Thursday morning, WFAN radio host Boomer Esiason addressed Brittney Griner and her release from a Russian prison. And then several outlets, including Fox News, aggregated his comments.
Esiason was happy that Griner was finally able to return home, but he questioned the cost of freeing international arms dealer Viktor Bout as former United States Marine Paul Whelan remains wrongfully imprisoned by Russia.
While it’s the former NFL MVP who is the lure for clicks, aggregators felt obligated to include a quote from Esiason’s WFAN co-host Gregg Giannotti. That’s Gregg with two G’s, Giannotti with two N’s and two T’s.
“We were talking about the Brittney Griner situation coming back from Russia, so we made all the websites all over the place,” Esiason noted Friday morning. “And on the Fox News website, they spelled Gio’s name wrong.”
Boomer would like Fox News to learn how to spell Giannotti pic.twitter.com/441j4jBFSK
— Brandon Contes (@BrandonContes) December 9, 2022
It’s an easy name to misspell considering there are double letters all over the place. It’s especially easy to misspell considering his nickname is “Gio,” while his last name begins with Gia. Fox News nailed the double letters, but they butchered the vowel placement, as seen in the screenshot below.
Giannotti said, “Everything, my whole last name was wrong.” Then he added, “But you could just go to my Twitter account and see it,” he added. He directed aggregators to the correct spelling for future use.
“It was just funny because it had Micah Parsons, a paragraph of Boomer stuff and then it was like ‘Gregg Gionnatti added…’” Giannotti said with a chuckle as he read the quote that led him to make his political news debut.
In mild defense of Fox News, they weren’t the first outlet to pick up Esiason’s comments and misspell Giannotti’s. The Fox News website likely pulled the spelling directly from the outlet that aggregated the comments before. They were just the ones who caught Esiason’s attention.
[WFAN, via CBS Sports Network]
