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Over the last week I've heard from several people who think Boston Herald reporter John Tomase should have been fired -- not just forced to apologize -- for his February 2 story suggesting the New England Patriots had taped the St. Louis' Rams' walk-through practice before the 2002 Super Bowl.So why wasn't Tomase fired? Tomase's friend Seth Mnookin makes the case for Tomase keeping his job, and it basically breaks down to this:
1. Tomase made clear that the taping was just an allegation from a source close to the team, not that the taping had definitely happened.
2. The Patriots didn't categorically deny the allegations.
3. Tomase's editors should have reined him in.
I don't buy 1 or 2. You can't just go printing every allegation you hear, and the main reason the Patriots didn't categorically deny is that Tomase didn't give them a chance: He told the Patriots about the story he was working on at a time when he knew perfectly well that they wouldn't have an adequate opportunity to respond.
But I do buy that Tomase's editors deserve a lot of the blame here, and that's the basic reason that I don't think Tomase should be fired. Tomase told the Herald's editors what he had, and the Herald's editors told him to go with it. The whole paper -- not just Tomase -- got the story wrong.
So does that mean the editors who approved the story should all be fired? It's understandable if people in the Patriots organization think so, but I don't. I tend to think that this was more a boneheaded organizational mistake than a malicious act, and as such the egg on the faces of the people at the Herald is enough of a deterrent to make sure it won't happen again.
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