Sports misinformation in Great Falls

Not quite a Poin Files case, but close. SID hired, only to be fired a couple of hours later after closer background checks:

http://www.greatfallstribune.com/article/20140403/NEWS01/304030025/UGF-hires-fires-new-sports-info-marketing-director?nclick_check=1

 

huh. So, the paper got him fired...

 

Well, there are different kinds of background checks. So depending on what you pay for, some stuff may or may not show up.

According to the story, he plead guilty to a couple of misdemeanors and the felony charges were dropped. It all happened in a different state. So pretty easy to see how something like that might not show up, depending on the search criteria.

I do wonder how the newspaper came by the information. I've never known a paper to take the time or money to do searches on anyone at that level (it's a pretty low level athletic department position). Heck, I've never know a paper to do searches on its own employees, much less someone else's. So my guess is they most likely were tipped off to something.

I mean, c'mon, school hires a sports info/marketing guy and sends out a routine press release. Places where I've worked it might get 2-3 paragraphs if it's a slow news day. So you tell me someone in the understaffed sports department decides to launch a criminal background on the guy that's more extensive than what the university did. I can almost guarantee you it wouldn't happen that way. They had a reason to go hunting.

 

The subhead of the story says the paper just did a Google search, which is something I do regularly for people who pop up in the police beat or declare for public office in the town I cover. It's something I routinely do because about two years ago, there was an elected state rep a couple towns over that never divulged that he got arrested for drugs and DUIs in the 1990s, IIRC. It wasn't my town, but the story stuck in my head. (Similarly, I think there was a thread on here or Romensko about the art teacher in Arizona that a paper had done a profile on, where they didn't realize the person had served time for murder or manslaughter.)

I can also imagine a scenario where if it was a poorly written press release, the sports staffer might have just run the name through Google in an attempt to get the guy's hometown or something.

 

Finally, a subject Mark is truly an authority on.

 

Perhaps. It might have been in a story at another paper at the time. No one I've known has even gone that far to do a Google search.

Even if I found something, I'm not at all sure I'd publish it without first talking to the person involved. We're talking about a person's livelihood here and not someone typically classified as a public figure, like an elected official.

 

If you Google the guy's name, the third link on the first page that shows up is about his arrest in 2010. We're not talking about rocket scientist work here, and if anything, there should be some serious questions from university administrators about how this dude got hired, and why they're paying money for any background check stuff if the company missed this, or if they just overlooked it.

As far as why it's a story, why the heck wouldn't it be? A university hired a dude who pleaded to improper conduct with minors for its athletic department. The charges were within the past five years; it's not like we're talking about something from 1980 here. It's a private university, but in any town, a college is a significant employer and a significant factor on the local economy. If they hired this guy, how many other people have they hired without doing proper background checks?

 

I would guess a fair number.

I would guess a fairly significant percentage of people over the age of, say, 30, have some sort of arrest and/or conviction record somewhere at some point in their life. If a company wants to adopt a policy against hiring such persons, that's on them and it's on them to do their due diligence if they choose to enforce it. In this case, they obviously failed to do and were sort of caught red-faced over it.

Do you really expect someone to volunteer that information on a resume or in an interview?

 

Not trying to come off all holier-than-thou, but I've got no problem with this affecting his employability for quite a few years.

You don't want to go through stuff like this where it's really, really hard to find a job? Then don't do the crime. I don't find it at all over-the-top for him to still be suffering from the ramifications of his poor decision-making (a crime against people) 4 years after the fact. Especially since he likely will be working with students and student staffers quite a bit at this job.