LIV Golf has canceled the media credentials of a Michigan golf reporter after the man refused to edit out of his podcast a question about the league’s Saudi funding sources.
Michigan Golf Live host Bill Hobson interviewed pro golfer Pat Perez for his YouTube channel when he posed the question about Saudi funding.
Hobson says that LIV reached out to him and offered an interview with Perez, and the podcaster subsequently spoke to the golfer on the phone for an hour, according to Golfweek.
During the interview, Hobson asked Perez about his feelings about the league’s funding from Saudi Arabia and the Saudis’ Public Investment Fund, which supports LIV. The golfer apparently had no problem answering the question.
Hobson, though, claims that after the interview, LIV asked him to delete the segment about the funding. The reporter, though, was reluctant to remove anything from his podcast.
“I told them, ‘Those were perfectly fine questions and he answered them fine,’” Hobson told Golfweek. “They said, ‘No, he didn’t answer them fine. He was out of his lane, and he shouldn’t have gone there. I said, ‘Well, you understand that’s not on me.’”
He added, “I had not agreed to any limitations or, you know, ‘I won’t go there’ categories. They may have made those up in their own minds, but I would invite or defy them to come up with some sort of screenshot that says, ‘No, no, right here, he said he wouldn’t do that.’ There isn’t any such thing. And I wouldn’t have done the interview with that.”
After Hobson refused their entreaties, they reportedly pulled his media credentials, and he will no longer be invited to cover LIV golfers and events.
A shocked Hobson called the move “largely unprecedented.”
“It’s largely unprecedented to revoke an already-granted credential. You know, I’m accustomed to not getting approved,” he added. “But I’ve covered, I don’t know, 120 tour events and Ryder Cups and majors and I’ve just never even been remotely close to scratching the surface of what’s happened here”
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