Fox Sports Blurs Lines Between Football and Reality TV

Flashback to January 2011. The Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers renew the oldest rivalry in the NFL with a trip to the Super Bowl on the line...

It’s the third quarter. The Bears, down at Soldier Field, try to mount a comeback while their starting quarterback, Jay Cutler, slumps on the sidelines and shields himself from the freezing temperatures with a space blanket. Fair or not, Jay Cutler left this last impression on the media, the fans, even other players around the league, before fading away into lockout-infused offseason obscurity.

Fast forward to Sunday, September 18th, 2011. The Bears travel to New Orleans to take on the Saints at the Superdome and the broadcast belongs to Fox Sports. During the game, announcers Kenny Albert and Daryl Johnson, naturally, find the time to discuss Jay Cutler and the questions concerning his toughness that continue to haunt the much maligned quarterback.

So far, nothing unusual. Addressing the issue is good journalism. It’s early in the season, and many fans had not glimpsed Cutler since the ill-fated championship game. If I’m Fox, of course I want to address a controversial topic on air... what could possibly go wrong?

Here’s what.

In a new twist on the “Cutler’s toughness” saga, Fox superimposed images of newspaper headlines over pictures of the Bears quarterback on the sidelines. The announcers then make the claim that “These are the actual headlines from the local papers in Chicago,” following the NFC Championship.

“Cutler Leaves With Injury”

“Cutler Lacks Courage”

“Cutler No Leader”

All of these so called headlines could have been (and were) claims made by, well, anyone and everyone in January. The only problem with Fox’s “journalistic evidence” is that not one of these headlines actually appeared in a “local Chicago paper.”

Unlike Fox, the Chicago Tribune did a little digging and what did they discover:

"The whole production rang false to us. The headlines didn't look real. The language used in them was off. And since we know that most Chicago media had defended Cutler, we looked into it. We searched throughout Illinois newspapers for those headlines — Tribune, Sun-Times, Daily Herald, every other paper in the state.

What did we find?

Nothing.

In fact, we could not find any such headlines in any newspaper in the United States."

Wait a second. Am I claiming that television programming actually lied?

Yes I am. And through their lie, Fox blurred the line between live sports coverage and reality television such that their broadcast became Jersey Shore meets the National Football League.

Most people, when they watch television, suspend their disbelief. They understand the program, even if it claims to be “reality,” is at best a scripted one - influenced by producers and distributors clamoring for ratings. Fox is a network. They want to create a compelling argument as to why a viewer should tune in to the Bears Saints game on their network, as opposed to the Buffalo Bills versus Oakland Raiders game airing on CBS at the same time. By hyping up the Cutler story line, they hoped to give viewers another reason to watch, another compelling story line to follow.

Through their lie, however, Fox discredited the authenticity of their broadcast, because (go figure) football is not Jersey Shore. The reality should not have to be scripted. Live sports production predicates itself on being a window into the ball-park. The viewer watching at home and a fan in the bleachers should see the same thing. The only scripts that should exist are the laminated ones clutched tightly in the fists of the coaches on the sidelines.

Fans found the Jay Cutler story line infuriating, amusing, and interesting all off-season - without lies. Besides discrediting their authenticity, Fox also painted itself as lazy by airing the fabricated headlines. As the Chicago Tribune points out, if network executives had dug a little deeper they would have found this gold mine of a quote courtesy of Jacksonville Jaguars running back Maurice Jones-Drew, "Hey I think the Urban Meyer rule is effect right now... When the going gets tough........QUIT."

Plenty of people had plenty to say after the NFC Championship in January. The ash from the Cuter explosion settled in various media outlets across the internet from ESPN to Twitter.

It’s the networks job to hype and over analyze the subplots of a game. However, football currently holds the title of the most popular sport in America because so many people already find the subplots interesting without the networks having to infuse them with lies to make them interesting.