The Jon Gruden email saga has just caught Adam Schefter in some concerning drama that also involves Bruce Allen, the former team president of then-Washington Redskins.
Here’s an excerpt of the report of Sam Farmer and Nathan Fenno of the Los Angeles Times regarding the emails used as exhibits in a legal fight between Washington Football Team owner Daniel Snyder, among which includes one interesting one that Schefter sent to Allen:
“Several emails between Allen and journalists are part of the filing too. In one of them from July 2011, ESPN NFL Insider Adam Schefter sent Allen the draft of an unpublished story that was published later the same day.
“Please let me know if you see anything that should be added, changed, tweaked,” Schefter wrote. “Thanks, Mr. Editor, for that and the trust. Plan to file this to espn about 6 am ….”
During his weekly radio hit on 97.5 The Fanatic, Adam Schefter took some time to address that email from 2011.
“I’ve learned for a long time in this business not to discuss sources, or the process, or how stories are done,” Schefter said. “But I would just say that it’s a common practice to run information past sources. And in this particular case, during a labor intensive lockout that was a complicated subject that was new to understand. I took the extra rare step to run information past one of the people that I was talking to. You know, it was an important story to fans; a host of others, and that’s the situation.”
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ESPN would later release a statement on the matter.
ESPN released the following statement in response to the correspondence: “Without sharing all the specifics of the reporter’s process for a story from 10 years ago during the NFL lockout, we believe that nothing is more important to Adam and ESPN than providing fans the most accurate, fair and complete story.”
