Deflategate: A Study In Journalistic Bias

I’m going to talk about Deflategate, but the real topic is journalistic bias. It’s been fascinating to watch the media respond to Deflategate and I think the lessons are easily transferred to the MSM and their relationship to the Democrats.

For those who don’t know, the NFL just sent down a punishment on Tom Brady and the New England Patriots for their role in the secret deflation of footballs below the air psi levels allowed by the rules and for their failure to cooperate with the NFL’s investigation. Let me make some quick points that will be useful as background.

(1) The investigation was conducted independently by an attorney who has worked for the NFL before, but no one objected to his impartiality until after he released his report. All of his findings were supported by written evidence in the form of text messages between Patriot employees and his scientific conclusions were reached with the aid of the head of the Science Department at Princeton.

(2) The reason deflation of balls matters is this: it affects the football itself (the key object in the game) and it provides the Patriots with a competitive advantage. Specifically, it makes it easier to grip the ball in cold weather, which makes it easier to throw and catch. Moreover, as Tom Brady alone was aware of this, only he had the opportunity to become accustomed to such balls, which according to Eli Manning do fly very differently. Hence, his opponent was always using a ball with unfamiliar traits whereas Tom was not. This goes directly to the integrity of the game.

(3) The penalties inflicted upon the Patriots and Brady are extremely light. Yes, light. A four game suspension (what Brady got) is typical for players found to have taken performance enhancing drugs. But players who have been involved in issues more fundamental to the game, such as the Saints’ bounty scandal, have received much longer suspensions, and their investigations haven’t been delayed until after the season... allowing them to play out the year as Tom did. Other coaches, like Sean Payton, have been suspended for as long as a year for failure to control their employees, even though he knew nothing of the violation. Belichick got nothing. The Patriot’s loss of a draft pick also is less than it appears as the pick will be from 2016 for a 2014 violation (picks are generally considered to lose one round in value each year).

(4) It is impossible not to see this as affecting Brady’s legacy. Keep in mind that the Super Bowls Brady won were all won in the last second by field goals, so any advantage would be huge. The first set were won when Brady had the illegal advantage of knowing the defensive signals. The new one was won when he had the advantage of the deflated balls, and even then was only won because of a fluke play by the Seahawks.

Against this backdrop, here is the issue. Almost every single analyst or talking head at ESPN and the NFL network has some close connection to Brady. Most are former teammates. Some are former Patriots executives. The pure journalists almost all come from the Boston papers or Sports Illustrated, which is located in that region. To a one, they have shown amazing bias:

(1) Most will openly begin their discussions by stating some sycophantic love of Brady. They will blather on about how amazing he is, how handsome, how his wife is beautiful, how great he is, etc. They have almost uniformly stated that “the public” views Brady as “the perfect athlete and the perfect man.” They don’t seem to be aware of the fact that the public outside of the Boston area and their newsroom sees him much more negatively. They claim his legacy is that of a squeaky clean athlete, which is not anything the public at large would say about Brady.

(2) In his defense, they have done several entirely intellectually dishonest things:

(A) They have only presented people who think Brady is innocent or doesn’t deserve to be punished. So far, I have only seen two people allowed on these shows who think Brady needed to be punished, and even they have said so grudgingly.

(B) They have misstated the report and the basis for the punishment repeatedly. For example, the report concluded that there was sufficient evidence to find that it is more probable than not that Brady was involved. That’s legal speak for “meets the preponderance of the evidence standard.” But they have argued this is equivocation, which it is not. They have also argued that there is no “smoking gun” because the report never found anyone who specifically admitted that Brady was involved. Yet, it is almost unheard of to find such evidence. Almost all cases are handled on the basis of circumstantial evidence. They have also misstated the basis for the punishment which is the violation AND failure to cooperate. They only stick to the first part of that and they claim they don’t see the proof.

(C) They have openly misstated the report to such a degree that its author took the unusual steps of debunking their reporting today.

(D) They have pretended that they are incapable of seeing any competitive advantage to doing this, even as others have pointed out the numerous advantages, and even as that would make Brady a total fool.

(E) They routinely endorse the conspiracy theory that the league wanted to punish Brady for reasons that make no sense in their assumptions and asides.

The worst of the worst is this dipstick named Mike Florio. He runs a rumor website which NBC bought, and he has been dishonestly defending the Patriots for years. Since this story broke, he’s been on the offensive. In the past several months, he has done each of the following:

(A) Tried to suggest that the mere act of testing the PSI in the balls caused them to become illegal, i.e. the NFL invented the crime.

(B) Made a wrong claim about how far below the legal limit the balls were and then debunked his own claim and used that debunking to attack the report as flawed as if the report relied on his own claim.

(C) Despite writing article after article attacking the report at the edges, he never once wrote an article outlining the actual findings of the report, like the damning text messages.

(D) He did things like claim that Wells’ claim of a lack of cooperation is based on Wells basically harassing the Patriots with “many requests” to interview the same employee, when the reality is that Wells only made two such requests and he said he would work around the employee’s schedule.

(E) He wrote articles saying this could not have led to an advantage and never reported the NFL quarterbacks and scientists who stated to the contrary.

(F) Then he got tricky... realizing perhaps that his case was hopeless, he began to write articles claiming that “everyone” does this. Despite the fact he never could identify a single QB who admitted that, he began using his own report as evidence of “public dissent” with the official report. (Others actually wrote articles saying that Tom should have been allowed to do this because... well, because!)

(G) He tried to deflect attention from Brady by attacking the Colts for reporting the crime... blaming the victim.

(H) He began attacking every other team or player he could find who had broken any rules. Basically, he smeared everyone else. He would also accuse any journalist who discussed Deflategate in anything less than a totally pro-Patriot’s manner of bias.

Today, the grieving process finally took these “unbiased” journalists to the point where they were assuring each other that the Patriots would teach every other team a lesson for doing this to them: “We’ll show you!!”

All of this has been an amazing example of what happens when you are biased and what can happen to a news organization when it collects a critical mass of similarly biased individuals. These Patriots-fanatics/friends-of-Tom-cum-journalists have (1) blinded themselves to the world outside their bubble where Tom is not seen as Godlike or pure... he’s seen as an arrogant cheater, (2) they have excluded those who do not belong to the bubble, (3) they have convinced themselves that there is simply no proof of guilt by demanding that the report achieve an impossible standard (“absolutely certainty”), (4) they are passing around conspiracy theories and attacking the messenger and the victim, (5) they are blind to the horrible PR that the tantrum the Patriots are throwing is doing to their image, indeed, they have embraced it – one even called it “a well needed middle finger to the NFL,” (6) they are dismissing all evidence of which they don’t approve as bias and skewing the rest, and (7) they have chosen to defiantly defend their friend.

This is IDENTICAL to the way the MSM treats the Democrats. Isn’t it interesting that the same MSM is packed with former Democratic operatives and journalists married to current Democrats?

The coverage of Deflategate should be used as a model for studying how the reliability of journalists breaks down when they are biased. Those lessons should be used by conservatives as a means of demanding new rules of ethics from the field of journalism.

Thoughts?