Reporter defends ESPN's coverage of Bernie Fine allegations

• On why he has not yet interviewed Bernie or Laurie Fine about the allegations:

"We never really have gotten any kind of access to him through his attorney. We went at that really hard early last week. We told them we have new information that we think you should know about and before we go with it, we would like to speak to Bernie and his wife. They said, 'What is the new information?' We said, 'Well, we'll tell you that when you get Bernie and Laurie in touch with us.' They never did. They never produced them."

• On the notion, which has been raised in some corners, that ESPN pushed the Bernie Fine story as hard as it has and when it did in reaction to having the journalistic equivalent of the Penn State story:

"I think that is ludicrous. One story has nothing to do with another story. The fact is, the reason why this story was aired on ESPN on Nov. 17 is because someone came out from denial to corroborate a story that we had been given by one man in 2003. It did have to do with Penn State in that Penn State created this contact between two stepbrothers who have had all of three or four conversations over 11 years. That is another misconception. Jim Boeheim called [Lang] his cousin and said, 'Isn't it interesting that his cousin ...' The fact is the two are stepbrothers and not cousins, and they are not in contact with one another at all. Bobby Davis saw Mike Lang at Mike Lang's father's funeral. That was one of their only contacts in the last 10 years."

• On not reporting the case harder between 2003 and 2011:

I would have taken a run at it every month of my career between 2003 and 2011 if I could have been pulled off other events and other coverage. If someone said you can either do this story, or you can do 100 NBA championship events or 17 World Series, which would you do, I would do this story and let other people cover the World Series."