East Coast bias

East Coast bias is the tendency for sports broadcasting and journalism in the United States and Canada to give greater weight and attention to teams and athletes on the East Coast of their respective countries than those on the West Coast.

Overview

East Coast bias is used to explain perceived slights of teams and players relative to their comparable counterparts on the West Coast. It is attributed to East Coast sports stories being more repetitive, comprehensive, and exaggerated. "In America news still travels from east to west," wrote author George Will in Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball. The bias is also used to rationalize the broadcasting of an East Coast team in favor of another compelling team based to the west.

National coverage of live games is also perceived as favoring certain teams located on the Eastern side of the continent. For example, critics of what Hockey Night in Canada chooses to program allege that the show particularly favors the Toronto Maple Leafs. Likewise, ESPN's baseball coverage has been the target of criticism because of its perceived bias towards the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees.

Causes

The North American continent is divided into seven time zones, spanning 6½ hours from Alaska to Newfoundland. Most of the continent's population (including all of the major professional sports teams) is concentrated in the four time zones of the contiguous United States and Canada west of the maritimes; this, however, still poses a significant obstacle in that the easternmost sports teams are a full three hours ahead of their western counterparts. For sports that play in prime time according to local time zones (as is the case with hockey, baseball and basketball), this can result in the west coast playing games while the East is sleeping and after printing deadlines for the next day's newspapers have passed. Gennaro Filice of SI.com wrote that Major League Baseball's West Coast night games are ending as "the country's most influential scribes are catching Z after Z." John Buccigross of ESPN notes that a lot of people in the East are asleep when National Hockey League's West night games are going on, resulting in lower television ratings for those West Coast games, which contributes to the lack of national broadcasts of West games.

In the United States, the major media hub is the East Coast city of New York, with ESPN and NBC Sports having their hubs in the neighboring state of Connecticut (although Los Angeles also serves as a significant hub on the West Coast). Canada's two major media hubs, Toronto (for English language media) and Montréal (for French), are also both in the Eastern Time Zone (although "East Coast" is used culturally here, as geographically, Canada's east coast uses the Atlantic and Newfoundland time zones; no major professional sports teams, however, occupy those time zones). Buccigross wrote that an imbalance is understandable from the East writers considering they are influenced by their close proximity and easier access to the happenings in the East. The East is home to nearly half of the country's population and is both more densely populated and was settled and developed much earlier than the West.

Fox Sports sportscaster Joe Buck attributes the shift to the economics of running a business. "If you think there is a perceived East Coast bias, guess what? You're right. That's where people are watching, that's where the numbers are." ESPN ombudsman Le Anne Schreiber wrote that fans should forget about expecting equity in teams the network selects to broadcast. "It is long proven in NBA and NFL and MLB that spreading the wealth to 30 or 32 teams is a prescription for deflating ratings," said Len DeLuca, ESPN senior vice president for programming.

See also

• Criticism of ESPN
• Effects of time zones on North American broadcasting