Bray’s comments at the Television Critics Association panel on Aug. 6 praising the partnership can be found here. The senior coordinating producer was Aronson-Rath’s primary contact at ESPN and is known at the network, along with all fulltime OTL staffers, as an advocate for journalism.
“He was positive, he was confident, he made statements of purpose about our collaboration,” Aronson-Rath said. “There was no reason for us to believe that any of what he said or anything anyone said at the editorial levels were anything but genuine about our partnership. Besides what they said publicly, the proof was in the work we were doing together. Our journalists were eye to eye. It was one of the best partnerships we had with the journalists at ESPN.”
In an interview with SI.com on Sunday, Steve Fainaru said the NFL had “pushed back” on concussion stories he and his brother have reported, making particular note of a story they did for ESPN and Frontline on the late Junior Seau last January. “They have been uncomfortable with the coverage from the very beginning and before we started writing the book,” said Fainaru, who won a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting while a staffer at the Washington Post.