Written By Colin Dooley
Reporting on rumors is something that is common practice within the journalism field. However, things can go bad quickly when media personalities and/or journalists report on these rumors as facts. One of the most recent cases came back in February 2025 when an online rumor went viral about Ole Miss student Mary Kate Cornett. This rumor about Mary Kate allegedly sleeping with her boyfriends dad, took off when Barstool Sports personalities picked up on this “story” and had posts from multiple people from within the media company offer their thoughts on it. Of course all of these takes on this alleged story were negative in nature towards Mary Kate. What also helped blow the story up was when popular ESPN personality Pat McAfee talked about it on his show, which just continued to add eyes to the viscous online rumor. Unsurprisingly, this rumor about Mary Kate turned out to be false, but the damage had already been done. As she stated in an interview with NBC, the rumor has “ruined her life”. The spread of the rumor caused her and her family, as well as her boyfriend and his family enormous amount of harassment caused by the spread from major media outlets. After it came out that this rumor was false, and a lawsuit filed by the Cornett family, Barstool founder and CEO Dave Portnoy came out and publicly apologized to Mary Kate and her family on behalf of his company. McAfee would follow suit and also issue an apology for his role in fanning the flames of the rumor about her.
Major Media Companies Need to do Better
This sorta thing is nothing new for Barstool Sports, who are always commenting on viral trends and stories and find themselves in controversy constantly for their crude and borderline misogynistic takes. Pat McAfee, who is employed by ESPN, is not known for engaging in this type of content and it was really surprising to see an extremely popular personality of there’s acknowledge the rumor, never mind offer discourse about it. Not that ESPN hasn’t ever had a false report before, it happens to all news sites who report large quantities of news. But to be entertaining a rumor that has nothing to do with your core of being a predominately sports news outlet is pretty reckless. These companies have to have better self awareness as to the size of their audiences and the ramifications their content has. I understand that both Barstool Sports and Pat McAfee are more for entertainment of their audiences than actual news reporting, but as we saw with Mary Kate, the things they choose to talk about get a lot of attention. That requires them to be more careful about what they choose to make/create content about. In this case they took an online rumor, gave it millions of eyes, and caused an innocent girl unwarranted personal attacks, emotional distress, and probably life long trauma from the incident. There is a fine line between entertainment and unethical journalism. Yes, to a degree you have to find topics and stories that you think your audience will find interesting and engaging but at the same time, you can’t overlook the impact you are going to have on the individual/individuals that are at the center of the topic. Especially when it comes to online rumors with as sensitive of a topic as Mary Kate’s. For no reason other than million’s of peoples entertainment her name and character were dragged through the mud and it was in large part due to the roles major media outlets and personalities played in distributing the rumor to their large audiences. It is something that no apology can fix and because of Barstool Sports and ESPN, a 19 year old girls life will never be the same.