A very fine line between being malicious and being professionally irresponsible for someone in his position. By definition his job requires fairness and accuracy, and he brought neither on that story. It was more than bad judgment or a mistake, it was inexcusable.
In fairness to Tomase, he did bring fairness to the the story. Unlike Greg Bishop and Mike Fish, Tomase gave the Patriots and Belichick an opportunity to respond to the story.
Here is the last thing I will say before I am done rehashing this 3 1/2 year old topic. This is how I rank the villians in whole saga:
1.) Arlen Specter - Abused his Congressional powers to get revenge for his Eagles having their Super Bowl victory "stolen" from the Patriots while pushing his COmcast agenda (his biggest campaign contributor).
2.) Greg Bishop - Through the whole Matt Walsh process, acted as Specter's press secretary through the pages of the NY Times. Wrote slanted pieces dragging in Matt Walsh into the spotlight and other things like unconfirmed rumors that Bledsoe stated that he benefitted from stolen signals (although Bledsoe was never named by name, it was obvious it was him).
3.) Greg Easterbrook - He facilitated the Matt Walsh interview with Mike Fish because of his weird self-righteous stance that Belichick was evil and needed to be brought down. If Belichick was just a perverted antisemite, Easterbrook wouldn't have had a problem.
4.) Mike Fish - Had his Matt Walsh interview story for months. Never ran it because he knew it was bad journalism to run a story of someone claiming to have very damagining evidence against another person but would not even prove that he had such evidence (nevermind what the evidence was and whether it was truly damaging) unless he was paid (Walsh wanted his legal bills paid in perpetude which should have raised the red flag). He changed his stance, not because he was able to verify Walsh's allegations but Bishop outed Walsh and Fish didn't want to be scooped. This is also the story that made Tomase think Walsh had the tape of the walkthrough.
5.) Tomase - Tomase took allegations out there already that Belichick cheating went far beyond filming opposing sidelines and gave it a tangible event of cheating - filming the walkthrough. I think he just made a stupid mistake. It was an irresponsible and wreckless mistake, but a mistake none the less. I think he thought the story was legitimate and his source was valid and just rushed to get it out there because he felt Fish's Walsh story was enough confirmation. It was wrong.
Personally, I have no use for any of the above people including Tomase, but somehow most of the Pats fanbase as taken all the crimes of my 1-4 villians and attributed it to Tomase. For example, I have seen people revel in reports of the Herald's financial problems, but get peissed off if other are happy about the NY Times problems for the same reasons. Personally, I don't get happy about innocent people losing jobs, but I don't get the hypocriscy where Tomase made a stupid mistake while Bishop's motives were more calculated in an effort to destroy the character of Belichick. Trying to destroy Belichick's character is a pastime for the NY media (see the endless stories in the NY papers a few years back of unconfirmed allegations in a bitter divorce trial that Belichick was having an affair with a former co-worker).
