Can You Believe It?

If you're watching WPRI-TV sports, the answer is ... maybe not.

According to Deadspin, the station recreated the ending of an amateur golf tournament in Rhode Island, having the participants fake their final putts for the television cameras. It's hard to determine what the worst part of all this is: the recreation, the reporter's reaction, or the news director's lame excuse--

"The video that Sara Hogan was taking of the players was for a story that she is working on about the players that has not yet aired. It is not our policy to recreate or reenact 'highlights.' It is, however, our policy to specifically and accurately describe and identify the video that we present. It appears in this case that although the video was not described as highlights, it should not have aired in this context."

Saying nothing at all would have been better than contrived double talk, which essentially admitted the crime.

In this age of the Internet, citizen journalism and YouTube, one of the few things that separates real journalism from the other 99% of sports content is credibility. Lose that, and you're just content taking up bandwidth. WPRI didn't lose it so much as the station set it on fire and threw it out the window.