There has been a flurry of NFL news regarding the coaching carousel in the last 24 hours as teams have moved quickly with the regular season now over to get themselves onto the coaching market and begin the process of overhauling their franchise leadership structure.
As such, folks like ESPN’s Adam Schefter are breaking news left and right and it’s never more important than in these moments to take that extra double check at the handle and verification badge when you’re on the hunt for news. This is something that is especially important if you write about sports and even moreso if you, you know, work for ESPN.
That’s why what happened on Monday was rather stunning as ESPN ran a story on the Dolphins firing offensive coordinator Chan Gailey, citing an Adam Schefter report. The problem was, Schefter never tweeted the news, an account @TuaNeedsHelp did with Schefter’s avatar and their name changed to Adam Schefter as a fake and, somehow, ESPN’s news desk picked it up and ran with it.
ESPN got duped so hard by a fake Schefter tweet that they published a whole article
pic.twitter.com/rMbbLWqvGx
— RedditCFB (@RedditCFB) January 4, 2021
From there, they had to issue a retraction and apology on the site and social media, which the real Schefter tweeted out.
Statement from ESPN on this issue:https://t.co/XhF5ZCvOTp https://t.co/m6BJQGUWcu
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) January 4, 2021
It is the absolute nightmare scenario for someone working on the news desk, but that it happened at Schefter’s employer makes it all the more strange as ESPN changed its news breaking policy recently to insist its newsbreakers don’t tweet out information if they have not already provided said info to the news desk so they can begin working up a story for the site. In this case, Schefter obviously didn’t file anything and still this got out, which means that policy has since been pushed aside or someone thought Adam had gone rogue.
In any case, this was an unfortunate moment that all of us that work in the business dread happening and I’m sure the person on the desk that did this feels absolutely sick about it. It’s really not a tremendously big deal in the grand scheme, although the celebrating Dolphins fans on Twitter are probably a bit miffed and it likely led to some very uncomfortable calls for Schefter, Gailey, and the Dolphins as this all got sorted out.