Exclamation Moint wrote:
Deadspin is on fire with outing the ESPN diddlers. Bristol must be shitting their pants. This is awesome.
I disagree:
http://stupidsportsblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/deadspin-acts-in-professional-manner.htmlI'm going to quote a lot of this, because it's hilarious, and accurate:
Quote:
However, if you are in the business of printing completely unresearched, unfounded and salacious rumors about the sexual activities of people -- and naming names -- simply because you were scooped on a story because your investigation into a rumor didn't cut it, then you should consider moving into another business. Like perhaps a writer at US Weekly?
Because that's exactly what Deadspin did Wednesday after the New York Post broke the story about ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips and his affair with an ESPN employee, Brooke Hundley. The Post had PDFs of Hundley's psychotic letters to Phillips' wife and had the news of his one-week suspension from the network.
Enter sour grapes and bitterness.
As A.J. Daulerio explains in his post that served as both a warning to the employees of ESPN that every rumor in Deadspin's inbox was about to be published and a nice platform for stomping his feet and crying, he's got every right in the world to do it. Why?
On September 9, we received a tip. Subject: "S. Phillips." The contents? "Rumor winding it's way around the hallowed halls of the WWL is that Steve Phillips is getting canned tomorrow for an offense on par with Harold Reynold's misdeed."
After a call to ESPN public relations department asking about the "rumor" I was told that "I would be wrong" to print that story because it was inaccurate. Fine. I would have been. But natural follow-up question to these types of rumors, as per give-and-take protocol, is well, what's the real story then? Was there an incident with Phillips that Baseball Tonight people are concerned about? However I was summarily nothing-to-see-here-please-dispersed.
Breaking news: That's what PR departments do. To sum up that part, he called ESPN's public relations department, who told him his story was inaccurate, which it was. And in a shocking follow-up to that, ESPN's PR department didn't voluntarily admit to Deadspin's editor that there was a different story about Steve Phillips banging an employee. The nerve!
So since Daulerio's "digging" into this story of one call to ESPN didn't turn up the truth, he felt he was wronged by ESPN and it was time to lay into them. I'm not sure what the analogy is here to make people understand how crazy this line of thinking is, but imagine you own a company. We'll call it USPN. Another company, Fredspin, does nothing but bash you all the time. Now, a USPN employee, Sleeve Pullups, is in trouble for sleeping with another USPN employee. Are you just going to divulge this information to Fredspin?
I don't know much about much, but being stonewalled by a company's PR department is hardly grounds for losing one's mind and feeling scorned. And that's what led to this:
And since the tenuous connection between rumor and fact for accuracy's sake has been a little eroded here, well, it's probably about time to just unload the inbox of all the sordid rumors we've received over the years about various ESPN employees. Chances are, at this point, there's some truth to them.
You have to love the gallons of self-importance mixed with a dollop of justification for printing these rumors in this post. "Well, this one story that I put one phone call's worth of work into, then forgot about for a few months turned out to be true, so maybe these will too. Let's unload'em!"
That of course led to the pair of irresponsible posts that had more bitterness than your morning grapefuit. Radio guy Erik Kuselias wanted to have sex with someone. Senior VP Katie Lacey (who?) allegedly slept her way to the top. I mean, just wow. A juicy rumor about Katie Lacey! Don't hold back! This is totally newsworthy!
I suggest you read these posts and enjoy the lack of facts any of them have. Basically, someone sent Deadspin an e-mail accusing someone at ESPN of having some sexual indiscretions, and Deadspin printed it. And they only printed them because Daulerio was upset with his treatment by ESPN. The timeline:
1) 2006-2009: Inbox flooded with rumors about ESPN employees' sexcapades.
2) 2006-2009: Company policy is never delete them, never do any investigating into them, but don't publish them, because we're not going to do that to those people.
3) August 2009: "Hello, ESPN? Hey, it's A.J. Is Steve Phillips getting fired for doing Harold Reynolds-esque stuff? No? Anything else? No? Kthanksbye!"
4) October 2009: Daulerio spits out his pumpkin latte when he reads the Phillips story in the New York Post. He arrives at work and decides it is now OK to print those old rumors since the one about Steve Phillips, which actually wasn't true if you recall, since ESPN didn't tell him about the real Steve Phillips story.
Journalism!
If you're looking to ruin someone's life, I suggest you set up a fake e-mail account and e-mail Deadspin with a tasty sex rumor about whoever you like at ESPN. Get your friends to do it too so it seems more credible. Tell them Stuart Scott tried to work a three-way with Cindy Brunson and the corpse of Tom Mees. They'll print it and be right to do so since they didn't get the Steve Phillips story.
No one tries to get the best of A.J. Daulerio by telling him the story he's calling about isn't true! He'll learn ya real good!
I'm not going to sit here and tell you that Deadspin set back journalism 50 years or anything like that. I mean, it's not like they invented Around the Horn. But it's just a sad state of affairs over there for a blog that used to be one funny dick joke after another, and now it's run by a guy who has a vendetta against ESPN because the New York Post did its job better than him.
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