So it appears the Bengals have finally traded Carson Palmer, sending him to the Raiders for a pair of first-round draft picks. That news was surprising enough. But then something else popped up from the clogged Twitter feeds announcing the deal: That ESPN's Adam Schefter knew about the trade last night but chose not to report it.
We know this because John Shahidi, the CEO of RockLive, a manufacturer of personalized iPhone apps for NFL players once reported to be a business partner of Palmer's brother, Jordan, tweeted it. The tweet has since disappeared, but not before it had been re-tweeted by Jerry Rice, the screen grab of which you see above (as captured by The Big Lead).
Now, I see three possibilities here:
1. Schefter knew about the trade, but held off because his sources—in Palmer's camp, from the looks of it—asked him to. This kind of thing happens all the time.
2. Schefter knew via other sources, but Palmer's camp asked him to hold off, lest it gum up the trade. This sort of thing happens, too, especially with deal-mongers like Schefter. Now, a Poynter Institute drone might say it's not Schefter's job to worry about gumming up the trade, but here on planet Earth, reporters make those little compromises every day.
3. Schefter deliberately withheld the information because he's part of a secret cabal that also knows all about Vince Foster's murder, Obama's birth certificate, the 9/11 controlled demolition, and the U.S. government lab in which AIDS was created. But then he and Chris Mortensen decided to break the story anyway. But then Jay Glazer broke the story. Let's go with this option.
We're trying to get in touch with Shahidi and will have more if we hear anything else.
UPDATE: Shahidi has responded to a series of questions, saying he's "in the tech biz and ha[s] no idea how this stuff works. I didn't mean anything else. I'm not a journalist so I worded it wrong. It was my bad. What I was trying to say is in the tweet that I posted 3 minutes later (it was early and I was/am hungover)." Asked if Schefter, whom he still thanked in that subsequent tweet he just referenced, had known about the trade last night, Shahidi said, "I highly doubt it."