Washington. The American sports channel ESPN He deceived Emmy organizers for years to receive dozens of awards from the prestigious television institution as reported this Thursday by The Athletic, the supplement of The New York Times.
According to The Athletic's investigation, after they won fraudulently, ESPN changed the awards to match real characters from the network.
The fraudulently obtained statuettes were returned by ESPN to the Emmy organizers.
The scam to deceive the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS), which awards the Emmys, It began in 2010 and allowed ESPN to win at least 30 awards.
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One of the ESPN programs most heavily implicated in the scandal was “College GameDay,” which became one of the network's most successful.
The show won multiple Emmys from 2008 to 2018 which were awarded to executive producers who did not exist but bore the same initials as the anchors and analysts who appeared in front of the cameras and who were not allowed to run for the awards.
It was the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences itself that discovered the fraud and launched an investigation.
In a statement from ESPN to The Athletic, the network acknowledged that its employees were involved in the hoax.
“Some members of our team clearly made a mistake in submitting certain names, possibly dating back to 1997, in the Emmy categories in which they qualified for recognition or statuettes,” ESPN explained.
The chain also justified the action to a certain extent by pointing out that this was the case a “misguided attempt to recognize hosts who were key members” of ESPN.
For its part, NATAS assured that after uncovering the fraud, it contacted the management of ESPN, which “took responsibility for the actions of its employees in order to thoroughly investigate and correct the fraudulent activities”.