ProFootballTalk.com reports the following:
Per a source with knowledge of the situation, John Tomase of the Boston Herald is off the Patriots’ beat.
So there you go.
It took the Herald a year to make this hire, and while several local candidates were interviewed for the job, the paper ultimately decided to hire Ian R. Rapoport from The Birmingham News to fill the Patriots beat writer position.
If this is true, now perhaps we can put the whole ugly Tomase incident behind us, and maybe the Herald will even finally open up the comment section on Patriots articles now.
Popularity: 5% [?]
This is the kind of humiliation I was waiting for. With the media industry collapsing within itself and most experts predicting a long ‘nuclear winter’ for all things media, termination at this stage is the cruelest blow for Tomase. We need folks who aren’t hell-bent on using their position as some sort of ‘bully pulpit.’ We also don’t need contrarians, whose only objective is to say ‘black’ when everyone else can see ‘white.’ It’s these people who deserve the nuclear media winter they’re in now, and I hope they freeze themselves out of our market or at least out of the industry. The sad fact is that we see good media people exiting while the truly bad ones simply hang around.
If only the Herald did lay his fat, lying ass off. No such luck
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I still wish Kraft had refused to grant any Herald employee a press credential unless Thomase was removed from all Patriots coverage.
I love when a “media” site relies on profootballtalk to “break” media happenings. Where’s David Scott when we need him? And Chris, I dont think the Herald is terminating John Tomase. They would have done that a year ago if that was their plan. Sounds like he’s just no longer a Pats guy.
I love when a “commenter” just comes to toss snark around when really he is just a troll. Where is Joe Haggerty when we need him?
Bruce had the Herald hiring the new guy on Friday – two days before profootballtalk.
Only stating the obvious, but this is a year too late. That the Herald continued to keep a beat reporter that had lost any level of credibility with the fan base of the team he covered is puzzling, at best. I haven’t given the Herald’s football coverage a glance since this all hit the fan and don’t plan on going back now.
My favorite (personal) moment about this all year.
The Herald calls:
“Hi, we see that you used to be a subscriber. Would you be interested in re-subscribing?”
“Does John Tomase still work for the paper?”
“Um…….I’m not sure….I can check.”
“No, he does. No thank you.”
Good riddance to the John Popper lookalike fraud.
Several other journalists had the exact same information that Tomase did, but correctly realized that the source alone wasn’t enough, or wasn’t credible enough; and, realized that to publish the information would be irresponsible.
in effect, no in reality, Tomase acted below the standard of care of the average reasonable journalist in the same situation, as established by those other journalists. Were he in an actual profession which policed itself, or had ohjective standards/tests to establish knowledge or proficiency, he would have at the very least been suspended, if not removed, from the profession for his egregious failure to act as a reasonable journalist.
He simply no longer has journalistic credibility.
It’s too bad that Pats’ fans can’t exert the same kind of pressure on ESPN–I can think of at least a half-dozen morons over there who are equally deserving of losing their NFL beat privileges for the way they overhyped the big nothing that was “Spygate.”
Hopefully, the next domino to fall will be Red Light Goodell, whose over-the-top reaction to the whole thing kick-started the entire media firestorm and chatter about “tainted titles”–simply because he was ticked off that Belichick ignored one of his precious memos.
Kraft is very influential at those owners’ meetings–maybe, just maybe, when Commissioner Red Light’s term comes up for renewal, Kraft will attempt to stage a coup.
I’d love to see it happen.
I should mention that I’m not trying to condone Belichick’s ignoring of the memos, because I’m not. He should have stopped doing what he was doing (since it’s very likely that everyone else who was doing it before 2006 stopped once the memos came out).
However, Goodell’s overreaction and severe punishment for what was a minor, minor rules infraction was, no doubt in my mind, motivated by his contempt for the fact that Belichick would dare ignore his memo(s).
The fact that he punished the Pats so severely for what was a minor offense opened the floodgates for the media (and fans and players of teams previously vanquished by the Pats from 2001-2004) to begin the rampant speculation and accusations about how the Super Bowl wins were “tainted.”
I mean, when using a video camera to steal signals (which most teams instead do with a binocular and a notebook from the press box) is punished more severely than SF and Denver cheating on the salary cap and subsequently winning Super Bowls with those illegal rosters, you know something is askew in the world of NFL justice….the severe punishment was all about Goodell’s ego and his desire to make an example of Belichick vis a vis ignoring the memos–he can’t possibly think that what the Pats did was more significant a rules violation than salary cap cheating.
For years, well before he wrote the infamous bogus story about Spygate, it was no secret John Tomase was trying to get off the Patriots beat because he wanted to cover baseball. So what happens? He shames the Herald and eventually gets his wish, i.e. rewarded. Not only did the Herald boss forgive Tomase, they freakin promoted him! And you thought the lifetime contracts at the Globe were a problem. Tomase apparently has a lifetime deal at the Herald.
Does anybody else see something wrong with this picture?
It’s just Tomase being Tomase.