Early this morning, Jay Glazer (not Rick Reilly) broke the news that Ben Roethlisberger would sit out this week's game against the Baltimore Ravens thanks to a shoulder injury suffered Monday night.
On SportsCenter, the Roethlisberger report got the "sources" treatment from ESPN (as seen above), which caused Glazer to fire this cannon across the bow:
The weird thing in all this is that ESPN.com's online report clearly references that Fox Sports had the report first and a team source confirmed the report to ESPN:
"Byron Leftwich will start for the Pittsburgh Steelers at quarterback against the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday night as Ben Roethlisberger will sit the game out due to a sprained shoulder, a team source confirmed to ESPN.
Fox Sports had earlier reported the Steelers had made the decision to sit Roethlisberger this week."
Maybe with the condensed television format, SportsCenter just forgot or neglected to include that second sentence. Or, maybe ESPN thinks they can play it both ways by crediting Glazer online and not on television. That way they do credit Fox, just not on their most important medium.
UPDATE: Almost immediately after we published this story, ESPN.com changed their write-up and REMOVED the reference to Fox Sports' initial report of the story. The ESPN.com article now reads like this:
"Byron Leftwich will start for the Pittsburgh Steelers at quarterback against the Baltimore Ravens on Sunday night as Ben Roethlisberger will sit the game out due to a sprained shoulder, the team announced Wednesday."
[…]
A source confirmed to ESPN that Roethlisberger's rib and shoulder injuries occurred on the same play. The source said it remains unknown how long the quarterback might be unable to play with the injury to the front of his throwing shoulder."
All righty then…
Neither Glazer nor Fox's name was mentioned during the segment I saw covering the Roethlisberger injury with Kevin Negandhi interviewing Adam Schefter. Perhaps "Fox" or "Glazer" will be mentioned later in the day on television, who knows.
Regardless, we've reached a critical mass with ESPN's reporting. Because of the past history involved, the default reaction in a situation like this is for every reporter to think that ESPN is stealing their stories. Glazer said as much with another tweet. Is there any end to ESPN sourcing controversies in sight?
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