by Lindberg Woodhouse

Created on: November 11, 2008

For years, ABC's Monday Night Football has been at the pinnacle of sports broadcasting. The best broadcasters, edgy personalities, and eloquent ex-players have helped turn a simple football game into a highly-watched weekly spectacle. Following its move to ABC's subsidiary ESPN in 2006, with the addition of Tony Kornheiser, even this sacred American tradition has succumbed to the delinquency of modern television media. ESPN may have been trying to capture the edginess of Howard Cosell, but Tony Kornheiser has proven to be about as out-of-place as Dennis Miller was in his two-year tenure.

Although he's been a journalist and radio host for years, Kornheiser gained most of his notoriety for co-hosting the daily sports talk show Pardon The Interruption (PTI) on ESPN with Michael Wilbon. Both men earn their paychecks by adopting extremely opinionated views on any number of current sports topics, and then they argue with each other for 30 minutes.

Kornheiser certainly brings some of this argumentativeness to his Monday Night Football commentary. His co-announcers Mike Tirico and Ron Jaworski are of a more typical Monday Night Football mold. Tirico is a polished and knowledgeable play-by-play announcer, while Jaworski is a seasoned ex-NFL quarterback color announcer. It seems that Kornheiser is just there for his loud-mouth comments and abrasive opinions.

This is a symptom of the decline of integrity of television programming due without question to the plethora of specialized cable channels with hours and hours of programming to fill. Kornheiser is cut from the same mold as Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs, Keith Olberman, Nancy Grace, and others who gain popularity due to their starkly opinionated commentaries.

News coverage and sports announcing is supposed to appear neutral. Nowadays, in order to distinguish themselves and their network, journalists are free to push aside the standards of years past and inject their own editorial opinions where and whenever they feel like it. Good entertainment it may make, but some may actually mistake these opinions for actual fact. The divisive non sequitur banter of journalists like Tony Kornheiser does not help in the narration of a sports program at all.

In a forum like PTI, which is all about debate and defending opinions, Kornheiser excels. This is partly due to the fact that he is tempered by Wilbon and his similarly strong presence and contrasting opinions. Conversely, there is no character who produces endless banter on par with Kornheiser on Monday Night Football, nor should there be. Kornheiser in no way compliments the other announcers nor does he enhance the enjoyment of a big weekly television event such as Monday Night Football at all.

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