Friday, December 14, 2007

This zero revenue blog has greater journalistic standards than WNBC

The Smoking Gun:
Shortly after ESPN broke the news yesterday that Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte would be nailed in the Mitchell Report, WNBC-TV, the NBC affiliate in New York, blew the story wide open. "Newschannel 4's Jonathan Dienst has obtained the expected list of current and former major league players linked to steroids, according to George Mitchell's investigation," reported the station's web site at 11:23 AM. The WNBC story then unspooled a list of 75 purported juicers, including Albert Pujols, Johnny Damon, Jason Varitek, Nomar Garciaparra, Ivan Rodriguez, Jeff Bagwell, Milton Bradley, Kerry Wood, Mark Prior, Trot Nixon, Mike Cameron, Brady Anderson, Albert Belle, Kyle Farnsworth, and Wally Joyner. The WNBC exclusive, which is reprinted below, was posted seven minutes after an identical list of names was published by the sports blog Deadspin, which reported that it had been forwarded the names by "about 25 different people" during the preceding hour. The list, which was whipping around via e-mail, "could very likely be one of those Web urban legends that somehow got around," Deadspin cautioned. WNBC, though, showed no such reserve. The station reported that it had received the list from "two separate sources" (which was still 23 "sources" fewer than Deadspin). But after WNBC posted the list, baseball officials began refuting the story, with the station reporting that Major League Baseball brass said there were "several discrepancies between the list posted and Mitchell's list." As it turned out, it was several dozen "discrepancies," with nearly half the names in WNBC's story not appearing in Mitchell's report. In fact, every name above--from Pujols to Joyner--can not be found in the Mitchell Report.
Smoking Gun has a reprint of the WNBC post.

My 2:03pm EST post is here, although I only had about 15 of the names at that time, and updated the post as I blitzed through the report.

I think may have one-upped the Smoking Gun, too; Wally Joyner is actually listed on the Mitchell Report, page 73.

UPDATE: Let's add Deadspin to the list of one-upped by Cav.

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