| Sports Journalism Takes Hits To Reputation Authored by Tommie De Riemaecker/Off The High Glass - February 26, 2005 - 7:52 pm
Add to the list of things you can’t always believe: the newspaper, the Internet, the radio, and everything you see on TV.
ESPN and Fox Sports spent much of the month of February wiping the egg off their faces for a series of erroneous reports through their various media outlets that left a scar on their reputations as the largest sports information brokers in the United States.
At the heart of it all is their disregard for checking the facts, which started a snowball effect with other media that exposed many of them for simply reporting news from other news outlets.
If it sounds like I’m damning my own profession, it’s because I am. As part of the up-and-coming generation of journalists, it’s my job to improve upon the work of the previous generation and hold who will be my bosses for the early part of my career to uphold the truth and their purpose in reporting the news.
I’ll start with ESPN. An enterprising charlatan somewhere adopted the font and Web site style of the Miami Herald, a credible daily Florida newspaper, to post a false report that Miami Heat center Shaquille O’Neal had suffered a torn ligament in his left knee early in the Heat’s Feb. 22 home game against the Chicago Bulls that would force him to miss the rest of the NBA season. The Web site the hoaxer used, miami.dolem.com/sports, was not the Miami Herald Web site, although it did include a link on the page to the legitimate Herald Web site.
The article was written in stilted journalistic language and contained multiple errors in Associated Press style, to which most newspapers in the United States adhere. (Among the errors were: the lead sentence contained a parenthetical statement; the lead paragraph consisted of more than one sentence; the writer omitted a necessary apostrophe in a possessive noun; the article bounced from referring to O’Neal on second reference by O’Neal to Shaquille O’Neal to Shaq; incorrect possessive form of the Heat; misspelling the name of guard Dwyane Wade; editorializing by referring to Wade as the Heat’s “other star player”; incorrect format of a paragraph quote falsely attributed to Wade; failing to end that quote with a comma instead of a period; and editorializing in the final sentence by referring to last year’s Heat season as “amazing.”)
Further more, the article’s attributed author, Haime Gonzalez, does not exist, at least as an employee of the Miami Herald.
That’s not to mention that the report, which appeared on Wednesday, was contradictory to the fact that the Heat had announced O’Neal wouldn’t even have an MRI until Thursday, when the team doctors could assess his injury status.
But somehow, ESPN’s research team still ran with it. A breaking news bulletin streamed across the ticker on its ESPNews broadcasts for about five minutes. But the self-proclaimed “Worldwide Leader in Sports” wasn’t the only organization duped – Fox Sports, continuing the chain of reports reporting what other reporters said, ran their own report, attributing it to ESPN, who attributed it to the Miami Herald.
The Herald, to its credit, denied writing and posting the story when a few enterprising news teams from various radio stations around the country called to verify the facts, which is the whole problem.
To recap, one Internet Web site author managed to dupe, within minutes, ESPN, Fox Sports and numerous fan-maintained Internet column sites, such as HoopsWorld.com, all because none of the reporters in any of the organizations thought to call either the Herald or even the Miami Heat before racing to the public with the “news.”
Since when has it become acceptable to report news through other news organizations? For all those reports, not one news organization ever interviewed anybody. That’s alarming.
For the record, the Heat announced Feb. 24 that O’Neal’s MRI diagnosed a mild left knee sprain and he remains day-to-day.
It didn’t begin and it doesn’t stop there though. On Feb. 18, ESPN’s E.J. Hradek reported on SportsCenter that the NHL owners and players’ union were about to ratify a labor agreement that would end the league’s lockout and restore the season which had been canceled by commissioner Gary Bettman three days earlier. The truth? They were headed back to the negotiating table, not about to agree on a proposal. In fact, the league was unable to come to an agreement and the season remains canceled.
Just before midnight Feb. 23, the night before the NBA’s trade deadline, ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith attributed his knowledge of a pending trade that would send Sacramento Kings forward Chris Webber to the Philadelphia 76ers to his “sources.” Smith was exposed for making up his “sources” when other media revealed they, as well as ESPN, learned of the trade through an e-mail from the 76ers media relations team sent to all the media at 11:38 p.m. EST.
To its credit, ESPN as an organization is taking the blame for its mishaps, acknowledging that they didn’t do their jobs properly by interviewing sources, properly attributing news sources, or checking the authenticity of “facts” before declaring them to the public.
If you’re keeping track at home, that’s the basic job description of a journalist. And yet they all still have jobs.
Fox Sports had its own independent February snafu, though. Fox Sports West analyst Jack Haley, a former NBA forward and assistant coach, reported during a Feb. 20 Southern California Sports Report broadcast that the Los Angeles Lakers were going to complete a trade that would send three unidentified Lakers to the Utah Jazz for forward Carlos Boozer. Haley attributed the information to a general manager involved in the deal (which would have to be either Lakers general manager Mitch Kupchak or Jazz vice president of basketball operations Kevin O’Connor). He even gave it a 24-48 hour timetable.
But the deal didn’t happen. Both sides called it ludicrous, especially when Haley leaked the next day that the Lakers involved were forwards Caron Butler and Devean George and center Vlade Divac. George went on record with the Los Angeles Times saying he wasn’t upset with the Lakers and that he had three championships and a multi-million dollar contract to console him. Divac said he would be bought out of his contract with the Jazz and re-sign with the Lakers. Butler was incredulous.
But it was still wrong. By the time the trade deadline passed Feb. 24, all four players were still on their original teams and Haley was back peddling, admitting he shouldn’t have called the deal “imminent.”
It’s debatable whether Haley was strung along by a highly ranked source within one of the organizations (he does have ties to the Lakers, having played for them during his career), but it remains that he reported a trade he knew to be a rumor as an imminent fact. By refusing to divulge his source, he put his own neck on the line as a reporter as to the accuracy of the report and got burned doing so.
Another mystery is why Haley was the only one with the story. In this age of organizations striving to the get the story out there first, and right later, Fox Sports definitely would have a viable interest in scooping a major trade with one of the league’s most marquee franchises in the Lakers, especially as the network tries to overtake ESPN. But they were left with egg on their face when no deal surfaced and no other media organization even picked up the story, having been told by the Lakers and Jazz that there was no deal.
So much for accountability with the major sports news organization. It’s understood that sports and sports news generate millions of dollars in revenue for all sorts of organizations and people around the country, but it’s still no excuse to ignore the basic tenets of journalism to tilt the money and attention scales in your favor.
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