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Athens, GA (Jan 12, 2008) - Neil Best of Newsday did not know it at the time, but when he wrote a very small item about The Golf Channel's Kelly Tilghman's inadvertent choice of words last week, he was the only person in the United States that even reported the on-air incident. The only reason he knew about it was because of an e-mail he received from William Mangino, an assistant professor of sociology at Hofstra University.

In talking about his scoop on this news, Best writes:

I don't think I've ever had a "scoop" as strange as the one last week about Kelly Tilghman's notorious "lynch" comment on the Golf Channel.

It came in the form of a tiny item in a Tuesday newspaper column, and I didn't know until that evening that it hadn't been reported elsewhere before.

The translation here might be "I really never knew how few people actually watch the Golf Channel" or "I never knew that the demographics of viewers on The Golf Channel were so skewed that no one took immediate offense to what she said."

Best has more about this in a Newsday article today, and publishes the e-mail on his Watchdog blog.