Forgive the rambling nature of this piece, but I have a number of tangentially related thoughts I want to pull together. I warn you ahead of time, this will be a long one.
Tonight on Countdown to UFC 92, Dave Meltzer of Yahoo Sports appeared in the final segment and made comments on the Wanderlei Silva vs. Quinton Jackson fight. At first glance, there is no problem with it. He is the top journalist in the sport and made educated comments on a historic feud many fans in the United States know little about. On the other hand, his appearance was on a show completely designed to hype UFC storylines and sell pay per view buys. This is not an objective show like MMA Live; it is a show produced by the UFC with the sole purpose of driving a company-approved narrative home to fans in order to get them to purchase a show.
Is it appropriate for a prominent member of the MMA media to appear on such a program? I don’t know the answer, but I have a feeling that if Dave raised any questions about the appropriateness of this fight given Rampage’s recent history, they would not have made air.
In his interview with David Samuels, Lorenzo Fertitta made an interesting comment about the UFC’s relationship with the media. He said:
Beyond that, we have our PR department. And it’s not just about going and hiring a PR firm and saying go do this for us. We have it in-house. We want to build the relationships in-house, we want to know these people. Every other sport just hands everything over to a network and says you guys do whatever you want with it, we’ll have some input or whatever but HBO rolls in and does boxing. Even the NFL.
The major networks roll in and they just do everything for them. We do everything. And one thing about Dana that has made us very successful—he is passionate and meticulous about the product, and he gets how the product should be, and how that needs to resonate with the consumer.
The message is loud and clear: they want to shape the consumer’s view of their product. Who doesn’t? They have every right to do it, but a robust press would resist that function.
I don’t mean to pick on Yahoo sports, but the structure of the bi-weekly articles Kevin Iole writes tell the story better than I could. I am not talking about his ideas about the sport, just the structure of the articles. They are primarily designed to hype upcoming shows and events, rather than to react to, predict, or analyze events. The article on Rachelle Leah is the clearest example of what I am talking about:
Leah, who will return to her old job for one more night when she shared the duty with Arianny Celeste at UFC 90 on October 25 at the Rosemont Horizon in Rosemont, Ill, is a lot more than another pretty face.
Yeah, she’s Playboy’s November cover girl, which will hit newsstands on Friday. She was the UFC’s most popular octagon girl and she just signed a deal as a spokesmodel with Anheuser-Busch.
While none of those jobs require a degree from Harvard, it’s selling Leah short to believe she’s making a living solely from her looks. She is brash and thoughtful and introspective and witty and plenty crafty.
All of this may be true, but I can’t read a column like that without realizing that the only possible reason to write it is to promote sales of Rachelle Leah’s playboy issue. I’m sure he believed everything he wrote, but it is still the kind of thing that usually comes out of PR departments, but instead it is coming from independent media sources. It’s not just Yahoo either.
The blogs and opinion centers are banned from covering the UFC for a number of reasons, some legitimate, some illegitimate. As a result, it is up to those with access to use that access to bring news and insight to the masses. Steve Cofield routinely does a great job with it, and Dave Meltzer does too. Kevin Iole has done well too by bringing us news on undisclosed bonuses and slamming the latest season of The Ultimate Fighter.
I think the greatest harm from restricted access and the UFC’s media strategy is latent bias. Many fans accuse Kevin Iole of being a UFC shill, but I think that characterization is completely wrong. What shill would bash The Ultimate Fighter the way he did on Steve Cofield’s show? Instead, it comes off that way because he is new to MMA, and his views of the sport have been influenced in large part by Dana White and Lorenzo Fertitta. When he takes their side in a dispute or sounds like he has a pro-UFC bias, it is not as if he is a pravda columnist doing it intentionally. That really is his opinion, it is just shaped by people who are far from objective.
To wrap this up, I don’t fault the UFC at all for their strategy, it makes perfect sense from their end. It’s up to media members to assert independence and refuse to be used as a free PR department.