It seems Deadspin is about to go guns blazing at ESPN re: sex rumors

Have it on good authority that ESPN hired this lady to help them with sexual harassment and stalking issues.

http://www.safetychick.com/index.html

Wonder if Studly Steve consulted with her.

 

Fine, but let's not pretend that this was in any way about exposing wrongdoing or protecting women.

 

Exactly. And to be clear, I'm not defending ESPN at all. I do believe that they have created an environment in which women can be treated badly.

My issue is with the attacks on individuals based on anonymous emails with the writer even bragging that he just doesn't care that he can't back them up. Deadspin abused the forum it has yesterday, demonstrating a complete lack of integrity in the process.

I get Mizzou supporting this, because it fits how he posts and he obviously has issues with ESPN. But I am disappointed to see that anybody else on a journalism site would support what Deadspin did.

 

Latest update. Quenched in regret. Or not.

http://deadspin.com/5387745/when-there-is-blood-there-is-backlash

 

I really wish Deadspin would take down the story that appears with the ESPN debachury stories about Lee Corso taking a massive dump.

 

I don't see it as tarnishing journalism so much as using a public forum to attack individuals out of spite, which I find reprehensible. We don't know if what they printed was true. And as I mentioned yesterday, all it would take is one anonymous ESPN employee with a mad-on for a co-worker and the ability to make up a story to smear an innocent person's name.

I'm just saying that I would expect journalists to be more sensitive to this sort of thing.

 

No self outing.

 

This line of thinking, which I believe prevails now in the public's perception of what the media is and does, is why this whole thing is so disturbing. It's one of the comments offered at the end of the story linked above:

"I’m a blogger, and I’ll defend AJ to the last. It’s a friggin blog. To sit here and talk about legitimacy or decency or blah blah blah is a joke. Good for AJ. He’s just a blogger having fun out there."

People don't know, or care about, the difference between us, and "them," as it were. This allows, and will continue to allow in the future, some in this business to get away with just about anything, because lines and standards are so changed, blurred and compromised and/or erased by all the change going on in this industry.

When legitimate newspaper journalists started doing blogs for their papers, this delineation, and reporters' concerns that it would be lost, was one of the reasons why some protested so vehemently and hated doing this aspect of our jobs so much.

Now, we all just know and have resigned ourselves to the fact that if we want to work, we have to blog -- definitions and delineations be damned.

Blogs are prevalent, and just out there now, for better and/or for worse. This case simply points up how, really, that's the problem.

As playthrough said, "It's an online rag, nothing more and nothing less."

But, isn't that how people are beginning to see/treat traditional newspapers, too? And isn't that what traditional newspapers are on their way to becoming, more and more?

This is dangerous, potentially wrongful territory, and readers don't even see it, or understand that, or care about it.

 

Blood? Deadspin drew about as much blood yesterday as a mosquito. And I'm talking a normal skeeter, not a way-down in Louisiana, back in the swamp skeeter.

If they're patting themselves on the back over yesterday, they really have no clue.