ESPN's New Ombudsman Another Tony Kornheiser Pal

Tony Kornheiser might be ESPN's highest-profile employee. He's a commentator on Monday Night Football, which is by far the network's most popular live sporting event, and he's the co-host of Pardon the Interruption, which is the most influential of the network's many opinion-oriented chat shows.

Those two shows provide a fascinating contrast. On PTI Kornheiser is great: He's articulate, intelligent, provocative and funny. On MNF he's terrible: He comes into the booth unprepared and ignorant of basic information about the teams, he reacts to live action with scripted lines, and he distracts from the game on the field with frivolous allusions to pop culture and lame attempts at humor.

Fortunately, ESPN has an ombudsman, a person whose job is to provide, in ESPN's own words, "independent examination and analysis of ESPN's media outlets." So, naturally, that ombudsman would be the perfect person to examine and analyze Kornheiser, and try to break down what it is about him that makes him great on one show and terrible on another. Right?
Wrong. ESPN has had two ombudsmen. The first, George Solomon, was previously sports editor at the Washington Post, where he edited Kornheiser's columns. That prior relationship negated any possibility of reading an ombudsman's column that took an in-depth look at Kornheiser. Now Solomon is gone, and ESPN has replaced him with Le Anne Schreiber. Surely, Schreiber will finally give us that independent examination and analysis of Kornheiser we all want. Right?

Wrong again. In her debut column today, Schreiber mentions that she previously served as sports editor at the New York Times. She then writes,

And I will add that my one significant overlap with present-day ESPN arises from those days, when it was both my pleasure and my grief to be the young Tony Kornheiser's boss at The New York Times. Why grief? Because The Times kept pressuring me to make Tony more Timesian, and Tony kept pressuring me to make the Times more Tonian. My failure in both directions led to the parting of Tony and The Times, which was no doubt for the best of both those institutions.

So we have, again, an ESPN ombudsman who is incapable of a fresh look at Kornheiser because of a previous working relationship with Kornheiser. There are many places on the web where you can get independent examination and analysis of Kornheiser's work. But it's a shame that the ESPN ombudsman will not be one of them.

UPDATE: Too Close to Tony Kornheiser? ESPN Ombudsman Responds