Now let me say this: And I’ve done this before.
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Chris Mortensen, who was the first one to report about the Deflategate scandal back in January, was scheduled to appear on Boston’s WEEI sports radio this morning, but dipped out of the appearance because of what he claims to be a conflict of interest.
The New England quarterback lost the appeal of his four-game suspension amid reports that he had destroyed his cell phone during the Deflategate investigation.
“What needs to be corrected has been corrected”, he said Monday. If you want to call it a retraction … what I didn’t do was retract it on Twitter.
The Wells report, released May 6, included all measurements of all footballs in the AFC Championship Game.
Read that again. Mortensen’s report, which came out months before the Wells report effectively corrected it, could nearly literally have not been more factually incorrect, and Mort has yet to publicly address reporting blatantly wrong information. So therefore it’s hard to feel I was used. That’s a red flag right there.
“You guys made a mistake by drumming up business for the show and how I would address my reporting for the first time”, Mortensen told WEEI, according to ProFootballTalk’s Mike Florio. The report added that the footballs were 2.0 pounds under the 12.5 PSI minimum. And the Wells investigation was not launched because of my reporting. But let me ask you this question: If I had simply reported, which I did include in the original report, that 11 footballs were found to be significantly under inflated, what would the reaction have been?
“…I think there was some inaccurate data at the time that was passed on to me, but I also talked to other sources who verified the number that I was focused on”.
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“I already had changed the descriptive tone”. “The two pounds PSI, that was obviously an error and clarified and corrected”. But there has been one person willing to discuss the issue; ESPN reporter, and Mortensen’s fellow NFL insider, Adam Schefter. Mortensen’s point is that there was so much incorrect information floating around, even in the upper reaches of the league office, that it isn’t surprising that just a few days after the game he was given false information, and that it certainly wasn’t malicious. And Ted Wells himself in a conference call said, ‘It’s ludicrous to think that the league would want to smear its face of the league in Tom Brady with this type of campaign.’ To me, it’s an insult a little bit to the intelligence. When he tweeted out the info on the alleged under inflated balls people were going to take his word on the matter. Eleven was a significant number, and “significantly underinflated” was a significant description.
