If you remember back in February, the day before the Super Bowl, I was all over the Boston Herald for their story suggesting the Patriots taped a walkthrough of the Rams prior to the Super Bowl back in 2002. My issue with Tomase’s story was its exquisite timing; when you release something the day before the biggest game of the season, it sure seems intentional to me. Not that it proves Tomase’s story completely wrong, but it sure was suspicious that none of the tapes turned over by former Pats video assistant Matt Walsh to the NFL contained footage of a Rams pre-Super Bowl walkthrough. To compound this news, Chris Mortensen says ESPN had the story too, but decided not to report it.
Other media outlets including ESPN, had this allegation and pursued this allegation for months, and it just didn’t meet the standard in terms of what you needed to report it, and the Boston Herald evidently felt they had met the standard to report it,” Mortensen said. “They need to come out and say, ‘We stand by our story’ or they need to have a retraction and apology and deal with the consequences of it, but certainly it’s damaging to the Boston Herald at this point, especially if they stay silent on the subject.”
Again, we don’t know for certain that the Pats didn’t tape the walkthrough and that the Herald got the story wrong, but they’re certainly left out in the cold right now. Mortensen’s comments make it seem overwhelming like the Herald was intentionally planning to drop the bomb on the Pats the day before the Super Bowl. Seems pretty scummy to me.
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This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 and is filed under Football, Policing the Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Their ’source’ better come through for them or else they should expose him.
What annoys me is the ‘nothing to see here’ attitude in the media with Walsh’s tapes. They are saying: we knew all about this already……NO WE DIDN’T! At no time did Goodell or Belichick come out last fall and say that the cheating went back that far and included the postseason/super bowls. It’s like: well if it doesn’t include the super bowl, then all is peachy. So you are telling me they cheated in every game all the way up to the AFC title game but -didn’t- in the super bowl? Yea ok and Rog Clemens didn’t take HGH.
I think Belichick went to Goodell and only told him what he thought he could get away with. Goodell last fall was asked many times in interviews about whether the Pats cheated in the postseason/SB and he NEVER said they did, he would say the evidence doesn’t show it. Either Goodell is lying or Belichick lied to him. I point to an excerpt from an AP article about what we knew when the Walsh story broke:
AP:During Super Bowl week, however, there were reports of possible earlier videotaping by the Patriots, including the St. Louis Rams’ walkthrough before the 2002 Super Bowl. Belichick vehemently denied the existence of any such tapes.
Stories like that show that even just 3 months ago we had no idea that the taping went back 8+years. So don’t tell me that there’s nothing to see here.
Good point, LBS; it’s weird that the hometown team was sabotaged BY THE HOMETOWN PAPER! At least when the Paul Byrd allegations came out for the Indians (which I still believe hurt their chances of closing out the Sox series), the rumor did not originate from the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
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