A decade ago, Mark Konkol won a Pulitzer. He won’t be in line for another after his report from earlier this week.
In a new item for Patch.com, Konkol acknowledges that his report that the Bears will fire coach Matt Nagy after Thursday’s game at Detroit was wrong. Konkol attributes the outcome to two possible explanations.
One, he got “bamboozled by a trusted source.” Two, something changed after the news of Nagy’s looming firing was leaked.
It wouldn’t be the first time that either has occurred. Although it doesn’t happen 11 of 12 times, reporters often get lied to -- and they sometimes pass those lies along without proper scrutiny or skepticism. Also, the mere emergence of a controversial report can cause a weak-kneed organization to wobble and waver and ultimately wander from its plan.
The Bears didn’t help matters by letting Konkol’s story bake for multiple hours before serving up Nagy to say it’s not accurate. The official silence on a matter that could have been easily refuted fueled speculation that Konkol’s report may have been accurate.
As Konkol now writes, “When I offered the Bears a chance to officially say the information wasn’t true, I got snarky answers rather than straight ones.” Konkol also reiterates that a “trusted source in a position to know confidently told me Nagy would not be the head coach after Thursday’s game.”
Konkol also acknowledges that he deserves some blame, if he indeed passed along a lie: “If my source fed me bad information about Nagy, I should have done better, much in the way the Bears should have done better.”
If Konkol got bad information from his source, he should be demanding answers from that source and sharing them. Then again, now that the source has proven to be untrustworthy, Konkol probably should ignore whatever excuse the source may offer now.
And so Konkol will do the only thing he can do, since outing the source who lied to him isn’t an option. (Some would say it should be.) Like those to whom someone lied in early 2015 about underinflated footballs, sparking the reporting that turned a mild curiosity into a full-blown hashtag, the reporter ends up publicly wearing the scarlet letter -- even if the reporter was simply the victim of a “fool me once” ruse.