ESPN’s ‘This Just In’ Got Duped By A Fake Ja Morant Quote About Michael Jordan

Over the weekend, Ja Morant made some waves in an interview with Bleacher Report’s Taylor Rooks when he said he would’ve “cooked” Michael Jordan like he does today’s stars, making the point that he has to have that level of self confidence to believe no one could stop him.

That very real quote was juicy enough to become fodder for sports radio and sports television shows in the A-block on Monday, but unfortunately for ESPN’s This Just In, they didn’t talk about that Ja Morant quote but instead a different one — one that wasn’t real. As David Jacoby filled in for Max Kellerman, he read Kendrick Perkins a fake quote from Ballsack Sports, a Twitter account that exists solely to produce fake quotes and try to get people to believe them — which they succeed at an upsetting amount of the time.

Jacoby reads the quote to Perkins and asks for his thoughts on the disrespect, which was, again, not real.

It’s fairly embarrassing and sadly not the first time ESPN has run a TV segment off a fake quote making the rounds on social media. As someone who is in the business of writing about quotes that often come from other interviews and sources, I’m fairly empathetic to how you can initially be duped by one of these, but for it to make it to air (or in my case print) requires far too many people to sign off on running with something without ever putting in the relatively mild amount of work to find the original source. There are dozens of accounts that exist solely to try and get aggregated — with ending up on national TV the greatest reward of all — and at this point it has to be standard practice to find the actual source of the quote before you’re willing to run with it.

That can be time consuming, but in the process it it will assure that you don’t run a fake quote if you can’t find the original source. ESPN didn’t do that and in the process ended up making Jacoby and Perk foolish in the process.