The top two NFL newsbreakers took vastly different approaches to the news of Dwayne Haskins’ death.
Haskins was struck by a car in Florida over the weekend, killing him at just the age of 24.
For reporters, getting or doing anything wrong when covering someone’s death simply cannot happen. And Adam Schefter, who broke the news, was roundly criticized after the ESPN reporter noted Haskins’ struggles to make it in the NFL as he shared the news of his death in a since-deleted tweet.
Meanwhile, NFL Media’s Ian Rapoport hadn’t reported anything. Rapoport and Schefter generally break news within minutes, sometimes seconds, of one another, but Rapoport didn’t say anything until tweeting out the Steelers’ statement from head coach Mike Tomlin.
Appearing on the “Pat McAfee Show” on Monday, Rapoport shared why he elected not to leak the news.
“It is something I think about all the time, and I’ll just talk you through my process for this specific thing, not anybody else, this is just what I was dealing with with Dwayne Haskins on Saturday morning,” Rapoport said. “I was actually at my son’s baseball game, and I got a text that was like ‘Hey, this is horrible, but I think Dwayne Haskins was killed last night, you might want to check into it.’ I said like that’s horrendous and horrible, because I actually got to know Dwayne pretty well and he is a great, great dude. Really enjoyed all my interaction with him, hung out with him a small bit when I visited Washington camp, he was great. So I called his team, I called the agent, I didn’t get it on the record, but I did confirm that the incident happened.
“Honestly, I didn’t feel great about breaking someone’s death. I just didn’t. So, my thought process in this case was the Steelers are generally a team that announces very serious things. If the agency or the team wants to announce it, I will just let them do it. So, that was me, I know obviously there’s a lot of other discussion, but that was just my process. And I called my bosses at the network and let them know ‘Hey, this happened, I want you guys to be aware,’ and that I was waiting for the Steelers to announce it. When they did, I led in with some thoughts and went on TV and talked about it.
“There’s a lot of delicate, tough life situations. This was not a good one, not a fun one. Any death is bad, any death way before its time is bad. The fact that I knew Dwayne is also bad, the fact that he was such a good guy is bad, I mean, it’s all bad. So anyway, that was my process through this.”
The job of people like Rapoport and Schefter is to break news as quickly as possible, but often it is transactional news that eventually gets confirmed by the team, player or agent. And while it might be an industry that operates at breakneck pace, Rapoport’s explanation shows that it’s not always pivotal to be first on something, especially if such a process eliminates the possibility of compassion.
“This is something that I do feel like my business …. it does in a way force you to react quickly and then think about it,” Rapoport said. “And so I’m constantly having to be like ‘Hang on, I want to break this, I need to break this, but hang on.’ And there’s been some instances where I’ve got it right, there have been some instances where I’ve not, but taking a deep breath and being like is this 1000 percent right, or when I tweet this what is somebody going to say? It is so hard, but it is also obviously so important.”
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