A fake Adrian Wojnarowski tweet made for some fine, although inaccurate, content for the ESPN debate show Around the Horn on Thursday. The panel debate show spent upwards of four minutes talking about LeBron James news that was neither real nor very likely to happen anyway.
The panel show – which featured Ramona Shelbourne, Kevin Blackistone, Tim Cowlishaw, and Frank Isola – is hosted by Tony Reali, who introduced the segment by invoking the reporting chops of the soon-to-be-ESPN reporter.
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“This headline I read, which is Wojnarowski so of course it’s true,” began Tony Reali. But the headline wasn’t true. Because it didn’t come from Wojnarowski. Rather, a fake Woj account named “@WojVertoalNBA.” Here’s the tweet Around the Horn used.
https://twitter.com/WojVertioalNBA/status/874726872059441153
That’s not a whole lot of retweets for the biggest piece of offseason news since Kevin Durant joined the Warriors. Also, what’s with the weirdly cropped photo? Not exactly the signature marks of a Woj Bomb. So there are your first few red flags. Still, it made it into the show. Each panelist reacted to the news. They made up graphics for it and everything.
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The panelists gave odds that LeBron ends up in L.A., and just generally talked about whether it would happen or not. It was a great hypothetical segment, if it were based on anything in reality. Reali took credit for the flub, which is good on him.
I got us @AroundtheHorn burned bad today by a fake tweet (fweet). Uggg this feels the worst.
— Tony Reali (@TonyReali) June 15, 2017
Oh well, everyone gets burned by a fake tweet eventually.
(Via Deadspin)
