Did The NFL Put Pressure On ESPN To Divorce Frontline?

By: Richard Deitsch

Article Reprintnfl frontline

Raney Aronson-Rath woke up Friday morning to a flurry of emails and texts from friends and colleagues. It had been an eventful 24 hours for Frontline’s deputy executive producer and a somewhat sad one, too. Last Thursday afternoon, Aronson-Rath and her Frontline colleague David Fanning, the executive producer for the award-winning program, posted a note to readers on the show’s website announcing their regret over ESPN’s decision to end a collaboration between the two entities on concussion reporting that had spanned the last 15 months. The collaboration was based on Frontline’s journalism and the work of two highly-respected ESPN reporters, Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru, the co-authors of an upcoming book, League of Denial: The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth. According to the book’s description, League of Denial “reveals how the NFL, over a period of nearly two decades, sought to cover up and deny mounting evidence of the connection between football and brain damage.”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *