Tennessee bans Knoxville reporter

Only one solution...
BLOGS!

 

A fan doesn't belong in a working pressbox. It makes it tougher for writers to raise hell about fanboy boosters/school employees creating a distraction in the box when some civilian who is in the box on a paper's credential is doing the same thing.

I actually thought that's what this thread was going to be about the first time I clicked on it.

 

About 15 or so years ago, then-LA Daily News Raiders writer Eric Noland was kicked out of Raiderland for many somethings he wrote that pissed off Al Davis and/or one of his minions.

With that, the LA Times promptly stopped covering the Raiders. So did Long Beach and several other SoCal papers. After several days, the Raiders capitulated, let Noland back in and things went back to normal.

I'll stop now, while you all ponder the differences in ethics here.

 

That's a great idea, MileHigh, but it sounds like the News Sentinel agrees its reporter should be punished.

I'll tell you what this looks like. It looks like an example of a newspaper scared shitless about losing one of its remaining potential revenue streams.

Industry doom-and-gloom is starting to have an effect on the product.

Nobody in newspapers wants to hurt a potential revenue stream.

 

Just reporting, not opining ... From what I'm told, this is more about the Knoxville reporter than what he actually did. Apparently the school has had issues with him before and this was the last straw. If another UT beat writer had done the exact same thing the most that would have happened would have been a scolding.

That said, UT was wrong for "suspending" a reporter's right to cover it for a certain amount of time. No matter what it's the wrong way to approach the situation. And if the player actually talked, they were especially wrong.

 

Does it sound like that? I thought it was more like, "We knew what would happen, but we put the news first anyway." I guess I just know from very personal experience how impossible these schools can be to deal with - and how much they hold every single card. I hate what they do to reporters. Hate it. Hate how they just shit on the people who show up every day, day after day after day after day for these "interviews" where players and coaches are coached on every single thing they can say.

Ultimately the university can pull the credential for a game or whatever, but the N-S wins - they got the news. Everything the school does afterward it does to save face in Coach Land.

 

So would all the beat writers walk out of the pressbox, when someone got booted for cheering?
The person doing the cheering has a First Amendment too. But the price of admission is following the rules. And one of the rules is no cheering and if you break it, you'll get punished.
I know it isn't the same, but still.
Oh and HIPAA isn't a smokescreen, it's serious business. Most people don't understand it, and researching an article on it, a law school dean, who specializes and teaches the HIPAA classes told me this, "I do HIPAA every day. I wrote the book on HIPAA and I don't even understand all of it."
I'm also fairly confident that you don't sign away privacy when you put your name down on a letter-of-intent. You can sign individual releases specific to a situation, but an all-purpose release isn't doable.

My other question is this. If this story was such a no-no, how did it get into print in the first place?

 

Smokescreen and serious business aren't mutually exclusive, and I do not disagree with what the law school dean told you. Still, when a coach uses HIPAA as an excuse not to comment on injury it is, 100% of the time, a smokescreen unless that coach is an attorney or has been advised by an attorney not to do so, and even then it is still very likely a smokescreen. I've researched HIPAA well, too, and while I don't deny the seriousness, its applicability to anyone outside the medical profession is stretching the interpretation beyond paper thin.

 

I'd wager 90 percent of the people who are martyring Hooker in this situation did not actually read the story in question.

This was essentially a puff piece on Inky Johnson that ignored the two elephants in the room: first, the future nerve surgery he requires and second, if he will ever play football again.

In essense, the story essentially said, "Inky's spirits are high and he's thankful for all the support and putting his faith in God."

Well, stop the presses.

If you're going to get suspended, get suspended for doing something with actual significance. People are making this out like he was doing a huge investigative piece.

And this isn't the first time Hooker has gone around the rules to get stories that are, in essence, blips on the radar.

 

Got beat on this one, did you?

 

Nope. Just a Tennessee native who read the story and found it lacking. And I know people on the beat.