jakewriter82 said:
93Devil said:
jakewriter82 said:
schiezainc said:
Oz said:
BUT EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING IT! [/schiezainc]
Well, they are
Dude, take off the fanboi glasses and take a look at what you're saying. Its not making sense.
If you claim to be a journalist, being a fanboi is probably one of the worst sins you can commit, even if it's not with a team you cover.
The Patriots cheated, and yeah maybe some people were making it a bigger deal out of it than it was. But people do that about everything, not just the Patriots.
Do you feel that hating a team is just as bad as being a fan of them?
Just curious.
Being a fan is one thing, but being a fanboi is another.
And I guess yes, it can be just as bad. If that hate gets in the way of your objectiveness.
Everyone is a fan of a team, a player, a coach I'm willing to venture. Just as I'm sure everyone hates a team, player or players or coach.
But when that blurs your ability to look at something fairly, without a strong bias, then that's a problem. This guy's fandom, it appears to me, has made it impossible for him to look at the situation without automatically taking their side no matter how peculiar it might seem.
I hope that makes sense!
Why do you discredit anyone who may believe that the Herald and Tomase acted improperly or that this issue is now dead as a Patriots fanatic? I know Tomase and he's an O.K. guy, but I have to wonder about several elements of that article.
First, Goodell said in his presser that he asked Walsh if he knew of anyone else he should speak with. Walsh said no. We forget that Walsh was fired because he was taping Pioli's telephone conversations without the GM's permission.
What is extremely mind-boggling is that your argument now hinges on a so-called conspiracy theory within the NFL. Do you truly think that all 31 other owners would lie up directly behind the Commish on this major controversy? Are the Patriots that popular across the league?
Essentially, your argument is that we don't know that a tape was not made of the walk-through. You can't prove a negative, dude. How can the Patriots prove that no walk-through tape exists beyond what they have already done? Believe what you want, but I'd like to think that my fellow journalists would want more proof than that.
Whereas you admonish schizenaic as a fanboi and for lacking objectivity, I think you are being equally subjective. Why is it that people think that being objective means being negative or a contrarian? You seem equally passionate in your desire to see something here with the Patriots that is not capable of being seen.
If that tape exists, then Belichick should be suspended for a year. I don't think many people, including Patriots fans, would argue that such an action isn't extremely serious.
For months, however, this meeting has been hailed as the big one, the one where Walsh would release all of the skeletons in the closet and we'd finally have the proof to nail the Patriots. Yet Walsh doesn't have this walk-through tape; he had a total of eight tapes which contained absolutely no information that the organization had yet to already inform Goodell of.
And the Herald acknowledges in their apology in today's paper that they "neither possessed or viewed" such a video or spoke to anyone who did. Walsh is not the source to this article. So who the heck has this tape? Consider the type of person who would have this tape. Consider what rules they would have had to have done to procure this tape in the first place. That type of person is very likely the type of person who would come running out, in search of their 15, with this tape for all the world to see.
So we all realize that the Patriots needed to receive some form of punishment for this rule violation. Sadly, the exact nature of the violation has not been accurately depicted in our business. The problem was not with the actual videotaping; every team videotapes to some degree.
The problem---and I'm not denying that this was a violation deserving of a noteworthy punishment---was that the camera filming the opposition was located on the field. If they had positioned the camera in the coaches' box or in the press box, there is no violation. The Jets and the Dolphins have been found to have similar practices. heck, Mangini did the same thing in Foxboro in December 2006. THAT DOES NOT JUSTIFY THE ACTIONS OF THE PATRIOTS. I am not saying that, though I am certain you will say otherwise.
You want to know why print journalism is going down the shirtter? Because of the hoiler-than-thou attitude. People like Bissinger and others (say, Tony Maz of the Boston Herald, the paper that printed this story) who bitterly scoff at blogs like to speak of the so-called "lack of accountability" of bloggers.
Yet the Herald publishes a huge story that relies on only one unnamed source. This story is about a videotape, yet the video is not viewed or possessed by either the Herald or the unnamed source. The story sparks a massive firestorm that endures for three months. This story is published the day before a Super Bowl that had perhaps the biggest build-up of any in recent memory.
But Tomase won't be fired. Nor will his editors. And anyone who suggests "legal action" is laughed off as a self-righteous Patriots fan-boi. I'm not saying that any of these actions should be undertaken, but I'd hate to think that the Herald can simply skate by with a measly apology in its Wednesday editions.
Essentially, I ask, what will need to happen before we just move the fork on? This story has dominated headlines since the first week of September. Think about that for a second.
Now you can proceed to condescendingly refer to me as another blinded Boston fanboi. Whenever a board member refers to another poster with a differing viewpoint as a fanboi, it reminds me of the political tactics of the Bush White House. As in, instead of engaging in a civil debate, you call the other guy a wimp, ask where the opponent's war medals are, say that the terrorists will kill you if you don't vote for me, tell South Carolina that McCain underwent psychological exams when he arrived home from Vietnam, and that you can't support the troops and detest the war at the same time.
