From TV Week.com (linked here):
The top golf writers from Sports Illustrated, in a recent roundtable discussion, dissed the Tiger Woods news coming from TMZ and other celebrity sites.
Finally.
Jim Herre, the managing editor of the Sports Illustrated Golf Group: “The real eye-opener for me has been how TMZ.com and Radaronline.com have been cited as credible sources by lots of media outlets, even though the websites’ sourcing is beyond flimsy. The fact is, we really don’t know what’s true and what’s not.”
Farrell Evans, a writer-reporter for Sports Illustrated Golf Plus: “There are no facts, really. All we know is that Tiger isn’t in control of what’s out there. We have some text messages and a voicemail, but we have no bulletproof evidence of Tiger ‘knowing’ any of these women in the Biblical sense. At this point perception is much more powerful than whatever the reality is.”
Jim Gorant, senior editor, Sports Illustrated Golf Plus: “This is why [Woods] needs to come clean. I don’t know about Barbara Walters or Oprah (too staged), but you have to take control of it. Look at what Letterman did. Everything’s going to come out in the end anyway, and the TMZ crowd won’t stop ’til they pick every last piece of meat off the bone. You can kill all the rumors and speculation by telling the whole truth. Then, everyone can start to ‘heal,’ whatever that means.”
As TVWeek.com notes, both the Sports Illustrated publications and TMZ are owned by Time Warner.
The roundtable is posted at golf.com (linked here; a summary of the roundtable is available at The Improper.com (linked here).