Azubuike24;1251314 wrote:UNC isn't getting preferential treatment. More like, they aren't getting ridiculous, over-the-top, jump to conclusions treatment. The fans of the programs who are likely victims of this, or have been victims of this, are the ones making a stink. That's why I've seen both UK and Duke fans crying out.
I'm not saying I agree that UNC deserves anything more, but I think those fans do have a point. For instance, if this was Nick Saban at Alabama, it would be breaking news every hour. You would get daily updates even if there was nothing new to report.
I think Az captured the heart of my previous post just perfectly here. It's not that I think ESPN is blatantly covering up any wrongdoing by the UNC basketball program, but rather it is my viewpoint that the sports network has taken a decidedly cautious and detached stance on the entire matter, thus leaving fans of Duke and Kentucky and other schools that have experienced much less circumspect treatment from ESPN in the past regarding similar situations where sports scandals are suspected (i.e. the Duke lacrosse debacle, or the Bernie Fine affair at Syracuse) with a sour taste in their mouths. Those two situations involved much more serious accusations than what's being investigated at UNC, but the general point remains that ESPN -- and a large majority of the media -- decided not to wait until all of the facts were clear in those cases before beginning to air hearsay that cast outrageous aspersions about those two institutions around the clock as if they were fact. And, in the end, of course, those accusations just weren't true.
While ESPN's conservative and evenhanded approach to the UNC story is exactly how the network should be handling a situation as this wherein not all of the details are known, it is hard not to criticize it when considering how ESPN has handled its reporting of other certain high-profile schools in the past. Can you imagine if a similar accusation of academic fraud was being reported in Lexington? ESPN would relocate the entire town of Bristol to the Commonwealth, and that is the only college basketball news you would hear until November. Even with the history of Calipari's vacated Final Fours, that simply wouldn't be fair. But that's how ESPN would react in that event, because "Kentucky" would make it a big story. For whatever reason, Duke and Kentucky just seem to be more universally polarizing than UNC, which makes for a more interesting story to a broader amount of people.