NFL diary/column trainwreck

Column proved fraudulent

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I read that link three times and I still can't understand what happened here.

Fletcher agreed to write a column for this paper, and then let his agent write it instead (which was fine with the paper because people use ghostwriters all the time?) and then the agent let a publicist take care of it, but the publicist was writing the same column for Tahi in Minnesota?

Is that the gist of this?

 

I've always wondered why we quote from athletes' websites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook as if it were really the athlete speaking -- how do we know whose words they are?

Even if the athlete tells you he approved the quotes -- "Fine by me" -- I don't like it. If I'm doing a face-to-face interview with an athlete, I wouldn't allow his publicist to speak for him without saying, "Bradley Fletcher, when asked a question, allowed his publicist to answer and said only, 'What he said.'"

Why do we give up our verification obligation so easily? I'm afraid I know the answer to that, and I don't like that, either.

 

Not only do we quote our players' tweets, but we keep all the horseshit cyberspeak and bad grammer. Even used it in a headline once.

"I'm in LA to bring odom bac to miami"

Disgraceful.

 

If you're going to use it, and not paraphrase, you kind of have to.

 

Then paraphrase . . . or at least never let it see the light of display type.

 

Just to further the hijacking of the original topic ...

I'm seeing AP stories based on tweets, and also seeing them use comments from users, including Internet slang and emoticons! I don't think we can assume something that's tweeted are the subject's actual words unless we see them type them his/her self ... and if we're there to see that, why aren't we grabbing a notepad or tape recorder and asking our own questions? It's like a controversy we had last month over the JV football coach being fired. Someone saying they were the coach used our message board and apologized, but since it's an anonymous posting, I told the reporter doing the story he couldn't use the post, since there's no way to verify who said it.