VIDEO: GWINN: Fox Sports’ Charissa Thompson Reveals She Sometimes Makes Up Sideline Reports During Games

Charissa Thompson
Cooper Neill/Getty Images
Dylan Gwinn

During a recent interview with Barstool’s Pardon My Take podcast, Fox Sports’ Charissa Thompson admitted that she used to make up sideline reports if she couldn’t get an interview with a coach.

Thompson, who now works on the Fox NFL Kickoff show and on Amazon Prime’s Thursday Night Football, used to work the sidelines, where she would try to get interviews with players and coaches and get insight into what was happening at the ground level. However, sometimes, Thompson couldn’t get an interview with the coach because the coach either wouldn’t show or he would be too late.

So, what did Thompson do when that happened? As she puts it, she would make up the interview.

“I, and I’ve said this before, so I haven’t been fired for saying it, but I’ll say it again,” she said. “I would make up the report sometimes because A., the coach wouldn’t come out at halftime or it was too late, and I was like, I didn’t want to screw up the report, so I was like, ‘I’m just gonna make this up.’”

“Because, first of all, no coach is gonna get mad if I say, ‘Hey, we need to stop hurting ourselves, we need to be better on third down, we need to stop turning the ball over . . . and do a better job of getting off the field,’” she continued. “Like, they’re not gonna correct me on that.”

So, what to say about this? It’s one thing to offer insights. as to what you think a coach would say, as long as you preface it by saying that you didn’t actually speak to the coach.

For example, if Thompson had told Joe Buck (who used to be at Fox when Thompson was sideline reporting): “You know, Joe, coach Belichick did not come out for his halftime interview. But, you have to imagine he’s not pleased with how his defense has performed in the first half…”

That maintains a level of honesty with the audience by establishing that Belichick was not actually interviewed, and it still fills up airtime and gives the broadcast something to talk about.

But, to say what you think he would say while presenting it as if you did talk to him? To make it up? That is not journalism. It doesn’t matter that it was relatively innocuous, and the coach probably would have said it anyway. That is a serious breach of ethics. It is profoundly not a journalist’s job to say that he/she interviewed someone when they didn’t and then put words in their mouth.

Bad look.

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