Adam Schefter’s Greg Hardy Interview Isn’t News, But It’s Still Dangerous

Way back when Tim Tebow was an athlete, ESPN discovered a magical formula that essentially boiled down to one ESPN personality—usually Skip Bayless—yelling about Tebow, and then the rest of the company responding to that all day, maybe even for multiple days. ESPN would turn into a snake eating its own tail, or Tebow's noodle arm eating itself, and the ratings followed. To a certain extent, ESPN always does this, and usually it's harmless. But it looks like the Bristol machine is kicking into gear again after Adam Schefter's ridiculous interview with Greg Hardy, and that's dangerous.

ESPN actually teased the interview yesterday. Let me say rephrase that: ESPN teased a softball interview with a man who was convicted of beating and threatening his then ex-girlfriend's life, only to have that conviction later overturned on a technicality. They teased it in a press release, and later in a brief segment on NFL Live on Tuesday. It aired in full today, and then Adam Schefter appeared in numerous outlets to discuss his time with the currently unemployed defensive end. Here are the money quotes from Schefter, appearing on The Dan Patrick Show.

• "What he meant by that was he feels like he should not have put himself in that situation around that woman at that time of night around alcohol, and that was his mistake he should never have done that. But in his mind he swears he never put a finger on this woman. And people can believe what they want."
• "I went in with the idea that this guy is a monster. I came out of there with a very different feeling. I came out of there feeling this is a guy who has managed to say the wrong things at the wrong time. Has not always made the right decisions, but I found him to be a changed kind of guy, a guy that, I think realized he did make some mistakes, could have handled things differently. In regards to that incident, I'd like to more people before I made a judgment. All I can go by is what he said. I'll say this: he wasn't wavering. He was adamant: 'I. Never. Touched. This. Woman.'"

Pretty amazing to see a reporter parrot back talking points like "he should not have put himself in that situation around that woman" in order to explain Hardy's nearly incoherent denial, but that's where we are. When Patrick pressed Schefter on whether he believed Hardy, Schefter said it didn't matter what he believed. Even with his "he's a changed man…. he was adamant" bullshit response, we still don't really know what Schefter believes. But we do know why he was the one who got the opportunity to speak with Hardy.

ESPN is typically very protective of its personalities and doesn't often let them appear on competing programs like Dan Patrick's. It's curious that for such a nothing interview, Schefter was allowed to speak to other outlets, becoming the story himself, but that's nothing compared to this:

.@DianaMoskovitz making history. pic.twitter.com/YIPqf7GVMH
— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) April 5, 2016

That is Deadspin's Diana Moskovitz appearing on ESPN. Moskovitz obtained and published damning photographic evidence of Hardy's beating of Nicole Holder on Deadspin in November. Deadspin has long been a nemesis of Bristol—at one point they had a staffer dedicated to following ESPN and its various fuckups—and then out of nowhere, there's Diana Moskovitz chatting with Bob Ley about Greg Hardy. Deadspin has broken several big, important stories, but today was the first time anyone from the site had ever appeared on ESPN. That is pretty wild! Due to her prior reporting, Moskovitz is uniquely qualified to appear on the show, of course, but she was not a guest on any of the ESPN properties at the time her report was published. But today was Greg Hardy day at ESPN.

Michelle Beadle and her co-hosts on SportsNation discussed the interview, with Beadle killing her company for allowing Hardy to use its airwaves to profess his innocence in a wholly unchallenged conversation with Schefter. You can bet your ass that Statler and Waldorf will be spending all day on this tomorrow on First Take, every anchor appearing on SportsCenter in the next 72 hours will deftly switch to their serious voice and intone "in an interview with Adam Schefter…," and people will watch it because they think it's news.

It's not, obviously. Greg Hardy hasn't said anything different than he has in the past, except maybe to share his strange belief that no one has ever beaten a woman in the south. What ESPN, Schefter, and Hardy have done is something akin to historical fiction. They have manufactured an entire news story based in fact—Greg Hardy is a real person, who was accused and convicted of terrible, real things—but those facts simply provide the backdrop to the real story. And the real story isn't even a story, it's just a bunch of chuckleheads debating what it all means. Ordinarily this is just a cynical way of operating, with little downside. At the end of the day, who really cares if ESPN talks about Tim Tebow longer than they should? It's silly, and makes ESPN looks bad, but it doesn't have any real consequences elsewhere.

This is different, though. It's hard enough to be a survivor of domestic violence and abuse without having the full weight of the Worldwide Leader in Sports crafting a redemption story out of thin air for an abuser. Victims have to deal with not being believed—the world barely believed Ray Rice knocked his fiancee out until we saw the actual video—on top of the surreal and disorienting experience of having a loved one physically beat you up, and, if you are unlucky enough to have been beaten by a famous person, attacks against your character, family, and friends by total strangers defending the celebrity who beat you up.

This is why ESPN is venturing into dangerous territory. Even though part of the fallout of the Ray Rice case was supposed to serve as a sort of teachable moment for the league, its players, and everyone else paying attention, we still find ourselves incapable of having a responsible discussion about domestic violence. Here, Greg Hardy got to go on TV and say he didn't do anything wrong in the most unspecific way imaginable, and he was aided by Adam Schefter's signal-boosting robot voice telling the world "He was adamant: 'I. Never. Touched. This. Woman.'"