My latest column for the National Sports Journalism Center at Indiana talks about the perception problems ESPN faces in the wake of pulling out of the League of Denial film on PBS.

Here’s an excerpt:

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Often in the game of perception vs. reality, perception is Peyton Manning going up against a nine-man defense.

The news/journalism division of ESPN knows all too well in the wake of pulling out of PBS’ production of the “League of Denial” documentary earlier this year. The perception is that the NFL pressured its TV partner back off on the controversial film about concussions that portrayed the league in a negative light.

At the time, ESPN insisted the issue was over editorial control with PBS and not a case of wilting like a miniature running back being hit by a 325-pound defensive lineman. Few people believed it then. It was as if NFL commissioner Roger Goodell was pulling the puppet strings above ESPN’s headquarters in Bristol.

The repercussions go beyond this one instance for ESPN. Its credibility likely will be questioned whenever the network has to cover a highly charged story involving one of its partners. Bottom line: The whole thing just looked bad.

The reality, ESPN’s Vince Doria insists, is much different. During a recent interview with Sherman Report, the ESPN director of news addressed the fallout from ESPN’s pullout from the documentary. Doria wouldn’t get into the specifics of the network’s decision. However, he stressed repeatedly that it wasn’t a case of ESPN bowing to the NFL.

“People either didn’t do their homework as well as they could have, or maybe didn’t want to do their homework as well as they could have,” Doria said.  “It is an easy enough story if you wanted to, to connect some dots to it and say, ‘Look, they kowtowed to the NFL.’  But if you looked slightly further, and look at what the on‑air product was and what we delivered and the volume of what we delivered, the platforms over which we delivered it and so forth, show me somebody else that comes anywhere near giving that kind of exposure to the concussion issue as it relates to the NFL. I don’t think there is anybody.”

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If you follow the twitter feed of Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch, of which there are many, you know that he constantly bashes ESPN for moving Outside The Lines to an earlier, less attractive time slot on Sundays during the football season.

And if you follow Keith Olbermann, also a considerable number, you can sense his frustration about his show, Olbermann, not starting on a consistent time on ESPN2. There even are many nights it airs on ESPNNews because of the network’s live coverage of games.

I addressed those issues and more in the second part of my Q/A with Vince Doria, ESPN’s senior VP and director of news. Note: Olbermann’s show doesn’t directly fall under Doria’s watch, but he says he is “heavily involved with it.”

What is the situation with Outside The Lines? Deitsch has been hammering you guys. He says the move marks a reduced priority on journalism at ESPN.

Well, if you’re really paying attention, the Sunday morning show had moved over to 2 last year during football season, so this was the second year of it.  I’m not sure why the sky was falling this year.

The daily show moved over to 2 this year for the first time during the football season.  I believe there’s going to be some discussions about moving it back to 1 after the football season.  We’ll see what happens.

But look, shows ‑‑ daily shows here are always challenging.  For instance, the daily OTL show, when it was launched it was briefly a late night show but then it became an afternoon show 3:00 in the afternoon, and it was called OTL First Report. When it was launched it was the first live news and information show on during the day.  We were still re‑airing SportsCenter throughout the day, and there was certainly a sense on people this was the first ‑‑ that show then would carry headlines from the day and so forth.

When we launched the live day part SportsCenter starting at 9:00, now by the time you get to Outside the Lines and so forth, a lot of these topics have been dissected during the day.  By the way, it’s not just SportsCenter, it’s Mike & Mike, it’s First Take, Colin Cowherd, a variety of shows. While Outside the Lines I think tries to take a little different look at some of these pieces and have a different group of guests on and so forth,  it still might be in some cases people are saying I think I’ve heard this discussion here before.

So what are the options?

It’s part of the battle this place has.  This has been going on ‑‑ the issue of you’re repetitive and you’re doing the same discussions and doing the same stories on all your shows have been going on forever.  So I think that ‑‑ with the daily OTL show, that’s the challenge, to figure out does it need to evolve a bit based on the changing landscape and so forth? I’m not sure what that means or even if that should be the case.

It’s like a period of time we’re going through right now where we’ve had things like the Jameis Winston story, the Grambling story, (recently) we’ve got a handful of stories here that kind of play into the Outside the Lines milieu, if you will. That’s a good time.  Sometimes those stories aren’t out there with the same frequency.

The original Outside the Lines show was an hour‑long show generally built around one theme that had three, four, five pieces, and there were 8 to 12 of them a year with no real sort of regular air schedule.  It might air on a Tuesday night at 10:00 or a Thursday night at 7:00, whenever there was time available.

Then we launched the Sunday morning show, and that was always anchored by at least one, sometimes two long form enterprise pieces.  When we went to the daily OTL show where we were going to be doing this six days a week, we all understood that we could not produce six original long‑form enterprise investigative pieces a week, not unless we were going to hire a lot more than 30 people to do it.

You know, that’s one of the things we have to address to try to figure out, is there a next evolution of the daily show here?  When you find out what it is, let me know.  We’re trying to figure that out.

How do you feel Olbermann is going?

Well, I think it’s hard to tell.  It’s been kind of knocked around in terms of where it is and everything because of live events. It’s on at 11:00, oh, it’s on at midnight, oh, it’s over at ESPN News and so forth.  I like the show.  But I think it’s tough to get a chance when you’re buffeted like that on ESPN 2.

Look, part of the push‑pull around here is there’s an effort to grow ESPN 2, and that’s why you see certain shows there, going over there, and so forth.

On the other hand, you sometimes get into a situation where you look at a show and say, gee, I wonder how it would do on ESPN.  I don’t know, do we at some point take Olbermann over and see how it does at midnight on ESPN?  Maybe that decision will be made, maybe it won’t.  But the landscape is crowded.

I find Keith a rare talent in this business.  I hope that this kind of works and we figure it out or somebody figures it out and figures out how to do it because there just aren’t that many people that can do things quite the way he does them.  I hope we can figure out a way to make that work.  We’ll find out.

Is there a possibility the show could work better with a set time during the day? Or does he work better at night?

Well, one of the things that’s always fun with him are highlights.  He brings a unique style to them and he’s doing that at night right now by sort of picking and choosing what they do and so forth.  Could he do that ‑‑ listen, when you do that during the day, you have more time to look at the highlights and write them in a clever manner and so forth.  That’s a plus.  The negative is maybe everybody has seen the highlight 10 times by the time you come on.

I don’t know, could it work during the day?  Maybe.  Maybe that’ll happen.  I think there is some appeal to the late night aspect.

Why is it important for ESPN to have a strong independent news gathering operation? The E in ESPN stands for “entertainment.”

Yeah, listen, if you were starting this thing from scratch, somebody might say, you know what, we’re going to be business partners with all these people.  Maybe we don’t need to be journalists, also.  Somebody might have made that decision 30‑plus years ago.  Nobody did.  And as it happened over time with the arrival of John Walsh, other people with journalistic backgrounds, myself, more and more journalists came to the place, and I think a tradition of strong, aggressive reporting evolved, and now I think it is ‑‑ I think everybody understands that it’s part of our culture here.  It’s one of the things that we have done and done well, and people have come to expect of us.

We say we’re a 24‑hour sports, news and information channel aside from obviously carrying games and events.  With that I think comes a responsibility to do this kind of reporting.  It’ll be interesting to see as NBC and CBS and other entities get into the 24‑hour cable business, fox and so forth, whether or not they choose to pursue this kind of reporting.  I mean, everybody is going to present the daily news in some way, shape or form, obviously.  Are they also going to do investigative reporting, enterprise reporting?  I don’t know.  That’s their choice.  I don’t know that they’ll feel an obligation to do that or not.

BRISTOL, Conn.–Sitting alone on a table in front of a line of Emmys in Vince Doria’s office was League of Denial. You know, the book that ultimately created much angst for ESPN and the network’s senior vice-president and director of news.

ESPN still is feeling the fallout over its decision to take its name off the PBS Frontline documentary based on the book. The perception remains strong that the network caved in to pressure from its most important TV partner, much like a 350-pound nose guard falling on a running back.

Doria, who oversees ESPN’s news operation, was right in the middle of it. Perhaps the conspicuous placing of the book in his office was a coincidence. Or maybe he keeps it there as a reminder of a controversy that likely will linger for a long time.

In a recent interview during my recent trip to ESPN, Doria said that he wouldn’t discuss the exact details of the network’s actions regarding the documentary. However, he stressed repeatedly that ESPN didn’t bow to the NFL in this case, or any other for that matter.

“People either didn’t do their homework as well as they could have, or maybe didn’t want to do their homework as well as they could have,” Doria said.  “It is an easy enough story if you wanted to, to connect some dots to it and say, ‘Look, they kowtowed to the NFL.’  But if you looked slightly further, and look at what the on‑air product was and what we delivered and the volume of what we delivered, the platforms over which we delivered it and so forth, show me somebody else that comes anywhere near giving that kind of exposure to the concussion issue as it relates to the NFL. I don’t think there is anybody.”

Here is Doria’s first extended Q/A about the repercussions from League of Denial and ESPN’s dealings with the network’s big business partners. Notice I opened with a general question, and he went running from there.

How are things going with the various shows (SportsCenter, Outside the Lines, etc)?

The whole thing is going well.  Look, I don’t know what you were told, but I don’t want to talk about anything (regarding the documentary).  Certainly not everybody was in agreement on that, but look at the actual product that was produced. We produced six or seven pieces over the course of a year, co‑produced with Frontline, with the Fainaru brothers, our producers, their producers. They aired on OTL, which eventually formed the basis for the documentary, as well as more pieces online, written pieces.  When the documentary was ready to air, the Fainarus were on, I think, four different times for long talk‑backs here on Outside the Lines, on SportsCenter, on Olbermann.  We ran two long excerpts in OTL from the documentaries, both eight, nine minutes, shorter versions on SportsCenter, elements on other shows, on the NFL shows, Olbermann and so forth.

We probably, as it turned out, gave it even more exposure than originally planned.  As far as serving our viewers, readers, consumers and so forth, they got a heavy dose of the reporting that went into this. I think for people who think that somehow we squashed the project here or something, take a look at what was on our air and what we delivered.

Why did you go with more than you originally planned? Was it the result of the fallout from the decision to pull out of the film?

There’s no doubt that the sort of kerfuffle surrounding it here, however you want to refer to it, brought more attention to the whole thing.  But at the end of the day, we ran as much of it as we did and carried on the discussions we did because it was good, strong reporting, interesting, in many cases new material that deserved an exposure.

You know, we’ve done a long list of stories on business partners and so forth.  Honestly, I don’t know who else is doing this kind of work in sports with the regularity, with the frequency, putting the kind of resources, of manpower and money that we put towards it.  I don’t think anybody else in television is doing it to the extent we’re doing it.

Yet having said all that, how do you combat the perception that ESPN bowed to pressure from the NFL in this instance and probably will again?

Well, look, it’s always going to be out there.  You can scream from the mountaintop.  My sense of it is, look at the body of work.  If that doesn’t convince you that we’re independent, that we do a lot of tough, critical reporting on our business partners, then I don’t know how else to convince people beyond that.  But the people who want to assert that we’re compromised, and we don’t do this kind of stuff, I don’t know, look at the work.

You can say all you want. However, I bet you if I went and talked to 10 people, at least half would say they kowtowed to the NFL here.

You’ve been in the business long enough, and people are looking for stories ‑‑ they’re not looking for stories about how good you’re doing, they’re looking for stories about how bad you’re doing, right?

But this was a big public documentary, and for whatever reason, the perception was not favorable. Was there damage to your brand as a news operation?

Yeah, the way some of it came out publicly to me was not beneficial to the brand.  But at the end of the day, if you try to look past just some of the superficial media coverage of it and the blaring headline aspect of it and say, well, what exactly did this mean in terms of how ESPN delivered this reporting on the concussion issue, hard‑pressed to have anybody say that we pulled our punches in that area.

Yes, but can the ESPN news division remain truly independent when your programming division has a multi-billion dollar deal with the NFL?

We’re a big business partner.  The programming department here is charged with maintaining relationships with those business partners.  We try to keep them in the loop to the best we can about the kind of stories we’re doing and so forth.  Obviously when we’re doing these stories, we’re going to our business partners for responses, asking them tough questions and so forth.

Whenever you’re doing these kind of stories, yes, you want to keep people informed, but also you’re trying to keep some of the information held within a small group of the people reporting it and so forth so that it’s not all over the place.  That’s always a consideration here that is being made as you’re reporting these stories.

I think that because perhaps we have these business partnerships, it makes us ‑‑ I’d like to think we’d be careful reporters regardless of the situation– but there’s no doubt that knowing those relationships, we want to have things nailed down. We don’t just want to throw things at the wall here and so forth.  We try very hard to do that.

But there’s never been a time here in my 21, going on 22 years here, whatever, where anybody has told us not to report something that we have confirmed as it relates to business partners.  Nor has anyone ever steered us off of a story, stop reporting that story, stop pursuing it.  That’s never happened, either.

How would you react if it did happen?

I’d probably have to retire just like they’re saying I will.

We all know there are people here who talk to people and so forth.  I think that’s true of any large organization.  Clearly aside from the motivation that you want to do good, solid enterprise reporting, I think everybody understands that if there’s any evidence that you are backing off on that, or if you aren’t pursuing stories that you feel should be pursued and so forth, people are going to raise questions about it, and nobody wants to see that happen, either.  But that’s not the primary motivation I don’t believe, certainly not on my part.

Have you ever met with NFL officials, or representatives from the network’s other TV partners (leagues, teams, conferences) over ESPN’s coverage of stories?

Is there the occasional meeting with business partners where they’re unhappy with us and wonder why we have to be as aggressive as we do?  Those things happen from time to time, but again, they’re part of doing business…

But even prior to this kind of situation, it existed in newspapers. What, you’re going to do expose on a big advertiser here or something?  Let’s talk about it. That was the church and state in newspapers, if you will, right?  Television church and state is kind of the rights holding business and the journalism business.

So you’ve met with league commissioners?

There have been situations where I’ve been in meetings with commissioners, league commissioners and so forth…

Could somebody come here if they weren’t rights holders and have that meeting?  Yes, they could.  (ESPN’s partners) may feel they have a right to have that meeting because they’re rights holders or something. I don’t know, but I’ve always been open. For instance, our programming people may come to me or John Skipper and say, ‘Hey, would you be part of a meeting with so and so and explain how our news gathering operation works and so forth?’ I’m more than happy to do that.

Have any of ESPN’s partners ever threatened to pull the trump card on you?

No, nobody has ever done that. Nobody as a rights holder feels comfortable saying, ‘You as a journalist shouldn’t do that. We don’t want you to do that story.  We know you think you’re a journalist, but don’t do that story.’

No one is comfortable with doing this. They want to perhaps tell us why they think we’re wrong on a story, why their version of events is the accurate version of events. It’s all fine.  You listen to them.

I mean, to be honest, it’s not as oppressive as people want to make it out to be.  Whenever you’re doing difficult stories, any kind of medium, there are always potential landmines on it.  You want to make sure you’re accurate.  Maybe you’re going to step on some toes that matter, but that can happen in almost any medium.  I don’t find it ‑‑ there is a unique aspect to it here, I think, in terms of the large number of business partners we have and the large volume of news and information platforms we have.  But we’re not the only person dealing with some of these kind of issues.

What will be the effects on your end as a result of what happened here?

It’s not like you walk in the building every day looking for something to fall on your head here or something.  I mean, you go about your business, your reporting business.  We’re doing that story, we’re doing many other stories at the same time that we’re pursuing.

Wednesday: Doria on moving Outside the Lines to ESPN2, Olbermann and why does ESPN bother to cover hard news?