Articles by sports media writers Neil Best of Newsday and Michael Hiestand of USA Today, regarding the demotion of Joe Theismann both had one common theme:
Neither piece cited Pro Football Talk, the blog that originally broke the story.
Now it is possible that Best may have gotten the word from one of his own sources within ESPN. Still, considering that PFT had this story twenty-four hours before Best or Hiestand did, one would imagine that there would at least be a courtesy cite.
In addition to not citing Pro Football Talk, both the Hiestand and Best articles contained one similarity to PFT’s report.
Neil Best, Newsday: “Joe Theismann is out as a “Monday Night Football” analyst after one season, a person familiar with the decision said Sunday.“
Michael Hiestand, USA Today: “Joe Theismann will be replaced on ESPN’s Monday Night Football, says an industry official with direct knowledge of the move.“
As I stated before, it is entirely possible that Best and Hiestand had their own sources, whom they checked with to confirm the story. However, it is also entirely possible that both are simply referring to the source PFT cited in its original Saturday report.
Also interesting, as I alluded to in the previous post, is the fact that Best also cites an ESPN spokesman as saying “We have nothing to announce”.
That quote came from an e-mail sent by ESPN spokesman Josh Krulewitz to Michael David Smith of the AOL Fanhouse. In fact, the headline on the Fanhouse post was “ESPN on Joe Theismann: ‘We Have Nothing to Announce’“
In short, Neil Best’s Newsday report used material from both Pro Football Talk and the AOL Fanhouse without citing either. And considering the fact that neither Best nor Hiestand stated anything that wasn’t originally said in the post by Pro Football Talk (the lone exception being a quote Best got from a cell phone call to Theismann), there is no reason to believe that their articles — which receive automatic credibility simply due to the publications in which they are written — are anything beyond information gathered from those blogs.
UPDATE: Michael Hiestand makes reference to Pro Football Talk in a piece making recommendations as to whom ESPN should promote to the MNF booth:
Interesting that Soltys has been cited as saying the same quote as Krulewitz. Obviously, a quote as essentially innocuous as “we have nothing to announce” was likely used by several officials at ESPN, and is likely the company line until the announcement of Theismann’s demotion is made official.
With that in mind, it is entirely possible that the ‘we have nothing to announce’ quote may not have necessarily been stolen from the Fanhouse by Newsday writer Neil Best, as I had originally surmised.
