Does ESPN Promote Bad Sportsmanship?

I'm not really a big fan of the news media these days. In sports and in the news in general, people seem to focus on the negatives too much. Obviously it is important to know what is going on in the world, positive or negative, but that's just the problem. It is only the negative that we are being told about in the news and especially on ESPN's Sportscenter.

Aside from the highlights of games most of ESPN's stories are very negative. When a player gets arrested that is one of the top stories. When a player gets thrown out of a game or gets suspended or fined that is the big story. When two teammates fight with each other that is the big story. When a player celebrates a play by dancing around that is a top story. When a player is got cheating that is a top story. When a player makes a big donation to a charity or visits children in a hospital you'll never know about it.

Recently I was watching Sportscenter and two of their talking heads were actually debating who would get another job first, Pacman Jones or Tank Johnson. Why are we wasting time on these two bums? Why not debate the nicest guy in the NFL, or who is most charitable, or who is the best teammate?

Several years ago Steve Aicinena did some research on Sportscenter and wrote a report about it called "One Hundred and Two Days of 'Sportscenter': Messages of Poor Sportsmanship, Violence, and Immorality." Aicinena watched 102 episodes of Sportscenter and recorded every non-highlight comment made on each show. The research was to see how many comments were about good sportsmanship and moral behavior and how many were about bad sportsmanship and immoral behavior. Out of the 1,706 comments he recorded 355 of them fell under the category of sportsmanship or morality issues. Out of the 355 comments, 352 of them were negative.