"A lot of our employees' violations were traffic-related," a spokesman for Sports Illustrated says. "You can't really count those, even though we did for the college football teams."
NEW YORK - A new report from Blogger! News lists 25 media organizations with police activity among employees. The report comes on the heels of Sports Illustrated and CBS News' six-month investigation of crimes committed by college football athletes.
Among those listed is the sports magazine. "Well, you can't really lump everything together, like we did," SI spokesman Shane Katane said today. "We have thousands of employees; only a small number had violations; and most of those were not serious."
SI and CBS News investigated 2,837 players, and found 277 incidents. Of those, fewer than 40% were for serious offenses. When one reporter pointed out the parallels between the media organizations' records and the football programs' records, Katane declined to comment. When asked if the magazines and television networks did background checks on employees, as suggested for football players in the article, the spokesman stormed off.
"I guess they don't like it when the tables are turned," said Blogger! News executive editor Robert Brenneman. "Of course, that just makes us want to investigate more. We're going to go out and find a few news people with serious incidents and play them up in a future article," he said. "I'm betting they won't like it, but it'll sell, and that's what counts."
