His name is Tony Farmer and he’s a sleazebag.
A few days ago, the self-styled sleuth and podcaster published on X that the Buffalo Bills’ Ed Oliver lost his 2-year-old son in a drowning accident at the family home back in June.
The credentialed Buffalo media, the men and women who are there every day, knew about the Oliver family tragedy this summer, but were asked by the Bills to hold the story until Oliver himself felt empowered to share it himself.
It’s not a whole lot different than our situations here in Indy the last few years. A number of reporters knew Ryan Kelly was missing time to attend to a serious family matter involving his pregnant wife but chose to hold the story and accept the Colts’ designation that he was out for “personal reasons.” Same with Braden Smith: It was no great secret he was seeking help for mental health problems, but again, it was left to Smith to share the story after he returned from treatment. In both cases, the Colts designated the players’ absences as “not injury-related – personal matter” or just “personal matter.” They were honest, or as honest as they cared to be.
Now, I’m not sure how enthused I am about the Bills designating Oliver as having an “unspecified, undisclosed injury” instead of saying “personal reasons,” but the Bills’ staff insisted it pertained to a real injury and not related to him taking time to grieve his personal tragedy. Whatever.
The point remain, Tony Farmer is a sleazebag.
And not only did he publish his tweet to his 24,000 followers, he later castigated Buffalo media publicly on social media and DM’ed several of them to take issue with their universal decision not to share the awful news of the drowning. I don’t know Farmer; I know I blocked him long ago for some good reason, but I have to wonder if this guy has a beating heart. What kind of darkness lurks within?
We’re not talking about Kyle Shanahan getting into a serious pre-season auto accident. That story went unreported for weeks; I would have thought Adam Schefter would have been all over that given his relationship with the Shanahan family. Maybe he knew and held it; I have no idea. But Shanahan is as public a figure as it gets, and while I understand that July is a super-slow time for the NFL with no media availability, you would have thought it would have leaked, especially in a huge market like the Bay Area.
That most certainly should have been reported.
The Ed Oliver family tragedy, no.
There are just some human lines you don’t cross. More and more, fantasy football and gambling have reduced athletes to mere numbers, one-dimensional figures who don’t have families and fears of their own. They’ve been thoroughly de-humanized, there for our entertainment. Farmer did the same thing here, and to what end? I’ve heard the terms “engagement farming” and “clout chasing” – I don’t know what those are – but it sounds about right. I don’t know if it was clickbait; it wasn’t a hot take or anything. Rather, it was some dope who fancied himself as either Woodward or Bernstein and thought he was being a hero for reporting something nobody else was willing to disclose to the public.
I commend the Buffalo media for their restraint.
Look, if Farmer cross-referenced Oliver’s address with property tax records, good on him for doing some investigative reporting.
The question is, what do you do with that information?
This is what I would do and what most decent journalists would do: We’d get the records, ferret out the information and then reach out to the Bills. At which point, the Bills would have appealed to Farmer’s humanity and asked him to hold the story. Or he would have asked the Bills if Oliver was ready to share his story, and then gone from there based on the answer.
Would Farmer have accommodated the organization?
Based on his actions this past week, I’m guessing not.
Now, let me tell you a story about my scoop of a highly sensitive story and how I handled it — right or wrong:
