Fat Fred Kirsch is VP of Content and Publisher for the Patriots.
He should be fired.
Yeah, just as a thought experiment, imagine being the person in charge of this stuff. You decide that you're going to do a documentary episode on your advance scouting, which will entail taping game action. At that point I'm probably already nixing it, because it's just not worth even a tiny chance of what just happened happening.
But hey, let's say you decide to go ahead with it anyway. Literally the very
first thought that enters my head is "goddamn, gotta make 1000% sure nothing about this can be construed as another Spygate. I'd better impress on everyone involved in filming that we're under intense scrutiny at all times on account of the reputation that we, rightly or wrongly, have." At this point we have to assume that this conversation was not had, because if it was you gotta figure there wouldn't be 8 ****ing minutes of sideline tape.
But hey, let's say you actually need that tape for whatever reason. Fine, then I would go a mile out of my way to make sure every last thing, down to the tiniest of minutiae, was preemptively cleared with the league, so that if at any point someone was suspicious of my team--as they're likely to be--the league office would have already had advance notice and would know we're on the up and up. I'd seek to get the same kind of arrangement with the team being advance scouted, but if they weren't inclined to give it then that wouldn't be a dealbreaker as long as the league office knew. If I couldn't get that clearance/validation from the league office, I simply wouldn't do the episode. Full stop.
That's a sequence of 3 different colossal failures of common sense. For failing to understand this and undertake these steps, Kirsch and anyone else involved in this production has proven incompetent and a massive liability to the organization.