{"id":784305,"date":"2026-03-01T12:39:19","date_gmt":"2026-03-01T12:39:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/784305\/"},"modified":"2026-03-01T12:39:19","modified_gmt":"2026-03-01T12:39:19","slug":"chris-berman-isnt-worried-about-the-nfl-owning-a-piece-of-espn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/784305\/","title":{"rendered":"Chris Berman isn’t worried about the NFL owning a piece of ESPN"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris Berman spent decades as the face of ESPN. He has more reason than most to think carefully about what it means for the NFL to now own a piece of the place he built his career. Speaking with CNBC Sport\u2019s Alex Sherman<\/a>, Berman was asked whether the NFL\u2019s 10 percent equity stake in ESPN \u2014 the most consequential sports media deal in recent memory \u2014 creates a conflict of interest for the network\u2019s journalism.<\/p>\n

\u201cHard to believe,\u201d Berman said, before dismissing the concern. \u201cI don\u2019t think so.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTen percent, what does that mean? I don\u2019t think the NFL \u2014 OK, if we\u2019re gonna own 10%, here\u2019s the handbook,\u201d Berman added, pushing back on the idea that a 10 percent ownership stake would translate into any real editorial pressure. \u201cHere\u2019s the three pages that thou shalt not, thou shalt. I don\u2019t think that happens. And if it did, I\u2019d be really disappointed in the league as much as I am our place for agreeing. But that\u2019s not the way it goes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Berman wasn\u2019t dismissive of the broader concern, and he didn\u2019t pretend the question was an unfair one. The deal is, by any measure, unlike anything the sports media industry has seen before. No major North American professional sports league has ever taken an ownership stake in a broadcaster that airs its games, and the questions about what that means for day-to-day journalism at ESPN<\/a> aren\u2019t going away anytime soon. Berman acknowledged as much.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe lines have been blurred,\u201d he said, \u201cin a lot of ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t dispute that the structure of the deal raises eyebrows, or that someone looking at it from the outside would have every reason to wonder. There\u2019s an inherent strangeness to a situation where the entity being covered has a financial stake in the outlet doing the covering, and Berman seemed to understand why people are uneasy about it. It\u2019s a question that has followed ESPN since the moment the deal was announced, one that has prompted responses from everyone from ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro<\/a> to Roger Goodell<\/a> to a\u00a0former ESPN executive who wrote that the network had sold its soul to the league<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is an obvious, \u2018Whoa, ESPN, NFL, 10 percent?’\u201d Berman said.<\/p>\n

But despite that acknowledgment, he landed firmly on the side of confidence that the arrangement wouldn\u2019t actually change anything in practice. The concern, in his view, assumes a level of direct interference that he doesn\u2019t believe the NFL would ever exercise, namely that someone in the league office would call Bristol with instructions on how to frame a story or what not to say about a player. He finds that scenario implausible, and said so plainly.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think that has a stake at all,\u201d he added. \u201cI\u2019d be shocked if it was any dictation of that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

The deal Berman was reacting to was finalized in August 2025<\/a>, when ESPN agreed to acquire NFL Network, the linear distribution rights to NFL RedZone, and NFL Fantasy in exchange for a 10 percent stake in the company. Regulatory approval came far faster than expected<\/a> \u2014 clearing in roughly six months rather than the projected one to two years \u2014 and the integration of NFL Network into the ESPN ecosystem is now underway ahead of the 2026-27 season, which will culminate with ESPN hosting its first-ever Super Bowl<\/a>, something Berman never imagined would happen<\/a> at the Worldwide Leader.<\/p>\n

For Berman, who anchored NFL Primetime for two decades and has been synonymous with ESPN\u2019s football coverage longer than most of its current employees have been alive, the idea that a formal set of editorial restrictions would ever materialize seems almost laughable. But the deal he\u2019s defending is also one that nobody in sports media has ever had to navigate before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chris Berman spent decades as the face of ESPN. He has more reason than most to think carefully…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":784306,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2026],"tags":[14032,19085,110323,69035,27839,7,110966,126],"class_list":["post-784305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-alex-sherman","tag-chris-berman","tag-cnbc-sport","tag-conflict-of-interest","tag-espn-journalism","tag-football","tag-nfl-equity-stake","tag-nfl-network"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116153966313799371","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=784305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/784306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=784305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=784305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=784305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}