“Here's the thing that bothers me,” Ditka said on Sunday’s episode of “NFL Countdown.” “Al Jazeera is not a credible news organization. They’re out there spreading garbage. That’s what they do, yet we give them credibility by talking about it.”

To set the record straight: Al Jazeera is no fly-by-night propaganda machine but one of the largest news organizations on the planet, with 80 bureaus around the world and a massive English-language viewership and readership. The network poached dozens of talented journalists from places like CBS, NBC, CNN and PBS when it launched Al Jazeera America in 2013 and now offers an array of news programming alongside documentary investigations and miniseries. It has won dozens of awards for its investigative and documentary work, including an Emmy and two Peabody awards.

Other journalists' reflexive dismissal of the network's allegations without bothering to examine the evidence says more about the traditional sports media — and its prejudice against a news source with an Arabic name — than it does about the folks on the investigative team at Al Jazeera, which spent eight months on the investigation.