East Coast Bias - Causes

Causes

The North American continent is divided into seven time zones, spanning 5½ hours from Alaska to Newfoundland. Most of the continent's population (including all of the major professional sports teams) is concentrated in the four time zones of the contiguous United States and Canada west of the maritimes; this, however, still poses a significant obstacle in that the easternmost sports teams are a full three hours ahead of their western counterparts. For sports that play in prime time according to local time zones (as is the case with hockey, baseball and basketball), this can result in the west coast playing games while the East is sleeping and after printing deadlines for the next day's newspapers have passed. Gennaro Filice of SI.com wrote that Major League Baseball's West Coast night games are ending as "the country's most influential scribes are catching Z after Z." Buccigross notes that a lot of people in the East are asleep when National Hockey League's West night games are going on, resulting in lower television ratings for those West Coast games, which contributes to the lack of national broadcasts of West games.

In the United States, the major media hub is the East Coast city of New York (although Los Angeles also serves as a significant hub on the West Coast). Canada's lone major English-language media hub, Toronto, is also in the Eastern Time Zone. John Buccigross of ESPN (itself based in the East Coast city of Bristol, Connecticut) wrote that an imbalance is understandable from the East writers considering they are influenced by their close proximity and easier access to the happenings in the East. The East is home to nearly half of the country's population and is both more densely populated and was settled and developed much earlier than the West.

Fox Sports sportscaster Joe Buck attributes the shift to the economics of running a business. "If you think there is a perceived East Coast bias, guess what? You're right. That's where people are watching, that's were(sic) the numbers are." ESPN ombudsman Le Anne Schreiber wrote that fans should forget about expecting equity in teams the network selects to broadcast. "It is long proven in NBA and NFL and MLB that spreading the wealth to 30 or 32 teams is a prescription for deflating ratings," said Len DeLuca, ESPN senior vice president for programming.