Pat McAfee from ESPN has reinforced a radiant lie and improved the life of a teenager

Mary Kate Cornett, a then 18-year-old student at the University of Mississippi, pulled a completely unfounded and malignant rumor about an unnamed Freshman on this campus shortly after the moderator of the sports talk show, whose ESPN show, on YouTube.

As a telephone number for the teenager who vehemently contests the rumor, she began to kill hated messages, including messages that you instruct. In what NBC News confirmed, the police appeared with pulled weapons to Cornett’s mother’s house. To reinforce an evil rumor that made her family’s lives hell, Cornett and her family NBC News said that they want to take legal steps against McAfee and against ESPN that have licensed the McAfees Show.

McAfee is again in a conversation about sports media, “journalistic standards” and the responsibility associated with a platform that is as enormous as its. This month Cornett spoke about her ordeal, first for a lengthy piece by The Athletics Katie Strang and later to NBC News’ Tom Lamas.

Cornett is the victim of a sports media environment that prioritizes the ability to consciousness and does not seem to be interested in distinguishing between what is true and what is wrong. But as she rightly told NBC News, she is not a public personality, and McAfee should never have strengthened a campus rumor to have been spread by Yikyak, an anonymous, message-based gossip app, which is popular in the college set, before spreading X. and no responsible adult, not with an audience with an audience with an audience that should not be discussed, discuss. Even non -journalists agreed that some subjects were no more than private individuals and children.

McAfee seemed to fight the controversy for the first time in a live show on Wednesday evening and said that he never wanted to be “part of a negative in any life”, although he did not work any further. Neither McAfee nor ESPN explicitly commented on the case, but the defenders of McAfee quickly find that he did not name the woman during the segment and that he repeatedly “supposedly” said “supposedly” – as if this automatically gives him from responsibility if he discusses a not public figure at his millions of followers. In the past, McAfee, who has a story of the reinforcement of misinformation, has repeatedly denied being a journalist and mocked the idea that he is kept according to “journalistic standards”.

There is therefore a slight irony in its repeated, almost mocking use of the word “supposedly”: it is a convention that is used almost exclusively by journalists and sometimes by law enforcement authorities and lawyers to discuss the accused crimes. (It should also be noted that it is among the journalists, especially those of us who often cover gender -specific violence, about the use of “supposedly” when reporting on domestic violence or cases of sexual assault. Some claim that the word gives incredulously and doubtful doubts about the prosecutor.) Despite McAfee, which he does not use this common journalistic standards has stopped, arrives.

I would argue that, regardless of the name or size of the platform, everyone with a microphone should not have the human decency, not to pose unfounded rumors with non -public figures – especially not public numbers that are teenagers. This is twice the way you have the institutional support of an entity like ESPN. But there was too long a conspiracy of the border between journalists and entertainers in sports media in general, also at ESPN. Full disclosure: I used to write for ESPN and performed in the network’s shows and can confidently say that the network uses numerous journalists and entertainers who are very good in their work.

Last year ESPN said last year that the company in response to criticism of McAfee and its obvious allergy to reviewing facts concerns the responsibility for what is placed on its platform. ESPN licenses McAfees Show, so that he is not technically not an employee, although this is not automatically negated against things that McAfee says on its air waves.

In November, Chris Hayes from MSNBC McAfee and NFL Quarterback Aaron Rodgers called out when they quoted an invented status, who claimed that Detroit Lions, Jared Goff, was 6-0, where he had thrown at least four interceptions. After McAfee and Rodgers staged it brightly, X user Misterciv wrote the person who created the original post: “If you have ever asked yourself how easy it is to spread fake information, I put this status in bed at half -time of the game.”

As Hayes then said: “Fortunately, this is a completely harmless example of the disinformation and the only episode was that McAfee had to lay and lead it back. But what happened in this exchange between McAfee and Aaron ‘own research’ Rodgers is basically the entire history of our information environment.”

But McAfee devoted more than two minutes to discuss a rumor about a father-son lover triangle that was not harmless. Mary Kate Cornett says his reinforcement of this lie has built up her life.

We cannot continue to consist of the responsibility of their platforms. Cornett’s case is a strong example of how funky and truth cannot be worried, even if they are not mentioned.