Hiring Leanne Schreiber was not one of them. She writes an excellent column and ESPN would do well to heed her advice.

As for the stories themselves, there’s not much that shocks me in journalism, but Chris Mortensen’s comment really did. It was unbelieveably arrogant and wrong…dealing with sources who give you misleading or false information is just part of the job but you still have to give those sources a chance to tell their side of the story or you’re just doing a hatchet job.

And Stephen A. Smith and Cris Carter are two of the worst analysts on television. It continues to surprise me that anyone hired Carter after he showed himself to be the weakest link on “Inside the NFL” at every opportunity. He should be fired for suggesting (twice) that a football player should be shot as a way of improving the franchise. Smith’s just a terrible journalist…I don’t know why ESPN keeps him around considering how little he provides in useful analysis and what appears to be overwhelmingly negative opinions of him from the viewers (he’s a constant target for mockery). He got fired from the Philadelphia Inquirer for not taking his journalistic responsibilities seriously (he got caught skipping out on a game he was supposed to be covering and texting in a column from the airport) and every show he’s done on ESPN has been shuffled around and eventually cancelled due to low ratings. He does a blog that’s quite possibly the most useless I’ve ever seen…all it does is link to his columns on ESPN. He doesn’t even bother to reprint the story, he just posts the headline and a hyperlink. What a complete clown.