With Deion Sanders thriving as a college football coach, other former football players seem to be interested in that model. Those who cover football need to be wary that they’re sometimes being used as pawns in the effort to get the former football player a job.
It happened last month, when Adam Schefter of ESPN.com swallowed the hook on the notion that Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Lewis was a candidate at Florida Atlantic University. He was not. As someone else at ESPN.com reported.
It happened again today, when Schefter reported Mike Vick is a candidate at Sacramento State.
Joe Davidson of the Sacramento Bee reports that Vick is not a candidate for the job.
Davidson cites an unnamed “member of the school’s athletic department” in support of the claim that the ESPN.com report is a “rumor” and “not true.”
The game is obvious. The emergence of reports tying a given candidate to a specific job can take on a life of its own. In this case, linking Vick to the Sacramento State job operates as obvious leverage in his talks with Norfolk State.
When this happens, deeper questions arise. Does the reporter not know he’s being scammed? Or does the reporter willingly go along with it, knowing that the source will make it up to him (and then some) with other scoops in the future?
We routinely see reporters look the other way when passing along not-exactly-factual information about the value of player contracts. They’ll shoot first and ask questions never, all in the name of having a chance to beat their competitors to Twitter. Which then positions them to be credited as the first to report the news — and perhaps to chastise, publicly or privately, media outlets that fail to acknowledge the fact that someone gift-wrapped for them a story they weren’t even looking to break. it just fell into their laps, thanks to a single source. (And, yes, “per sources” routinely gets added to create the impression that the story was properly vetted, even if it wasn’t.)
It’s a dirty little secret of sports media. Few even view it as dirty. And it’s not all that much of a secret. It’s just the way things work.
Sources trade information for favorable treatment. Sometimes, that means looking the other way on a negative story. Sometimes, that means posting a gratuitous tweet on a topic of little or no interest to the reporter’s audience, like an agency expanding its practice or signing a new client. Sometimes, it means pushing a story without doing due diligence, because doing due diligence would show that the information is doo-doo.
We don’t know what happened here. Based on the trends that have developed in the business over the last twenty years, it would be reasonable to wonder whether someone told Schefter Vick is a candidate at Sacramento State, and whether Schefter tweeted it without contacting anyone at Sacramento State or asking any of his colleagues who cover college football to do it.
Is it possible that Davidson’s source is the one who’s lying? Yes. In the context of the broader relationship between the Sacramento Bee and Sacramento State, feeding the outlet a false story could cause much more damage. In the context of the relationship between a national NFL reporter and his sources, being fed a false story often becomes a temporary blip on the road to getting a lot more stories that aren’t.
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