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Well at least one NHL Team (the New York Rangers) appear to be.

January 14th/~3pm: I get an email from the agent and anxiously scroll down to see Chad’s contact information. Now, what I am about to say next is something that I have not told anyone before. The email address by which to contact the “real” Chad was the exact same one I saw on the Facebook just days earlier. I quickly open Facebook to double check only to find that the whole profile had been deleted (it has since been restored). Annoyed and confused, I then email Chad telling him what his agent told me and that we were good to go. He responds very quickly saying that it was not a problem, and just to clear it with Rangers Public Relations.

January 14/~4pm: I email the Ranger PR Director, who I will simply refer to as PRD (for PR Department). I am not expecting an email in return from him because I had never gotten a response in the past with any of my inquiries. I explain to him the situation and that I have the permission of both Chad and his agent to conduct the interview. PRD responds to me within ten minutes saying that I should have gone through his office in the first place and that Chad will not be available to do the interview. So I guess the human being himself wanting to do the interview isn’t good enough?

January 14th/~5pm: I CC an email to Chad and his agent telling them of my response and apologizing for any inconvenience. I then return PRD’s email saying that I did not go through him in the first place because I had never gotten a response back ever before. He replied, “You just did on the first email you ever sent to me.” Which is false because I had previous inquiries with both him and his assistant and they were never responded to.

The great thing about blogging is that it has eroded the ability of certain entities to “control the message”. When your attempts to control the message look ham-handed and foolish you end up worse off than if you had just let it go.

Read more: Ranger Rant: What Really Happened to the Chad Johnson Interview

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