Erin Andrews Exposed
Well my previous article, “5 Reasons Why Watching ESPN Is the Same as Watching E!” came out in rather spooky unison with the release of nude footage of ESPN’s Erin Andrews. Guess you can add yet another scandal to the archives of ESPN. In fairness to Ms. Andrews, this wasn’t a case of her taping herself and being stupid with the footage (a la Pam Anderson), but, nevertheless, it is still a scandal involving nudity of someone in the public eye.
I have to say, while the intent of the person who taped Andrews was deplorable, his (I’m assuming it’s a he) execution was what struck me as the most shocking, not his footage. No, I’m not condoning his actions. No, I don’t think it was a cool thing to do. No, I don’t view Erin Andrews as a sex object. But I mean, who knew the James Bond of peepers even existed? The guy drilled a hole through the wall of the adjoining room and then snuck a spy cam through it, which was small enough that Andrews didn’t notice it. How many weeks of living in his mother’s basement eating bulk ramen and reading anime comics did it take this guy to figure that one out?
It sure beats the hell out of the method of peeping outlined by Jack Nicholson in The Shining:
Uh… yeah, I’m pretty sure Erin spotted you Jack.
Clearly, there is only one person to blame for this happening and that is the loser who made the tape. However, it does highlight the dangers inherent in ESPN aggressively marketing the sex appeal of their reporters.
Ask yourself, is Erin Andrews attractive for a sports reporter or is she attractive for a celebrity?
What’s the difference, beauty is beauty right? Well, put Andrews in a group with Jessica Alba and Megan Foxx, and walk the three into a college dorm or a sports bar and see who gets the least attention. My money is on Andrews. It’s not because Andrews isn’t attractive, it’s just that the other two are really so far past the normal standards of beauty that it’s difficult not to drop your jaw when they enter the room.
So put Andrews in amongst Hollywood starlets and it’s likely she isn’t going to get the wave of drooling fan boys following her. Put her in an industry where men broadcasters dominate and the standards of beauty for women are not so ludicrously high, and, all of a sudden, she becomes a bombshell who gets voted America’s Sexiest Sportscaster by Playboy two years running.
The attention Andrews was receiving got to the point that even some male reporters were irked by it. Read these sour grapes by Mike Nadel for a good laugh at how juvenile male reporters can get when they’re overshadowed by their female counterparts.
Just because you scored 2.7 on your HOTorNOT profile even after you rated yourself 10 several times, while Andrews scored 9.4 without breaking a sweat doesn’t mean you aren’t as good a journalist as her Nadel. It just means that people probably aren’t waiting for you to bend over the scorer’s table so they can snap a shot of your ass.
Nadel’s backlash showed the negative effects that could come from the image that ESPN was and still is attempting to create for Andrews—with her help of course. Before she came to ESPN, Andrews had reported mostly on pro sports. However, ESPN quickly saw the potential to use her sex appeal to cultivate a huge target demographic: college students. Andrews is an attractive blonde with a great smile. It’s the college males’ perfect model of a woman. Mix that with her homely attitude, which doesn’t alienate female viewers, and it’s a winning formula.
There’s nothing wrong with Andrews using her physique. As she points out in this interview with Bill Simmons, her male colleagues work just as hard to make sure they’re as camera ready as can be.
The danger is in crossing that line between her being an attractive female reporter and ESPN trying to make her the hottest celebrity female reporter on the planet that everyone wants to see. Over marketing her sex appeal makes people lose sight of the fact that her job is actually to report, not to look good in clothes. If people start thinking of her as just something pretty to look at then perverts take it too far and think everyone has the same fantasies they do.
Consequently, for ESPN, the nude footage is not so much a can of worms as a can of steaming, liquid shit seeping in every direction. It is a public relations nightmare. They worked with Andrews to create an image and now that image has resulted in Andrews being violated.
So far, the footage has been contained extremely effectively. It is surprisingly hard to come by on the Internet and there is currently a story being circulated that many people who are trying to find it have ended up with viruses on their computers. I’m curious whether that’s actually true or simply a well thought out ploy to deter the general public from satisfying our natural interest in anything involving naked people.
If it ends up that the majority of the public know about the existence of nude footage of Erin Andrews, but haven’t seen it then I wouldn’t be surprised if some ESPN execs end up being happy this happened. From a purely marketing standpoint this may turn out to be a good thing not only for ESPN, but for Erin Andrews also.
The reason it may help Andrews is that it increases her exposure (pardon the pun) to different demographics, which increases her marketability. I had not heard of her until this story broke and I watch and read ESPN constantly. I’m just not that fixated on college sports and MLB, which are currently her major fields of reporting. Now even if you haven’t seen her before you know who she is and you know she’s attractive enough to risk entering the sex offender registry for.
If more people want to watch Andrews because of this then it can only be a good thing for her and ESPN. The network would need her even more so she would gain bargaining power over her own salary, which the network would be happy to satisfy because she would increase their viewers and, thus, their advertising revenue.
While it would be impossible to argue that what happened is a good thing, there is certainly a silver lining. So long as the tape doesn’t go viral, and ESPN is working aggressively to prevent just that, then the James Bond of perverts may have done Andrews’ career a favor. Though I doubt she thanks him anytime soon. And who could blame her, climbing through his mountain of plastic dolls would probably be a real pain in the ass.
The Editor
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