In his latest column, SI.com’s Seth Davis drops this little nugget:
I hate to disappoint Kentucky fans, who have every reason to be excited about their team’s run of eight wins in its last nine games, but I’m hearing Patrick Patterson is seriously considering turning pro.
Honestly, I wouldn’t blame Patrick for going pro. He’s performing miracles in the paint despite teams double and triple-teaming him. And I’m not mad that Seth Davis wanting to share what he hears from anonymous sources; I am pissed that all he wrote was one little sentence about it, without any evidence of fact-checking presented to the reader.
At one time in my life, I was an editorial editor for the Kentucky Kernel. They needed somebody to manage the editorial page — letters to the editors, opinion columns, the Kernel’s official Editorial piece, etc. The other sections of the paper had to maintain a high level of fact-checking and cite sources.
Honestly, I don’t understand what’s allowed for anonymous sourcing in professional journalism. I wasn’t a journalism major and I never took a journalism class. It was my understanding from my working experience at the Kernel that the information from an anonymous source needs to be confirmed from more sources. It seems to me that you have to give your anonymous source a little check — and you need to inform your reader of your check.
Maybe Seth Davis did his check. But hell if we know. All we know is that he expects us to trust him with what he’s hearing. Leaving out some of the details of his fact-checking — not including a follow-up call with Patrick Patterson himself — means that Davis decided to print what he’s hearing unchecked.
Instead, Seth Davis expects us to trust him. But its not his job to be trusted! Its his job to take what he’s hearing, question the validity of it, and present it as factually-based, incorrect, or unmentionable. That is what I thought the professional media — those who are supposedly better than blogs — are supposed to do.
I really hate this kind of shit reporting. Its no better than message board posters reporting rumors about Coach Gillispie’s off-court behavior. The only difference is that Seth Davis gets paid to tell us what he thinks about basketball, and to report basketball news. And it appears he’s not fulfilling his job duties by reporting to his readers the validity of his sources.
Of course, since I’m a blogger, my standards are different. So believe me when I say that I’m hearing Seth Davis just decided to jump on the “Patterson is Leaving” bandwagon early with this comment. My sources tell me that if he’s wrong, nobody but a few Internet trolls will remember; but if he’s right, he can say, “as I first reported in February…” until he’s blue in the face.
Seth, when you decide to present to your readers a fact check on your Patterson leaving rumor, I’ll reveal my sources that says your full of shit. Deal?
