This ain't news: Standing up for what you do only counts when you actually do what you say you did

K. Lee Davis is the motorsports editor at ESPN.com. Since ESPN is owned by Disney, apparently he believes it’s OK for him to live in a fantasy world, too.

I railed about ESPN claiming on Tuesday night that it “broke” the news about Dale Earnhardt Jr. going to Hendrick Motorsports. That’s just a flat, bald-faced lie.

At 1 p.m. Wednesday, I began an e-mail exchange with Davis about my complaints. He basically told me to suck it up because I was mad that ESPN had beat me to the story.

Here’s his initial e-mail to me:

As far as who broke what yesterday. AP had nothing on the Hendrick Motorsports angle until nearly 4:30 p.m. Marty Smith’s story saying Junior was going to Hendrick Motorsports was published on ESPN.com’s front page at 2:11 p.m. At 2:20 p.m., I made the run through your paper’s web-site and the others I generally check to see who else might have the story. That’s part of my job.

Your site had zilch and every other site had zilch on the Hendrick angle. Plenty were reporting there would be a press conference (we were first on that one, too) and that Hendrick was a possibility, but none had it definitively as Hendrick, and Marty did.

So, it would seem to me, Marty broke that story. Give credit where it’s due.

He didn’t say anything about dragons and unicorns, but he might as well have.

Here’s what happened in the real world. At 1:30 p.m., The Associated Press moved Jenna Fryer’s story saying that Earnhardt Jr. had scheduled a press conference and that her sources said he was going to Hendrick. I was writing a story saying the same thing for thatsracin.com and charlotte.com.

My story was posted at 2:08 p.m.

I am NOT saying I was first. Jenna got her story out first, so if there’s credit due anywhere, it’s to her. But Marty’s story was no better than third. It was a good story and he had some details in his story that I didn’t. Jenna had stuff neither of us had, too. But all three stories were substantively the same.

I don’t think any of us “broke” anything. We all tracked down the same people and did all the reporting we could do and still get a story up with dispatch. This business of a minute here and there is how reporters get into trouble these days.

All three of us kept reporting all afternoon and evening, working to nail down more information.

That’s the job, too. For Davis to say that AP had nothing on Hendrick until 4:30 p.m. is just absurd. For him to say my site had “zilch” on the Hendrick angle is just flat wrong. He said my story wasn’t up anywhere at 2:20. That’s a lie. Flat out.

I work for Sirius Satellite Radio, too. Part of that deal is I have to post news to the web sites my paper runs before I give anything to them. I sent in my story, looked to make sure it was posted and then sent it to folks handling the Sirius shows that were on the air in the afternoon.

After that, I checked ESPN.com and the story they had posted on the Earnhardt Jr. announcement will still not yet the one written by Marty Smith.

Maybe you don’t care. That’s fine. This isn’t about me getting credit, it’s about ESPN trying to take credit when they didn’t earn it. I won’t stand for that.