So, as a friend of beleaguered Boston Herald writer John Tomase, I’ve been wrestling with how I might address the topic without coming off as too biased on John’s behalf. Seth Mnookin spared me the trouble with his excellent post on the subject today:
But the vitriol and derision being directed at Tomase is over-the-top. (And getting angry at him or at the Herald is a bad way to displace frustration/anger over the Pats slightly-less-than-perfect season.) He had what he thought was a big story, and he thought he had made the limitations of his story clear in the piece itself. The allegations contained therein logically followed from what was already known. And nobody he interviewed would say, flat out, that the piece was wrong.
This was, more or less, going to be my main point. The calls for Tomase’s firing – there’s even a Facebook group dedicated to it – don’t make much sense to me. Is he accused of malfeasance here? No one seems to be making a credible accusation along those lines. He got a scoop that appeared legitimate, and ran with it. One would assume that at least one Herald editor knows about Tomase’s source(s), and was sufficiently satisfied with the sourcing to green-light the story.
Is he accused of frequent mistakes along these lines – viz, running a story without giving the target(s) enough time to respond? To my knowledge, this is the first time John’s been charged with this kind or, in fact, any kind of journalistic error. So what is the justification for calling for Tomase to lose his job? Doesn’t some of the responsibility lie with the editors, as Seth says, to rein the writers in?