ESPN explains why it dumped LeBron James story

Once upon a time (this past Tuesday, to be exact), ESPN Los Angeles sports reporter Arash Markazi wrote a piece on a LeBron James party in Vegas. Markazi embedded himself at the party and revealed a lot of the crazy happenings, and submitted it to ESPN. Although never actually appearing as a link on its site, the story was on the ESPN server, and available to those who searched for LeBron James, Miami Heat, etc. Then, after only minutes of life, the story was pulled.
Two days later, ESPN tells us why.
Rob King, Vice President and Editor-in-Chief, ESPN Digital Media:

“ESPN.com will not be posting the story in any form. We looked into the situation thoroughly and found that Arash did not properly identify himself as a reporter or clearly state his intentions to write a story. As a result, we are not comfortable with the content, even in an edited version, because of the manner in which the story was reported. We’ve been discussing the situation with Arash and he completely understands. To be clear, the decisions to pull the prematurely published story and then not to run it were made completely by ESPN editorial staff without influence from any outside party.”

Markazi also makes a statement:

“I have been in conversations with ESPN.com’s editors and, upon their complete review, understand their decision not to run the story. It is important to note that I stand by the accuracy of the story in its entirety, but should have been clearer in representing my intent to write about the events I observed.”

As you can see, ESPN is particularly prickly about the notion that the story was spiked on orders from factions outside the organization. The WWL bristles at the notion that James or his minions had the story killed, and they should; it speaks directly to its legitimacy as a news organization. Like it or not, however, ESPN IS in bed with James, so that perception is always going to be there when incidents like this turn up. People are going to say, “ESPN doesn’t want to embarrass LeBron, or they might not get the rights to The Decision II when his Heat contract runs out.”
I still have questions, if it matters. How does a story get on your servers, but is not considered on your site? Just because there’s no link doesn’t mean you can totally disown it. That’s like the child the family doesn’t want to talk about. He’s not in the family photo in the den, but he’s back there in his room, smoking weed. When you look at the cached version of the James story, it still has the ESPN logo, etc. Some editor(s) went to a lot of trouble to write headlines, think of a catchy logo (Behind The Velvet Rope), write photo captions … and Markazi’s ESPN Los Angeles byline is right there. Doesn’t sound like a rogue operation to me.
Whatever King’s explanation, this still kind of stinks. The facts are these: An athlete who has a close business relationship with ESPN was involved in a fairly wild Vegas party, and the ESPN reporter who wrote about it got his story yanked. I have to think that if the subject was Michael Vick or Mike Tyson, ESPN would have run it.
And the party wasn’t even that crazy, by Vegas standards. The story ESPN should have pulled was Rick Reilly’s cliched clusterfluff on running with the bulls in Pamplona. I doubt Reilly introduced himself to the cattle. At least Markazi’s piece had some journalistic worth.
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ESPN abruptly dumps salacious LeBron James party story (UPDATED with ESPN response) [Out of Bounds]