The Drudge Report, and the Smoking Gun site, report today on how a
fake Mitchell Report list fooled a big time TV station.
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WNBC's Bogus Steroids Scoop
Pujols, Nomar, Varitek on phony Mitchell list published by station
DECEMBER 14--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. The list was eventually yanked from the WNBC web site
out of "an abundance of caution," the station reported in an updated
story. The station has yet to retract (or apologize for) its original
reporting
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