Regret the Error

Last week’s release of the Mitchell report about the use of performance enhancing drugs in baseball gave rise to some incorrect reporting. Several news websites thought they had received a list of the players named in the report and chose to publish it ahead of the report’s release. The Smoking Gun offers the background on how WNBC got caught with an erroneous scoop:

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, and Kyle Farnsworth.
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.

It’s interesting that blogs are frequently criticized by those in the mainstream press for their willingness to publish unsubstantiated information. Yet Deadspin.com’s treatment of this information was a bit more measured and cautionary than that of WNBC. Note also that MSNBC.com published an erroneous list. It subsequently published a correction:

Msnbc.com on Dec. 13 erroneously published the names of several Major League Baseball players who were not mentioned in the Mitchell report on the investigation into steroid use. Johnny Damon, Albert Pujols, Ivan Rodriguez and Sammy Sosa were wrongly mentioned in msnbc.com’s report.

The New York Observer followed up on The Smoking Gun’s story by contacting WNBC’s Dienst:

Mr. Dienst said that after yanking his inaccurate list from the WNBC.com web site, he hit the phones trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
“I spoke to a fourth person after I got the complaint from Major League Baseball,” said Mr. Dienst. “His explanation was that the people who shared the stuff with me, had an earlier version that had probably been [subsequently] changed and edited because they had been working on the report up until the final minute.”
Mr. Dienst said he regretted the error. “We want to be right,” he said. “We like to be right and first. But we want to be right before we’re first.”

WNBC has not published a correction or apology, and it’s arguable that Dienst has aggravated the situation by implying that the players on his erroneous list may have been targeted in the Mitchell investigation. Does he know this for sure? No. But he still told it to the NY Observer. Perhaps it’s time to stop speculating?

UPDATE Dec. 17: Reader Richard had previously informed us of another example, which we accidentally omitted from this post. KTVI, a TV station in St. Louis, went to air with rumors about Albert Pujols, among others. The station’s justification for airing the names is rather shocking: news director Kingsley Smith told the Post-Dispatch that “its affiliation with the Fox network allows it ‘a certain sense of edginess and aggressiveness’ that competitors don’t have…” Um, wow.

From the story, which is well worth reading:

The decision by KTVI (Channel 2) to devote the bulk of a newscast Thursday morning to a rumor that Cardinals standout Albert Pujols was on the list of baseball players named as using performance-enhancing drugs in the Mitchell Report has drawn the attention of many of the area’s news executives.
Channel 2 had in-depth coverage of the situation during its 11 a.m. newscast, and though viewers often were told Pujols’ name being on the list was unsubstantiated, the amount of attention given to the story — even including a report from the Pujols 5 restaurant — has drawn criticism. And KTVI news director Kingsley Smith knows some viewers took the report as gospel.
“Often when folks watch something, they key in on one particular aspect and miss the next few minutes of the story,” he said. “That probably happened here.”
The rumor, which also included former Cardinals pitcher Darryl Kile, turned out to be false and broke about a half-hour before the KTVI newscast began.
“There can be a lot of pressure to get something on, and you don’t want to ignore it,” Smith said. “You don’t get into too many tougher situations up against deadline. It’s never perfect when it’s live, but we tried to put it all in context.”
Smith said his station differs from the others in town in that its affiliation with the Fox network allows it “a certain sense of edginess and aggressiveness” that competitors don’t have, and that his station’s ratings are rising while some of the more conservative foes’ numbers are falling.
John Rawlings, editor of the St. Louis-based Sporting News, decries that stance.
“Channel 2’s behavior was reprehensible,” Rawlings said. “… Many media companies had that (bogus) list, Sporting News included. Yes, we were pulling out every way we knew of to confirm any of it. We did not publish anything based on that list.
“Kingsley Smith’s excuse for his bad decision is despicable. ‘The Fox network brand allows us a little more latitude’? I consider myself a journalist and that does not in any way represent my idea of how we do our job.”