Last year, Mike Wise of the Washington Post engaged in a deliberate experiment regarding the power of social media. As experiments go, it was nearly as bad as Peter Brady’s volcano.
Over the weekend, Jim Wexell of SteelCityInsider.net, one of the various FOX/Scout.com team-specific publications, wrote via Twitter that Redskins owner Daniel Snyder said on Sirius radio that the Steelers had a deal in place with Washington to move from No. 31 to No. 16 in the draft, presumably to engineer a Pouncey family reunion. It created enough of a buzz to make its way into Peter King’s Monday Morning Quarterback column, and it then caught enough of our attention to make its way to the top of the PFT headline stack.
Not long after pressing “publish,” I heard from P.R. exec Tony Wyllie of the Redskins, who said Snyder hasn’t done any radio since early February. King got the same call, and he and I both commenced the process of trying to put toothpaste back into the lamp. (It’s a helluvalot easier than putting a genie inside a toothpaste tube.)
But where’s Wexell in all of this? He wisely deleted the erroneous tweet, and he posted a follow-up tweet pointing out that "[t]he Redskins have denied alleged plans for a draft-day trade with the Steelers,” adding in a perfunctory "[m]y apologies.” Wexell has ignored a tweet from us -- and presumably tweets from others -- seeking an explanation for his belief that Dan Snyder said otherwise on Sirius radio.
Most recently, Wexell wrote that the error wasn’t “intended,” and that it was “my bad; my blunder.” He then tried to push some Twitter traffic to a colleague’s column that purports to report that Steelers coach Mike Tomlin wanted to trade up for Florida center Mike Pouncey. (Of course, to actually read the column, you’ve got to pay for SteelCityInsider.net and/or Scout.com.)
Sorry, but that’s not good enough. When someone screws up in a major way, as Wexell did, he needs to do something more than say “oops” and move on. After Wise deliberately posted a false item regarding the duration of Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger’s suspension, Wise offered an explanation for his so-called social experiment. And after we once wrote of rumors that a former Steelers quarterback had died, we provided chapter-and-verse information as to how it happened.
As to Wexell’s weekend whiff, all he’s done is muttered “sorry” and then tried to sell us content from a co-worker. Unless and until Wexell provides something more detailed as to the chain of events that prompted him to tell the Twitterverse that Redskins owner Dan Snyder said something he didn’t say about something that never happened, it would be unwise to give credence to anything Wexell says.