NFL executives immediately recognized that Cris Carter had stepped in it when he urged players at the 2014 rookie symposium to have a “fall guy” take the blame for legal trouble. So the league requested that the only reporter present keep Carter’s comments out of his story.
That reporter, Robert Klemko of TheMMQB.com, got what he describes as “near-unfettered access to the rookie orientation event.” But in return for that access, he agreed to allow the league to make some elements of the symposium off the record, retroactively.
That’s rare in journalism. Usually, when a source and a reporter agree to go off the record, they make that agreement in advance, and a source can’t make a statement off the record after the fact.