Tyreek Hill audio exposes the failures of KCTV-5 and Angie Ricono

KCTV-5 and those responsible for leaking a limited segment of the Tyreek Hill audio recording need to provide a real explanation (and apology) for why they did what they did.

Back in April, when KCTV-5’s Angie Ricono released portions of a conversation between Tyreek Hill and his then-fiancee Crystal Espinal, I said that the Chiefs had failed in the “second chance” they had given Hill.

Obviously, that feeling was colored by the release of that audio, but I do stand by much of what I said. My issue at the time was less with whether or not Hill was guilty than it was with the Chiefs’ lack of full transparency in their involvement with the rehabilitation of Hill. I believed and still believe that if a team gives a player a “second chance” they should be as open and welcoming as possible to questions and concerns as to what exactly that player is doing to continue to better himself.

When KCTV-5 initially released the clips, Ricono tweeted that the reason she wasn’t releasing the full audio was that she was concerned only with the “newsworthy” portions and didn’t want to include the rest, which she characterized as discussions of “intimate moments” as well as objectively non-news bits like Hill and Espinal passing through airport security.

Now, 610 AM has released the full 11-minute recording of that conversation, and while it does include some passing through airport security along with those “intimate moments”, it also brings a new context to some of Hill’s words from the original, truncated KCTV-5 audio. In the full release, Hill emphatically denies the domestic violence he pled guilty to in 2014. This denial is nowhere to be found in the portions of the audio KCTV-5 released.

What was in the audio KCTV-5 released in April, however, was this bit from Hill to Espinal:

"“You ain’t riding for me in 2014, you damn sure ain’t riding for me now, bro.”"

If you don’t remember this being a part of KCTV-5’s release, I don’t blame you. It faded into background noise the moment we all heard Hill say, “You need to be terrified of me too, b***h.”

As jarring and damning as that was, it was the comment about Espinal not “riding for” him that stuck with me as the most difficult to swallow. It’s easy enough to find multiple interpretations of Hill’s now most infamous “terrified of me” words. Some might say he spoke emotionally in the heat of an argument; others have hypothesized he was referring to his own ability to “expose” Espinal. I’m not particularly interested in parsing the comment myself, but it’s undeniable that you can if you want to.

But when Hill told Espinal she didn’t ride for him in 2014 and he had no reason to believe she would in 2019, what other interpretation could one logically come to based on the facts that were known at the time than that Hill was asking Espinal to lie for him? Until 610 AM’s release of the full audio, Hill has never publicly denied the 2014 crimes he pled guilty to. In fact, when he was drafted by the Chiefs. he acknowledged that fans had a right to be angry about his inclusion on the Chiefs’ roster.

Even Chiefs fans on social media most convinced of Hill’s innocence have felt the need to preface their defenses, “Okay, yeah, what he did in the past was horrible, but…”

So no one, or at least no one who would be taken seriously, was denying that Hill assaulted Espinal. It was universally accepted that this was something that happened. He pled guilty to it, served his sentence, and was given a second chance.

Which finally brings me back to Ricono and KCTV-5. I’m struggling, and I’ve tried all day, to find any logical, journalistic reason to release audio that includes Hill complaining to Espinal about not “riding for” him in 2014 while also omitting his extended denials of ever hitting her. At best, it’s terrible judgment. At worst, it’s a deliberate attempt to construct the most damning possible context around Hill’s words. Either way it’s dangerous, gross, and incompetent.

I’m not a reporter. The furthest I ever got into hard news was 12 years ago when I was editor of my high school newspaper and my staff broke the vitally important switch from Dominos to Papa John’s as the school’s official pizza provider. Today, I’m about a half-step above blogger. But I still consider myself a very small part of the collective “Chiefs media”, albeit perhaps not the Kansas City media, and I’d feel like a pretty massive hypocrite if I didn’t call out Ricono and KCTV-5 for their egregious bungling of the release of the Hill/Espinal audio when that very audio inspired me to call out the Chiefs.

It’s going to be extremely difficult for KCTV-5 to justify this, and even more difficult for anyone to fully trust Ricono’s reporting again. I cannot imagine listening to that audio for the first time, hearing Hill so strongly denying that he was ever violent toward Espinal in 2014, and deciding to bury it. This is information that runs directly opposite of Hill’s public sentiments regarding the issue, and it’s not “newsworthy”? Frankly, that smells like a bull’s ripe feces.

Many Chiefs fans on Twitter have already been waging a loud, stupid, and toxic war against the K.C. media, and this is only going to make it worse. This is all that was needed to justify the ill-informed notion that all news media is manipulative and bad. From the very beginning, here and on Twitter, I’ve defended the K.C. journalists against the irrational horde. It was and still is true that the average sports fan does not understand the way journalism functions. Yet, the mind-bogglingly horrible job done by Ricono and KCTV-5 has taken any chance the K.C. media had at vindication and chopped it off at the knees. So while my defense of K.C. journalists remains, KCTV-5 is no longer worthy of defending within the coverage of the Hill/Espinal story.

Even worse, of course, is what it did to Hill’s reputation. To reiterate, I’m not interested in personally determining guilt or innocence, nor am I interested in having an opinion about whether or not Hill was being truthful when he denied hitting Espinal in 2014. A private denial is not an exoneration, and I will not pretend it is. But what Ricono and KCTV-5 did with their truncated audio was ostensibly a public character assassination. Whether that was the intent or not—and I’m sure Ricono will try to explain why it wasn’t—that is the reality of what happened. To many outside the Chiefs fan bubble, Hill was already an unforgivable monster. There is no way KCTV-5 didn’t realize releasing his comments without the full context would do anything other than drive those feelings even deeper into the public’s minds.

I’m not one to call for someone’s job. I think that’s easy and lazy. There’s a thick air of irony and hypocrisy, for instance, in Chiefs fans on social media getting Kevin Kietzman the boot for words he said after many of those fans had spent months saying Tyreek Hill shouldn’t even be so much as suspended for words he said. Keitzman certainly more than deserved his fate, but hypocrisy is hypocrisy. You lose the moral high ground when your personal ethics are so blatantly dropped the moment you’re responding to someone you already dislike.

So I’m not going to call for anyone to be fired. What I will call for is an explanation—not a halfhearted, pretend explanation that couches personal responsibility in an excuse of misinterpretation (see: Kietzman). It’s either acknowledging total incompetence or admitting to a bias allowing for selective editing that contextualized that audio in an undeniably unfair, destructive way. Anything else is subterfuge.