ESPN Acknowledges It's Sucking The Life Out Of Sports

The New York Post's resident prude Phil Mushnick digs up an internal memo at ESPN that admits they're constantly stealing scoops from other non-ESPN journalists and claiming them as their own. We've noticed this several times — we almost expected a crawl this morning that said "ESPN's Marc Stein reports that the Spurs have won the 2005 NBA Finals" — and are kind of touched that ESPN even looked closely at itself to notice. From the memo:

"The point here is to reinforce a real vigilance on our part that, [sic] that when we take credit for a story, we are as certain as we can possibly be that we are the first to report it."

"Again, there are a lot of people watching us, a lot of people who believe erroneously that we are too quick to take credit for reporting stories, and they are looking for any example that we are taking more credit than should be the case."

Mushnick also re-tells the great story of Los Angeles Times columnist T.J. Simers, who was one of the featured talked heads on "Around The Horn" ... until he made a joke about the network in one of his columns. He shut up pretty quick after that. And so did everybody else.

Every Scoop's Pretty Nifty [NY Post]