Okay, so what happens when one, possibly two major behind-the-scenes players in network news are gay bashed on vacation? Do the very news shows they produce air stories on the event? Of course not. Not only do they not air anything about the beatings these two men received, but online alternative news sources give so many variations of the story that it’s unclear who these men were and what actually happened.

Richard Jefferson and Ryan Smith, it seems, were in St. Maarten on vacation and after leaving a bar, were hurled homophobic insults and then beaten with either a tire iron, a pipe iron or a wheel wrench, or some sort of blunt, dangerous object-you guess which. According to The Daily Herald of St. Maarten, two men were gay bashed while on a trip in St. Maarten. The piece says that Richard Jefferson a senior producer for NBC Nightly News, and “friend” were attacked with a pipe iron. Okay, but then according to 365Gay.com Jefferson is a CBS producer and Smith a producer for 48 Hours and gay.com's version also says that they were both CBS employees, but has a few variatons too.

If Jefferson usually goes by Dick instead of Richard (something people easily could have researched), they would find that Dick Jefferson was the CBS Evening News Senior Producer in 2004 on the cbsnews.com site, and he didn’t yield any results on the NBC site, so chances are, he works for CBS still. The bigger point is that there’s a range of limited, un-fact-checked stories circulating the internet in blogs, online news sources and even St. Maarten’s own news about the beating of people in the news biz and no actual coverage of this beating (Smith was supposedly suffered severe injuries), on any of the networks. But it hasn’t seemed to reach any of the major papers either. In 2005, a Dick Jefferson, Senior Producer at CBS was nominated for an Emmy. Isn’t he important enough to CBS to report this story?