The fabulist in their midst: Why won't Fox and Amazon address Charissa Thompson?

Amazon has great ambitions in sports broadcasting, the latest that it has its eyes on NBA playoff games https://awfulannouncing.com/amazon/prime-playoff-games-marchand-ourand-podcast.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter.  Thirty years ago Fox turned the sports world upside down by snaring NFL rights from CBS Sports, launching what is today one of the dominant sports broadcasters globally (to those who do not know why this was so shocking, Fox at the time was a startup rebel broadcaster, whose bandwidth was meager.  The NFL changed all that).

That is why there is some irony that Charissa Thompson is employed by both Fox and Amazon, neither of which had her address, well enough to apologize for, her shocking admission that in the 2000s as a sideline reporter she made stuff up.  Neither on TNF last week or on yesterday’s Fox pregame show, did Thompson address the elephant in the room. She did post an Instagram message Friday saying she should have been more careful with her words and she had never lied.

Here is what she said that started the kerfuffle: "I would make up the report sometimes because, A, the coach wouldn’t come out at halftime or it was too late," she said on the "Pardon My Take" podcast, "and I was like, I didn’t want to screw up the report, so I was like, "I’m just gonna make this up.'"

Thompson has been raked over the coals relentlessly (Peter King in his Monday column wrote it’s a fireable offense ).  I ran a Twitter poll,err X, and of 620 votes, 39 percent said she should either be suspended  or fired (45 percent didn’t care which is a reflection on the image of sideline reporters). https://twitter.com/KaplanSportsBiz/status/1725313788155486293

But I would like to focus on her employers who perhaps urged her to put out her Instagram apology, but did not have her address the issue on air. It's like the evening news the day after a hurricane wiped out a city reporting on everything but.

Games come and go, and there are hours of pre-game and post game shows.  But an admitted fabulist in the midst and nary a word?  Surely I am naive, but I believe it's hard to see CBS, NBC or ESPN letting this slide like this.  When court documents revealed ESPN insider Adam Schefter had sent a rough draft of a story to a team executive for edits and the LA Times reported on it, he promptly through ESPN put out an admission he had been wrong to do so. 

I will admit it can be tough to figure out what is important.  At my previous job in 2021 I had the Schefter email months before it would become public, as well as some of the Gruden emails (though modestly redacted) that caused such controversy, but a decision was made against writing about it.  That in hindsight was a mistake.

So I write the following knowing full well that journalism is hard and it's not always easy to know what to do. But Fox has never been the pinnacle of pointy headed sports journalism.  It doesn't have a history of in-depth investigations, features on the seamy side of sports, an effort to realize sports broadcasting can also be journalism.

And seeing Amazon embark down that path is disappointing. Prime is in year two of its exclusive  TNF rights package, and from a production standpoint it's been a winner, even if some say Al Michaels sounds bored. Few glitches, growing audiences, new stats aided by AI (predicting who will rush the quarterback).  And one doesn’t expect groundbreaking exclusives from the nascent sports division.

But come on, both Fox and Amazon need to address this.  I realize it's not the same, but should the New York Times just have let Jayson Blair keep on writing when it was revealed he made stories up? Not address it?  Thompson is not Blair, and what head coaches are compelled to spit up to a microphone at halftime is not necessarily within the realm of all the news fit to print. But there have to be some rules, some ethics.

If Amazon, and Fox, won’t address that one of their own copped to creating quotes, how does that reflect on the rest of their on-air staff? If Amazon is so unbothered by the fabulist in their midst, who is to say they aren't ignoring other transgressions.  It is a bad look for everyone who represents the Amazon TNF brand, through no fault of their own other than if they should make it known internally that off handedly boasting about journalistic malpractice should not be countenanced. 

Again I will leave others to judge Thompson, we have all done and said stupid things.  What I would like to see is Fox and Amazon take their roles in sports broadcasts with a little more seriousness and respect for the audience. They would be doing that by addressing what Thompson said.