Off the record

I feel bad for Eric Wynalda. I do. He was duped. Yeah, he said what he said but he was essentially caught with his pants down.

He was sold a bag of goods. He thought he was conducting an interview with a journalist but instead sat down with some schmuck who, if he has ethics, ignored them.

The problem with this is that journalists are held by a standard and this guy completely waltzed past it for his own personal gain. He tricked Wynalda to get a story that should never have been a story.

All of us in the media know a lot and are exposed to many things that are off the record but because we have standards and we're true to our profession we hold sacred. Because I'm a journalist and I like my job and I like the relationships I've built up, I'm not about to ruin them to post a juicy story. I talked to a well known soccer figure recently and he told me several things off the record and - guess what? - they're staying off the record. Off the record means off the record. I've had plenty of juicy conversations or overheard juicy stuff that was off the record so that's that.

I like what I do here in the blog because I can give people legitimate behind-the-scenes stuff that you can't get anywhere else. But I'm not going to tell you everything I see because some of it is off the record. It's too bad Christian Franek didn't follow those rules.