Sideline reporter gave fake news

It was hard for me to take it seriously before she started stoking Smith. Her “basketball career“ was a complete farce. To hear Vern talk about her on NCAA tourney broadcasts, you think she was Caitlin Clark. She was once Miss Teen USA. She has parlayed that and no skills into a seven-figure career.

 

I saw this on Fake SportsCenter, which I despise. But anyway ...

 

SO much pious and pompous handwringing on my LinkedIn feed from the other journalists about how Charissa is Satan.

Let’s take a minute. How would this happen?

I add that I’m now running a newsroom with a bunch of 23-28 year olds. All female reporters except for one. All incredible insecure, expect for one.

And I’m fairly demanding of all of them. As much as one can be in 2023. Because I have GMs and content VPs from corporate watching me like a hawk.

Let’s say, when Charissa was 25, she finds herself at the Big Ten Network. She’s covering a blowout and the losing coach won’t stop and talk.

She does the two questions bit of the winning coach at the end of the half.

And she has nothing from the other coach at the third quarter kickoff.

What’s plausible: the producer/executive producer of that broadcast loses his mind on her.

“You HAVE to get this!! Don’t come back next week if you can’t even do THIS!!”

It’s 2007. That’s how people in the truck talked to each other.

That producer/EP also has a boss and shit runs downhill from that person. We all have bosses who knit pick us in TV. “You need to tell her this isn’t an option,” the big boss may tell this producer/EP.

Now probably on the edge of tears and sleeping nights for a week, Charissa is terrified about her job. She thinks she is one more “failure” from getting fired and being stuck doing weekends in Terre Haute.

The next time she runs into this issue, she decides to “white lie” it. Maybe the truck knows. Maybe the truck doesn’t.

She says “f it” and gives some generic cliche at the start of the second half. No one notices. No one cares.

Until she decides to make that public.

There are shortcuts that may come up in the business. I had a military funeral on the other side of the market a dozen years ago I had to cover. The competitor’s station was ten miles from the funeral. My station was 80 miles away with poor cell service.

I had to leave by 8 pm while he stayed through tue 10 pm. At 8, we both needed some info confirmed. We swapped personal cell phones and he gave me the info at 9:20 pm that I needed.

Three years later, there’s a mass shooting a mile from my station. Damn right he got sent. Without asking, I told him what I knew because he needed 90 minutes to get there. (Now we did our own shooting for sound bites on scene).

I would never go telling my bosses about the info swap. But we were both weekend anchors and the top reporters at our respective stations.

However, at this competitor’s station a decade ago was a young reporter. Northwestern grad. First job. He kept getting these stories with incredible sound from the hood after crime scenes.

The police chief told me a year later this reporter had a stack of $20 bills (he came from wealth) and would hand them out for good sound bites in the poorest part of town. He was shooting his own stuff so he didn’t have a photographer call him out on it.

Within 8 months, that reporter made a huge jump. He’s now in New York City reporting. I hope this runs him at least a C-note per sound bite now.

 

Ding, ding. We have a winner.

 

Supervisors need to figure out quickly if they want to deal with our current landscape ... or do they want the truth?

In just the last few weeks, I've had local coaches who disappeared after a game/match. Wouldn't comment.

Years ago, SEs and other editors didn't consider that acceptable. Which is BS ... short of physically sitting on them, just what in the hell are we going to do to make them talk? At the high-school level, we're not backed by a union. The coaches aren't required to talk to the media under threat of reprimand and/or fine. Not exactly the NFL. Or a conference-backed network in which the coach knows that refusing comment is going to have consequences.

So now ... I simply tell the SE that the coach ran out and wouldn't talk. Neither of us like it - we remembered when coaches didn't do this kind of crap - but we have to continue along and not let them hold stories, writers, editors and publications hostage.

No fabrication. No Mitch Albom and people wearing their Michigan State clothing when they weren't even in the arena.

But now ... it's up to Amazon not to be as weak as Carole Leigh Hutton was with Albom and take action. And waiting it out is not action.

 

More and more, I think people -- not me, but a lot of people -- just don't care what's on social media, whether it's intended to be offered in a professional or a personal vein (and if professional, then even it's connected to a supposedly professional company or institution). It's just a platform/outlet to talk, discuss, opine and socialize, like everything is just a casual conversation. And anyone can use it, and can direct just about anything at anyone. (See, say, Donald Trump).

There really don't seem to be many rules, and, unless they're self-imposed, who's to stop anything, really?

 

She won’t get fired for a simple reason.

As a host/anchor, she has value.

I’m the target demo. Whenever she is on the screen, in the years since she joined FOX, I don’t think I’ve ever changed the channel. Not once. Sound down? Fine. I’ll just look. The moment it goes to highlights, then I’ll reach for the remote.

People never like to admit it but they do watch attractive people when they’re on — men and women all do. Otherwise, every newscast would be full of intelligent “6”s.

 

This is no excuse for what Charissa did. I’m in a national gig that requires chasing high-leverage news.

It absolutely sucks when you’re tasked to come up with info that you can’t get. Even if it might eventually cost you your job. But that does not give you a license to break the biggest rule in the business.

 

@gingerbread and @WriteThinking have posted things that I have been thinking and I am glad they did.

This thread unpacks so many issues that aren't new. They don't seem to get resolved so much as they evolve into new messes that go with the changing platforms and technologies. The core truths behind them make my stomach hurt.

A brief sidebar here: Years ago, someone at Bridgestone Arena told one of my colleagues she wasn't pretty enough to be that stupid. She wanted to be taken seriously as a sports journalist. I was happy to be Virgil to everyone else's Dante, but still felt for her and was vicariously offended on her behalf. For what it's worth, she wasn't stupid. In fact, she'd probably forgotten more about the sport we were covering than most people in the room claimed to know. (Ice hockey in Nashville, bruh. Live it! Or something.)

Check. I remember being asked by a couple of people I interviewed if I would clean up their grammar. Actually, it was usually their syntax that needed tweaking. If it didn't change what they said and it still kept their "voice," I did it. Maybe it was wrong. Not sorry even if it was.

Oh, yikes. This happened to me three times. Every time, I mean EVERY TIME, someone took credit for something they either didn't do or failed to mention the other people involved. I always kept my DVR files and/or emails and tear sheets to cover myself. There is a presumption of guilt because they presume you have no moral compass.

Nodding at all of this. Life happens and sometimes stuff is being held together by the barest of threads between the buzzers. Players and coaches may have their wives, their parents, their girlfriends, Pierre McGuire, maybe all of the above on their asses and they really can't stop and talk. Spartan editors need to eat something sweet and sit and rock until the feeling passes. (Sticktaps to St. Molly Ivins.)

Re. The info swap. This looks more like you were fulfilling your responsibility to get information to the communities who depend on you. Not sure why your handlers would see this as a sin. It's a shame you couldn't give credit for shared info.

Agreed.

 

Another fabricator making my job harder.

 

All of us agree what she did was a bad step, combined with the misstep of talking about this.

She also doesn’t do that job anymore and hasn’t for a while. Host/anchor is entirely different skill set. Very few sideline reporters have made the job to host/anchor, successfully, and she is one. (Erin Andrews tried one year on GameDay and it didn’t work.).

This also brings the value of sideline reporters up again. You could take them all out and I wouldn’t see any negative impact. The segments that I find especially worthless are the sideline reports that were conceived the day or two before in the production meetings about some receiver’s mom. Instead of a :27 second story between first and second down, make it a nice pre-produced :30 story with some graphics.

All we ever care about now is injury information. Especially for the bettors among us.

 

A weekend radio host here took the issue to task yesterday and related on air how long she worked essentially for free at various jobs at the college level for years to get her first paid sports media job. (At the same time and currently holding a full-time teaching job.) She said she had NO TIME for Charissa Thompson.