Witless for the Persecution

Gisele vs. The Mad Haters' Kangaroo Court
In my last Nob post, I expressed the hope that some august body would eventually take the media to task for its feeding frenzy over so-called deflategate. But in case The Columbia Journalism Review is too busy with Fox's wholly manufactured "No Go Zone"story, let me try to shine a little light on some of those most responsible for turning recent journalism into an embarrassing exercise in tittle-tattling. Where to begin? How about with the usual suspects…
The Reliable SourcesThey are as critical to reporters as informants are to law enforcement…and a good reporter is going to cultivate reliable sources over a career. But let’s understand that a reliable source has an agenda that is not usually to help the reporter do a better job. Reliable sources have their own biases and agendas. The leaks provided to the various NFL insiders covering this story had a distinct pattern of being just ambiguous enough to raise questions obvious to anyone with even a Perry Mason grasp of the law, but damning enough to totally impugn the reputation of the New England’s Patriots. The conduits of the leaks—Chris Mortesnsen, Mike Florio, Peter King, Jay Glazer—didn’t bother to question or even qualify whether the information they were passing on was possibly tainted or materially misleading. Peter King, as is his wont, expressed almost childlike faith in the reliability of his sources. And Jay Glazer seemed to willfully edit the info he got for dramatic effect when he used the expression “person of interest” to report that a Patriots’ locker room attendant was under scrutiny after being observed carrying a bag of game balls from one part of Gillette Stadium to another. Other media outlets used their own highly charged words to describe the anonymous locker room attendant—“lone wolf” and “rogue” being but two. The term person of interest is particularly creepy given that it’s been a cheap way for law enforcement to cast suspicion on someone it hasn’t been able to get the goods on. Richard Jewell, wrongly accused of the 1996 Olympic bombing is just one notable example. For that language to be thrown around in a trifle like deflategate, especially in regards to a low-level, easily exposed employee was shameful. It may be that it was Glazer’s source that used the term first and Glazer was just quoting him, but if so he should’ve used the same care he would’ve used if his source had used a racial slur so we could better understand the character of the source.

The Dilettantes Sports is often referred to as the toy department of news. During deflategate gleeful “adult” journalists broke into the toy store and immediately started tossing around the lawn darts and giggling and drooling over the balls. The sophomoric play on the word balls…wet balls, deflated balls, soft balls, rubbed-up balls, Brady’s balls…was damn near orgiastic. NPR’s Mike Pesca, one of the few members of the media to treat the entire incident with maturity  observed that it may very well be the irresistible opportunity for the straight news world to talk naughty that gave the story much of its air…”like the [Anthony] Weiner story,” he said. Here’s a tip for news ombudsmen everywhere: if your organization is still making up jokes about weiners and balls two days into a story, it’s time to drop the story. Interspersed with silly ball puns were solemn condemnations of public figures who had as yet to be found guilty of anything. Yet “Brady’s balls” and “Brady’s a liar” mixed as free and easy as Jello shots and 8-balls at a frat party. News organizations, which do little investigative reporting as it is, eagerly built entire “news” segments or even “news” hours around whatever utterly unchallenged scraps of rancid red meat their producers and interns gleaned from the Internet. The HuffingtonPost, the first word in sports if your sport is sighting celebrity nipples, engaged in some heavy inflation and deflation itself. Anything that made the Patriots look bad was given the top quarter of its front page with bold colorful fonts. Anything that was remotely exculpatory of the Pats got buried down along with latest Miley Cyrus stunt. News organizations that rightly saw the injustice in bringing up Tayvon Martin’s Facebook page or Michael Brown’s behavior in a convenience store minutes before he was shot to death, abandoned that journalistic standard when it came to deflategate. A spurious report (that was debunked within days) that the Patriots used the deflated ball gambit not only to improve their passing but to avoid fumbling immediately gained wide currency in the straight news world without anyone questioning the motives, competence or reliability of the source. Chris Hayes at MSNBC went all in on "ballghazi" after a spending much of a year taunting Fox for going all in on Benghazi. He repeated the long-ago discredited story that the Patriots had taped the practice of the St. Louis Rams before their 2002 Super Bowl. When I directly called him on that in a tweet, he replied that he “misspoke” (a Nixonian construction no self-regarding liberal should ever use without air quotes). Giving life to bogus and half-baked stories in such a frenzied atmosphere fueled the Internet madness where Patriot haters deaf, dumb and blindly insist that the team is guilty of “serial” rule infractions even though they are only guilty of one. If every NFL franchise with one infraction on its rap sheet was indelibly labeled a cheater, they might as well call it the National Flimflam League.
The Hatchet JobsSo there was vaguely sourced reporting, and there was silly and unprofessional reporting, and then there was just downright malicious reporting—hatchet jobs in the parlance of the news world. Bill Plaschke of the LA Times and Roxanne Jones of CNN called for the Pats to be banned from the Super Bowl…this would be mere days into the investigation of the crime they were charged with. If such hanging journalists had their way, our penal system would never have to deal with pesky things like witnesses or defense exhibits A, B, & C. Michael Rosenberg of Sports Illustrated took home the Pravda Prize. Not content like most everyone else of his ilk to simply run wild with the real and imagined facts of deflategate, Rosenberg took the opportunity to gather together every rumor, innuendo, and piece of gossip the world had to offer as regards the possible nefarious behavior of the Patriots. In order to expose the underhanded ways of the Patriots, this passage captures how low a road Rosenberg was willing to travel:

Does [Patriots owner] Kraft secure preferable game times for his Patriots? Let’s just say it wouldn’t be hard to do. Kraft is a close confidant and protector of commissioner Roger Goodell; in September, when the Ray Rice punch video leaked, and Goodell went into public relations overdrive, Kraft defended him on national television … on CBS, naturally. Cross Belichick and you cross Kraft. Cross Kraft and you risk the wrath of Goodell.

Does [Patriots owner] Kraft secure preferable game times for his Patriots? Let’s just say it wouldn’t be hard to do. How about proving it, Rosenberg? Would that be hard to do? Then do it and not throw it up against the wall like a turd and see if it sticks.  It's called reporting.  “Cross Kraft and you cross (NFL Commissioner] Goodell?” Really? Is that why two days after this scurrilous piece appeared, Kraft went before the cameras and called out the NFL and in effect Goodell for their handling of the scandal?
“Maybe some of this is overstated. But the perception is real!!!” Well, if Mike Rosenberg has anything to do with it the perception is real all right. Could he have ended on a lower note? Why yes he could…how about smearing Tom Brady? Rosenberg writes, “Are the Patriots favored sons? When defensive players get flagged for a helmet-to-knee hit on Tom Brady, Brady has been known to remind them: 'They made that ----ing rule for me!'” Unless Mike Rosenberg actually suited up for a game and was there on the field to hear Tom Brady utter something that so blatantly attempts to paint him as a spoiled brat, his only possible attribution for that quote is a "reliable source", and he doesn't even go to that shallow well. And Rosenberg wasn’t the only one to take that dark rat alley to attack. When Brady answered that he tried to calm down family and friends who were concerned about how he was weathering the storm by reminding them that it wasn’t ISIS, no one was dying, the New York Post slammed him for being "tasteless" and making a strange attempt to deflect attention away from the scandal. NBC football insider Mike Florio tweeted, “Tom Brady really went ISIS? ‘Go ahead and cheat, fellas. As long as no one loses a head, we’re good.’” How damned malicious do you have to be to put that kind of a spin on what Brady actually said?

Lucky for Belichick and Brady they have the support of a billionaire boss. If they had been running their own pre-school, they’d be out of business already and sitting in court while kids on a witness stand pointed out on puppets where on their bodies they’d touched them.