ESPN has been in hot water over the last week due to the in-house dispute between Pat McAfee and some top executives, but a new report has put the sports network under fire again.
According to a report by The Athletic, ESPN has returned 37 Emmy statuettes that the company after it was discovered that the company had been including fake names on its Emmy entries. The names were altered names of on-air talents who are ineligible to receive the awards.
The Athletic's report said that Shelley Smith, an ESPN on-air reporter for 26 years, was asked to return two of her statuettes after receiving a call from a top ESPN executive in March 2023.
This all spewed after an investigation by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) found that ESPN was inserting names for members of its on-air crew for "College GameDay," including Desmond Howard, Kirk Herbstreit, and Samantha Ponder.
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ESPN responded to The Athletic with a statement:
“Some members of our team were clearly wrong in submitting certain names that may go back to 1997 in Emmy categories where they were not eligible for recognition or statuettes. This was a misguided attempt to recognize on-air individuals who were important members of our production team. Once current leadership was made aware, we apologized to NATAS for violating guidelines and worked closely with them to completely overhaul our submission process to safeguard against anything like this happening again ... We brought in outside counsel to conduct a full and thorough investigation and individuals found to be responsible were disciplined by ESPN.”
The report said that there's no certainty as to who initiated the fraud by ESPN, but NATAS reportedly has made ESPN's vice president and executive producer of original content Craig Lazarus and senior vice president of production Lee Fitting as ineligible to participate in future Emmy awards.
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NATAS also told The Athletic that senior leadership at ESPN is disqualified for one year from "statuette eligibility" due to the investigation.
The NATAS rules did not allow on-air talent to be part of the credit lists for Emmy shows until 2023. They were instead eligible for other awards specific to their on-air work — which The Athletic report said was originally placed so that these talents couldn't potentially win two awards for the same program.
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This is where ESPN decided to commit alleged fraud, including fake names of on-air talent to its lists such as "Kirk Henry" for Kirk Herbstreit or "Dirk Howard" for Desmond Howard. The talents were reportedly labelled as "associate producers."
ESPN reportedly admitted to the activity in 2022 after NATAS had become more strict in the evaluation of names by means of verification. The Athletic said that fake names were included on the "College GameDay" submission until 2020.
There could be more than 37 fraudulently-obtained statuettes as the number was only those that have already been returned. Some may still be out there. Smith had only returned one because she said she gifted the second award to a relative.
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