A Different Collision: When Style Hurts Substance

League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis

A review by John Nicholson

The research is there, it seems. Due diligence was done. So why did I come away from watching Frontline’s “League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis” with the feeling that it is an exercise in gilding the lily? Two things struck me repeatedly: the melodramatic and ominous music and the “in a world…” narration by the estimable Will Lyman.  It was as if I was watching an episode of “Unsolved Mysteries” with Robert Stack. If any broadcast organization could be expected to give the story to us straight it ought to be PBS. Instead the production undermined itself by hammering home its points with dramatic overkill.

The powerful story of former Steelers star Mike Webster at the beginning draws us in. The words and pictures , especially the clip of Webster trying and failing to answer a simple question and finally acknowledging that he just can’t focus, make the point about his condition and its connection to years of willful collisions in a collision sport. We’d have no trouble feeling for him and the other players used as examples if their stories were told without the added gimmicks. Have we sat down to watch a movie or a serious piece of journalism?

 

And since when do the journalists appear in their own investigative piece as sound bites? Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada are producers of the program. Did they interview themselves? Each other? Would it make more sense to have the narrator say what they say in their sound bites? I’m picturing them saying, “We don’t want too much narration but we don’t have sound from anybody else who was there or who says it well, so we’ll just say it ourselves as if in an interview.” Who does that?

This is not to discount the substance of the report which is that large numbers of football players have suffered terrible brain injuries over the years and that the National Football League has gone to some lengths to downplay and deny the truth of that. NFL execs and doctors don’t help their case by stonewalling or by eventually settling with the Players’ Association but not admitting liability. (For what it’s worth, that’s standard in many large legal settlements.)

While the effort to make the game safer now is ongoing, it seems an excellent bet that football players at every level continue to suffer brain injuries, hit-by-hit, game-by-game. Networks want to broadcast, owners want to own, coaches want to coach, players want to play and fans want the modern day gladiators to get after each other. We’re talking about massive amounts of money. I haven’t heard of a movement toward the National Two-hand Touch League where no blocking is allowed.     

A wise news director told me decades ago that when you do an investigative story you get the facts right and lay it out for the audience to see and decide what, if anything should be done about it. Often what gets done is little or nothing. Shock and sympathy don’t necessarily lead to outrage and action.

If you have an important story and you have it nailed down, tell it. If you have to add a musical score and a voice of doom narration and if you have to interview yourselves to make the story work maybe you don’t have enough confidence in the story itself. Fairly or not, it winds up coming across as style over substance.