NY Daily News Journalism Ethics: Don't Allegedly Sleep With Basketball Players in 1987, Do Quote Their Fake Twitter Accounts as if They Were Real
Mediocre New York Daily News sports columnist Filip Bondy thinks that the tawdry, questionably sourced, and defiantly irrelevant Sarah Palin/Glen Rice/Joe McGinniss hookup story is a sad tale of lapsed journalism ethics. Sarah Palin's, naturally:
There is plenty of funny and jaw-dropping material in Joe McGinniss' book, "The Rogue," but the one serious, grimace-producing revelation is that Palin had a one-night stand while covering the 20-year-old Michigan player who happened to be in town for a basketball tournament.
According to the Alaskan's acquaintances and neighbors interviewed by McGinniss, Palin, 23, had a "fetish" about black men. Rice reportedly confirmed the affair when asked by the author, though he wasn't commenting on it Wednesday from his home in Coral Gables, Fla.
This is the stuff that drives legitimate women reporters nuts, makes members of AWSM (Association for Women in Sports Media) furious because it tears at credibility and plays to false stereotypes. Palin had learned her ethics the previous fall and spring as a journalism major at the University of Idaho—her fifth college in six years[.]
So what does the Daily News' own journalism ethics look like? Beyond making the rookie error of reporting that the famous athlete in question was Hall of Fame football player Jerry Rice (pictured), and letting Mike Lupica (shudder) attempt writing about politics, the Snooze also deploys the memorable sourcing phrase "the [National] Enquirer said Rice confirmed the romance to McGinniss," and then writes about how the story "sparked an endless outpouring of cyberspace wisecracks," including:
NBA Hall-of-Famer Bill Walton took a shot at the notoriously offense-minded Rice.
"Sarah Palin had an intimate relationship with Glen Rice in the 80s," he tweeted. "Rice tried to resist but he was never one to stop anyone from scoring."
The main problem with that quote? It came from @TheBillWalton, a parody site (see image) that bills itself as "Tweets from Bill Walton…. if only he knew how to use Twitter."