Basically, Massarotti implies that anyone in the media who does anything other than criticize the Patriots is somehow in bed with them (or, at a minimum, sleeping on officially-licensed team sheets and pillow covers). And that’s just crazy, in our view. Plenty of writers and broadcasters have written good things and bad things about the Patriots since Spygate first hit the fan. And there are, indeed, plenty of bad things and good things to write.
Actually, Massarotti’s column speaks to a deeper problem in our society — a problem to which we heard Peter King allude Wednesday morning on Sirius NFL Radio. Basically, many of us cling blindly to our positions on issues of sports and politics, forming an opinion based on an initial impression, guarding it like a newborn cub, and refusing to entertain any and all evidence that might later show that our initial impression was wrong.
So here’s the reality on this long, drawn out mess, in summary fashion. Good and bad.
The Patriots cheated, for years.
The Pats continued to cheat even after they knew that the league was onto them.
The NFL imposed a stiff punishment for the cheating.
The NFL destroyed the evidence that the Patriots turned over regarding cheating, making it impossible for anyone to know the extent of the Pats’ cheating.
Other teams have cheated, and continue to cheat.
The media generally has failed in its responsibility to develop and to present evidence of other teams cheating.
Some segments of the media instead have focused on trying to develop and to present more evidence of the Patriots cheating.
Meanwhile, the Patriots authored (without cheating) one of the greatest seasons in the history of organized sports.
Senator Arlen Specter, possibly motivated by the lingering dispute between the NFL and a major cable company headquartered within Specter’s jurisdiction, publicly stuck his nose into the matter.
Simultaneously, the race among the “real” journalists to publish the long-rumored story of Super Bowl skullduggery resulted in the Herald rushing to print a story that turned out to be flat-out false.
For the Pats, the timing couldn’t have been worse; the article came out the day before a Super Bowl game that the team would go on to lose.
Though it’s impossible to know whether the Pats would have won Super Bowl XLII if the franchise hadn’t been forced to deal with this tremendous (and, as we now know, unwarranted) distraction only one day before the game, no one can credibly contend that the story had no impact on the preparations and the planning for the game.
And so the Patriots are both villain and victim. Massarotti’s notion that the public and the media can see the Pats as only one or the other is juvenile, and wrong.
It doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been media bias both for and against the Patriots. But not everyone who follows the NFL for a full or partial living is out to prove that the Patriots are good, or that the Patriots are bad. For some of us, it’s about getting to the truth, and about acknowledging all sides of one of the most complex and polarizing stories that sports has ever seen. If the Herald had been willing to do the same, the February 2 story might never have been published.
