I took several classes on ethics in journalism. This absolutely crosses a line.

My big takeaway was that you cannot change the meaning of what someone did or said through your editing. ESPN has done exactly that here.

We studied an example of photojournalism and looked at an image of a high school player releasing a ball at the top of his jump shot. My teacher said that if we were to Photoshop out the basketball, that’s fine because the context tells us this was a basketball game and this person was shooting the ball. However if we used Photoshop to replace the ball with, say, a hand grenade well that drastically changes the meaning of the image.

What ESPN did here is no different. Through editing, they changed the meaning of what Dame said.