WaPo Lamar Jackson quote taken without credit

We’re back again to examine more bad aggregation. This week’s column will cover aggregation missteps (poor/no sourcing, misrepresentation, and more) from Aug. 30 to Sept. 5.

5. NBA Central pulls Steph Curry People quote without link or context

A widespread aggregation issue often featured in these columns so far is passing around a quote with just a tag for a publication’s Twitter/X account rather than a link to the story. That makes it highly difficult to track down the context of the quote, especially from publications that tweet a lot, especially when looking at stories later. One recent case of this came from the popular NBA Central (@TheDunkCentral) account, quoting a People exclusive interview Natasha Dye did with Steph Curry, but with just a tag for the magazine’s account:

At least the quote isn’t wildly out of context. There is a whole lot more in the story on the “deepened respect and friendship” Curry feels after playing with James again at the Olympics, and on both of them aging and how much time might be left for them; that’s all good context to have, but there isn’t a misrepresentation here. Still, the linking here was very poor, and a disservice to readers as well as to the journalist and publication that actually got the quote.

Rating: **

4. ML Football, Sleeper NFL, and Eagles Nation play telephone with Darius Slay’s podcast comments on Brazil

Speaking of just tagging accounts that tweet a lot, here’s the @_MLFootball account spreading a video of Eagles’ defensive back Darius Slay discussing warnings from the league on crime in Brazil with just a tag for the @SleeperNFL account:

If you go hunting through that profile’s tweets, you can eventually find how they relayed this. That was with an actual video link rather than an account tag, but to the @PHLEaglesNation account:

And that account relayed this video with no link whatsoever, and no mention of where it came from:

This is from the latest episode of Slay’s Big Play Slay Blue Wire podcast, near the 36-minute mark . (This is the second straight week of poor aggregation of a podcast with current or former Eagles players.) That can be inferred from the logo and backgrounds in the clip, but the lack of a link for this is unfortunate, and it removes the context of Slay’s comments (this was part of a couple of minutes of discussion on that game, and part of a much wider podcast overall). By the way, Slay later apologized “to anyone I offended,” with that probably coming at least partly thanks to the way all these accounts passed around his comments:

Rating: ***

3. “Dov Kleiman” reports on Christian McCaffrey’s health

Even the most banal information comes from somewhere. San Francisco 49ers running back Christian McCaffrey was listed as limited in practice Thursday with a calf/Achilles injury, which had previously been an issue for him in training camp. The team released that information, and, of course, tweeted about by the reporters at practice and plenty of observers of the team. The best citation would have been the team’s announcement, but reporters tweeting about it could have been an option too. Instead, “Dov Kleiman” tweeted it with no source at all, suggesting the account was reporting it themselves:

Then again, we don’t know who’s behind that “Dov Kleiman” account these days (which isn’t great ), so maybe it is someone at 49ers’ practice…

Rating: ****

2. Sportskeeda Pro Football and ML Football don’t cite Trump Truth Social post

The Truth Social company is not doing great. It’s owned by Trump Media & Technology Group, which former U.S. president Donald Trump has a 60 percent stake in, and much of the point of that company and platform was a place for Trump to express his daily thoughts while he was banned from X/Twitter. But Trump returned to that other platform recently, and that further hurt already-slumping Trump Media stock, which was down 70 percent from its March high this week (knocking $4 billion off the valuation of Trump’s own shares there).

Part of the issue there is that posts from Truth Social often get relayed and discussed on more popular platforms, sometimes with no credit whatsoever. Let’s track how that played out this week with a Trump “truth” on Brittany Mahomes, starting with a Sportskeeda Pro Football tweet that cited fellow aggregator ML Football:

That one’s interesting for not even tagging Trump’s X/Twitter account, merely posting a hashtag about him. So that ML Football account must be out there doing some reporting, right, getting an exclusive interview with Trump? Yeah, not so much.

That one does provide the full quote from Trump, and (if expanded), it does close with a “via” and a tag for Trump’s X/Twitter account. But this wasn’t posted there, and it only came “in a statement” in the loosest sense of the word (yes, a statement technically can be anything said, but that language more frequently refers to a release sent to media, not something directly posted by a person or organization). It came on Trump’s Truth Social account , where he’s much more active:

No wonder that stock price isn’t great if people don’t even reference the service.

Rating: *****

1. ML Football and Redditor “thefortitude” provide a wildly poor citation for Lamar Jackson quote

Ahead of the Baltimore Ravens-Kansas City Chiefs NFL season opener Thursday, The Washington Post got a lot of attention for a long “Lamar Jackson’s secret superpower” piece from Kent Babb. That piece is worth reading in its entirety for the deep context it puts Jackson in, from his upbringing through his college days his time with the Ravens, his contract negotiations with them in 2023, and more. As with many features, it involves significant reporting over a length of time, and it does a good job of identifying when and where each quote came from (which is not always the case). But, unfortunately, the way many people came across information from this feature was with one standout quote ripped from its context, sometimes even without a proper link. Let’s see how ML Football did that:

The lack of even a tag for the Post ‘s Twitter/X account is remarkable, to say nothing of the lack of a link to the story and the lack of context for that quote and wild misinterpretation of it. Jackson did not say he could not win by throwing; this quote came from him telling Babb, around practice in June, that he was feeling good and wished he had been that healthy in the AFC Championship Game to make more plays with his legs, maybe avoiding the throw into triple coverage (which also involved a receiver running the wrong route) that led to a critical late interception.

And the “can not win by throwing” is a bizarre takeaway from this. That’s not what Jackson was saying here. Indeed, the larger context of that piece is about all the people who have claimed he isn’t a quarterback and can’t throw (and the racial and historical context of that), and this particular quote comes with him saying that loss was the one time he wished he could have leaned into the “he’s a running back” line, saying “That would be the only time they could say I was a running back, because I would run the f— out of the ball.” There’s a lot of vital context that gets missed by not discussing how this came out of his comment on how he was feeling after a June practice and how that compared to how he felt during this January game, to say nothing of the wider context of Babb’s feature on race, quarterbacks, and those who have tried to move Jackson away from that position.

Let’s then look at that particular citation in more detail. So, there’s a “via WaPo,” and then an actual link to Matt Lane of the Kansas City Sports Network. Lane himself relayed this in a more reasonable way, screenshotting the Post ‘s Instagram story on this.

The link would have been better (preferably to the story, but even the Post’s Instagram would have been something), but there’s some rationality to doing it this way. The Post themselves put out this quote on their social media (albeit as the eighth image in a nine-photo story, and with an accompanying link), and screenshotting Instagram stories is a common and understandable practice, as those are difficult to link directly and vanish after 24 hours. And Lane wasn’t presenting this as “BREAKING” (unlike MLFootball), but rather discussing the quote; that’s fair enough, and that’s why he doesn’t make the standings here. But his post should not have been the cited source for anyone further discussing this.

Speaking of bad sourcing on this, let’s go over to the r/fantasyfootball subreddit. A Google search for “We wouldn’t have even had to throw the ball” in order to find the source of this quote produces a post there from user “thefortitude” as the top result (above a CBS Sports piece properly citing the Post story, then a bunch of X posts, and bizarrely, an unrelated Quora grammar question about “standing here”):

Google’s lack of respect for quote originators is its own issue, but that Reddit one at the top is worth diving into. That post got 998 upvotes, and it is simply a complete transcription of a tweet from Ravens’ writer/podcaster Kevin Oestreicher:

Oestreicher definitely did not get that quote himself. Indeed, he properly tagged the Post and linked the specific story in an immediate follow-up tweet . That widespread practice itself can be debated; it’s a way to avoid X/Twitter minimizing the reach of posts with external links, but it’s far from ideal sourcing, and it means that many interpret the quote as coming from the tweeter. Still, given that there was a proper link provided in the follow-up post here, this doesn’t make our standings. The much larger problem here wasn’t with what he did, but with that being used as the source for that popular Reddit post, which had no mention of the Post article or links to it at all (and didn’t even get a link anywhere in the comments). And that just adds further confusion for anyone who sees a quote like this and tries to find the source and context.

Rating: *****

Aggregator standings (these are bad):

@_MLFootball: 23
@NFL_DovKleiman: 15
@SKProFootball: 15
Redditor @thefortitude: 5
@GolazoAmerica: 5
@Spotify_Swift: 5
Fan Recap: 4
@SleeperNFL: 3
@PHLEaglesNation: 3
@DiscussingFilm: 3
@CBSSportsGolazo: 3
X: 3
@BR_Betting: 3
@TheDunkCentral: 2
@jasrifootball: 2

Aggregation subject standings (these are not bad):

Kent Babb/ The Washington Post : 5
Pat Brennan/ The Cincinnati Enquirer : 5
AFP: 5
Reuters: 5
The U.S. Sun: 5
Mark Craig/ The (Minneapolis) Star-Tribune : 5
Mike Florio/Pro Football Talk: 5
Mike Silver/ The San Francisco Chronicle : 5
TWSN: 4
Big Play Slay : 3
The 25/10 Show : 3
Deadline: 3
Ryan Michael: 3
Tom Fornelli/CBS Sports: 3
Natasha Dye/ People : 2
Clarence Hill/ The Fort Worth Star-Telegram : 2

Thanks for reading This Week In Bad Aggregation! User submissions are always welcome via e-mail or Twitter .

The post This Week In Bad Aggregation: Lamar Jackson, NFL in Brazil, and Donald Trump praising Brittany Mahomes appeared first on Awful Announcing .