Does Mike Florio Really Think Mike Wise Should Be Fired? We Asked.

Mike Florio has a big hammer in our internet media world. He’s earned everything he gets as he built PFT from nothing to a verifiable internet monster. Some people are giving Florio credit today for Mike Wise’s one-month suspension from the Washington Post. Whether or not that’s true (note: I don’t believe it is) Florio, himself, wrote this on PFT:

Frankly, Wise should be glad he wasn’t fired.  Armed with the relevant Postpersonnel policies, including the one regarding the use of social media, a semi-competent lawyer (or me) would have Wise admitting within five minutes or less that his employment should be terminated for cause.

That seemed awfully heavy handed to me, considering it was a joke. A terrible joke (for which Wise has apologized on this site, his own radio show and on Twitter). Wise learned the first rule of being funny: be funny.

I’m somewhere in the middle on the whole “journalistic integrity” thing though. ETHICS have become a four-lettter word. Heck, a site that linked to our interview with Wise yesterday took every single quote I transcribedREAD MORE

DL426: Mike Wise on Big Ben Tweet, ProFootballTalk, Social Media

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Thanks to the quick work of Kogod, I was able to talk with Mike Wise of the Washington Post this afternoon about becoming public enemy #1 on Twitter today after posting this tweet: “Roethlisberger will get five games, I’m told.”

It’s unsourced, and was followed by other erroneous and misleading tweets, as part of a bit for his radio show. The problem? Not everyone was listening to his radio show. Most notably, ProFootballTalk. They are not fans of Mike Wise today.

Listen to the audio below, but here are some of Wise’s comments about the situation. First, technology failed him, and cause a lot of people a lot of wasted energy tracking down (and writing about) this news.

“Where I screwed up was, I literally put a tweet right after that saying, ‘can’t reveal my sources…oh yeah, it’s a casino employee in Lake Tahoe’ and so I get this ‘Twitter is over-booked, try back later.’ So the actual secondary tweet doesn’t go come out until…a  half hour to an hour later and IREAD MORE