security protocol environments," lasted long enough that several viewers assumed their televisions had finally made an editorial decision.
It had not. The television was fine. ESPN was the problem, as it has been, in various forms, since the company laid off four hundred people and then spent the remaining budget on a desk that rotates.
Head coach sources, speaking on background because apparently that is what we are doing now, confirmed that communication with the sideline was affected during the pregame window, which is the exact period when having your communications disrupted is most useful to the people trying to stop you from winning. Nobody is suggesting anything. It is just a fact. A fact that is sitting there.
Stephen A. Smith, reached for comment, said the incident was "a reflection of the systemic failure to protect the infrastructure of sports broadcasting from the kind of unprecedented geopolitical interference that frankly, and I want to be clear about this, frankly, nobody has been talking about enough." He then said the words "let me finish" to a room he was alone in.
The White House did not respond to questions about whether Secret Service protocol includes any provision for broadcast disruption, which is itself an answer of sorts.
Meanwhile, Fox Sports, which has never won a journalism award and is not trying to, broadcast the whole thing in HD with a graphic package and a theme song. Their truck was parked. Their crew ate sandwiches. Everything worked.
This is the same ESPN that renegotiated its way into the most expensive media rights deal in the history of American sports, which it is now in the process of streaming through an app that crashes when three people in the same ZIP code open it simultaneously.
The league issued a statement calling the outage a "minor technical matter" and expressing confidence in ESPN's ability to restore service, which is what you say about a contractor you cannot fire for six more years.
Service was eventually restored. The game continued. ESPN's analysts spent the remainder of the broadcast not mentioning what had just happened, which is, genuinely, the most impressive technical achievement of the whole afternoon.
The story we are making fun of: https://frontofficesports.com/article/espn-suffers-technical-troubles-during-trump-visit/