Brian Wilson and Twitter-gate
Posted By Jeff Fletcher on April 27, 2009 5:27 pm
If you missed the whole Brian Wilson Twitter thing, click here to see what happened and what I think about it.
Long story short, Wilson Tweeted at 1 a.m. on Sunday morning about the Scottdale, Ariz., nightlife, then blew a save against the Diamondbacks about 15 hours later. Wilson says he was joking. Fact is, he shouldn’t Twitter anything that he doesn’t want people to read.
I think the real problem was Schulman’s article about the “event” (which was what alerted Giants fans to it in the first place) made big assumptions and made the situation out to be something it wasn’t. I’m not a huge Wilson fan, but he got a bad break in this. That said I agree with you he needs to understand as a public figure everything he does in a public forum is open to judgement, I just wouldn’t expect a respectable journalist to be leading the wild speculation…
I disagree with you on that one B. Fans were noticing Wilson’s Tweets and commenting about it before it got to Schulman. It was the fans who alerted him, actually. If the public is already talking about something, a reporter can’t simply ignore it. I believe in his original post, he said he wasn’t accusing Wilson of being out late or of not being prepared to pitch. He was simply saying: “Wilson wrote something on Twitter and this is what the fans think about it.” Period.
I’m going to stand by what I said here. From Schulman’s article:
“Somebody alerted me to Wilson’s Twitter page. Unless somebody hijacked the page, we have to conclude the Giants’ closer was out very late Saturday night clubbing in Scottsdale.”
So you’re right that the fans alerted him to the Twitter page. Schulman does speculate that Wilson was out late clubbing, though. I read Wilson’s twitter, and I do not agree that “we have to conclude the Giants’ closer was out very late Saturday night clubbing in Scottsdale.”
If fans were speculating about it I can see why Schulman wanted to address it, I just think the kind of speculation he offered was inappropriate. I’m not a journalist myself so I’m not going to offer an opinion on how it should have been reported, I just feel it should have left out the speculation on Schulman’s part.
Thanks for giving us another journalist’s point of view!