Over the last few years, sports journalism has become as ripe a topic for discussion as the games and sports personalities that the journalists cover.

This trend started with talk radio but really picked up steam when some cyber caveman invented the first Blog, which, when you think about the sound of it, has a very cavemanish ring to it. A fair amount of blogging, regardless of the subject matter, fixates on other media -- print, broadcast and even cyber -- because many bloggers are motivated by what they perceive as a disconnect between institutional media and the public that media is suppose to serve. And bloggers believe they can bridge that gap.

Which brings us to the granddaddy of all sports media stories to date -- the Boston Herald's now discredited Super Bowl eve report that the Patriots taped the Rams walk-through prior to the Super Bowl back in 2002. By now, even penguins in Antarctica know that's not true and the Herald has fallen on its sword with an unusual front-page apology to the team and its fans.  Today, the reporter responsible for the article that appeared on Feb. 2, John Tomase, donned sackcloth and ashes in a lengthy apology and explanation of what went wrong.

You can study and pick apart Tomase's explanation all you want -- the reliance on hearsay accounts, the  degrees of distance that certain sources had with events, misinterpretations of events that Tomase did confirm and it really comes down to two things.  There was a fatal urgency in getting it first, and there was a breakdown in the checks-and-balances that are supposed to be a prudent and essential part of the machinery in any newsroom operation.

If you follow Tomase's narrative and put yourself in his place, you can see how he could be seduced into arriving at the mistaken gut belief that the Patriots taped the Rams' walk-through six years ago.  But in committing a gut belief to ink and paper, or even pixels, most reporters turn into Hamlet.  Contemplating another type of irrevocable action, the Bard's melancholy Dane says, "Conscience does make cowards of us all."  Grafting that thought onto the practice of journalism, we should all be suitably apprehensive about going into print until we are absolutely sure we have the story cold.

In Tomase's case, the scoop -- too often journalism's fool's gold -- contributed to making him  braver about the merits of his story than his reporting warranted.

But even more concerning is how the system apparently broke down at the Herald. Before the days of elaborate ethics codes and newsroom ombudsmen, journalists lived by the old cigar-chomping editor's admonition, "If your mother tells you she loves you, CHECK  IT OUT!"  Just as the Golden Rule sums up some of the most complex faith dogma, that trusty newsroom aphorism covers a lot of sound media practices territory.

Journalism, especially investigative journalism as it is practiced at the level of a metropolitan newspaper, is a highly collaborative enterprise.  Above the reporter is an assigning editor.  That assigning editor will usually consult with still another higher editor on a major story, such as the earth-shaking one that ran on Feb. 2 in the Herald about the Patriots' alleged transgression in 2002.  Then, there is the last line of defense, the copy desk, where at least two more editors often take a look.  Sometimes in this business, having someone's back means protecting him or her from a self-inflicted wound.  Unless Tomase bamboozled his superiors (and I doubt he would still have a job if he did), others at the Herald -- some with more stripes on their shoulder than Tomase -- failed in their duties as well. 

In his article today, Tomase made a personal observation that was particularly sobering.  He called the Rams' walk-through story something that he'll have to live with the rest of his life.  I hadn't thought about it in those terms but he's probably right.  This is the sort of thing that winds up in a person's obituary.

And I believe that Patriots fans who think that the story may have had some impact on New England's Super Bowl loss to the Giants three months ago are convinced it should also be etched on the guy's tombstone.