LIV Golf Pulls Reporter’s Credentials After He Refused to Edit Out Question About Saudi Funding on His Podcast: Report

Seth Wenig/AP

A reporter had their credentials revoked by LIV Golf after he refused to take out a question about the league’s Saudi funding on his podcast.

Bill Hobson, the host of the radio show Michigan Golf Live, conducted an interview with golfer Pat Perez for his YouTube channel. At the time of writing, the league was scheduled to hold its next tournament at The Cardinal at Saint John’s in Michigan.

To promote the upcoming tournament, Hobson told Golfweek, LIV reached out to him and asked if he wanted to interview Perez. Soon after, Hobson spoke on the phone with Perez for approximately half an hour.

While most of the conversation was lighthearted — touching on topic’s like the league championship and the recent release of the film Happy Gilmore 2 — Hobson briefly pivot to a more serious subject when he asked Perez about LIV’s association with Saudi Arabia. The country’s Public Investment Fund owns and operates the league.

While Perez had no problem answering the question, LIV was less than enthused about it. According to Hobson, league officials called him 10 minutes after the interview and sounded “panicked.”

The report continued:

They asked Hobson to take out the question regarding Saudi Arabia and another about former LIV Golf CEO Greg Norman. Hobson kindly declined.

As a result, he received several more phone calls from escalating levels of LIV officials over the following 48 hours.

“I told them, ‘Those were perfectly fine questions and he answered them fine,'” Hobson said. “They said, ‘No, he didn’t answer them fine. He was out of his lane and he shouldn’t have gone there. I said, ‘Well, you understand that’s not on me.

“I had not agreed to any limitations or, you know, ‘I won’t go there’ categories. They may have made those up in their own minds, but I would invite or defy them to come up with some sort of screenshot that says, ‘No, no, right here, he said he wouldn’t do that.’ There isn’t any such thing. And I wouldn’t have done the interview with that.”

On Tuesday, LIV revoked Hobson’s credentials for the tournament and offered him spectator tickets instead. Hobson called the move “largely unprecedented.”