EVIDENCE IN SANDUSKY TRIAL: NBC INTERVIEW

NBC has agreed to provide Pennsylvania prosecutors with a complete transcript of Bob Costas’s interview with Jerry Sandusky last November, including portions of the interview that were not broadcast. (Only eight minutes of the 36-minute interview actually aired on NBC’s primetime Rock Center.) Ordinarily it is the policy of news organizations not to provide unaired […]

ESPN COMPARED WITH PATERNO FOLLOWING RELEASE OF INCRIMINATING TAPE

ESPN said Monday that it sat on a 2002 taped telephone conversation between the wife of Syracuse University assistant basketball coach Bernie Fine and Bobby Davis, the young man who has accused Fine of molesting him, because it could not corroborate the charges. Fine was fired on Sunday after ESPN finally played the tape after […]

SENSATIONAL INTERVIEWS GO HEAD-TO-HEAD IN PRIMETIME

It was the week when ABC’s Diane Sawyer was expected finally to beat her arch rival, NBC’s Brian Williams, in the ratings. Not on the evening news, where she trails Williams by about a million viewers, but in primetime, when her 20/20 interview with Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was expected to clobber Williams’s new magazine show, […]

OMBUDSMEN SLAM ESPN’S PENN STATE COVERAGE

The Florida journalism school The Poynter Institute, which partnered with ESPN to act as an ombudsman of ESPN’s sports news coverage, has excoriated the cable sports network for its failure “to ask tough questions and shed light” on the scandal involving Penn State’s football defense coordinator Jerry Sandusky, athletic director Tim Curley, university vice president […]