Six months later, Chris Mortensen has deleted his original Deflategate tweet

It appears that Mortensen was used as a conduit for at least one NFL official with a vendetta to smear the Patriots as the scandal broke (many speculate that the source for Mortensen’s “11 balls, two pounds under-inflated” tweet came courtesy of Mike Kensil, the NFL vice president of game operations and former Jets executive), which calls into question the credibility of both the league office and ESPN as a media outlet.

“I didn’t correct it on Twitter, and that was a mistake”, Mortensen said on Le Batard’s show. Even if that isn’t entirely true, the NFL failed to dispute or even attempt to correct the incorrect report.

After Mortensen backed out, WEEI’s “Dennis & Callahan” show tweeted it knew the bad source for the reporter’s wrong Deflategate story. He’s probably correct that the reaction would not have been much different if he’d used less specific figures, but I quibble with the notion that the Wells Report conclusively demonstrated that the footballs were “significantly under-inflated”. That report set off a Hindenburgian firestorm that eventually led to the NFL-sanctioned investigation by Ted Wells and Roger Goodell’s four-game suspension of quarterback Tom Brady.

He again acknowledged he should’ve clarified – not necessarily retracted – on Twitter, to say there was conflicting information on the specific number, but continue to say “significantly under-inflated”.

“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. And I did with our news desk, pretty early, to ‘significantly under inflated.’ And I will never retract that. While he may have changed the “descriptive tone” of his reports afterwards to “significantly under inflated”, that doesn’t unring the bell of his original report. “It’s kind of evolved that way because of the war between the Patriots and the NFL. Yeah, they could have”, Mortensen said.

Mortensen added that he was not being used as a pawn by the NFL because he sought the information out and it was confirmed by multiple sources.

On Friday, the Patriots also published a post to its blog: The Wells Report in Context.

New England and Robert Kraft believed that moment, on the sideline no less, showed more than a little bit of bias by the league and were disappointed that it wasn’t explored more in the Wells report.

And I don’t know the particulars of what happened. If you want to call it a retraction…what I didn’t do was retract it on Twitter. And so therefore do I feel betrayed?