With respect to the Spygate story, we’ve been accused at times of being apologists for the New England Patriots and at other times for having a bias against them.  And that tells us that our effort to be fair and balanced on this issue is generally working.

One media publication that isn’t, in my own personal assessment, behaving in a fair and/or balanced manner is the former employer of Jayson Blair, the newspaper of record, the repository for all the news that’s fit to print.

The New York Times.

In its May 11 edition, the Times has published what we regard as, quite simply, a one-sided hatchet job that ignores the basic reality that pro football teams break the rules all the time, if doing so will (or might) result in some type of actual (or perceived) benefit in the quest to score more points that the opponents on a per-game basis.

The gist of the article is that most of the changes to the league’s rules since Bill Belichick’s arrival as head coach in 2000 have been driven by complaints made about the practices of the Patriots.

The article cites only one unnamed league executive in support of the assertion.  (That said, an unnamed Jaguars exec is cited in support of the claim that the Jags filed a complaint against the Patriots in 2006 due to the failure of the coach-to-quarterback radio system.)  “They were the only team, really,” the unnamed executive said.  “Clearly, they were the team mentioned far more than anybody else.”

The “executive” in question presumably is a member of the league’s competition committee, since the item focuses on the efforts of the league’s rule-making body to make tweaks, supposedly in order to thwart (or, as in the case of Spygate, nail) the franchise that won three Super Bowls in four seasons and nearly captured a fourth to cap what would have been a 19-0 season.

But teams have been cheating, or at least trying to cheat, for years.  We posted back in February this 1967 article from Sport magazine, which talks about the cloak-and-dagger realities of the modern (at the time) NFL.  Also, in the wake of Spygate I, former Cowboys and Dolphins coach Jimmy Johnson was candid about the fact that he was taught how to videotape defensive coaching signals when he arrived in the NFL in the late 1980s.

And don’t get us started (again) on tampering.  In this regard, the Pats have been victimized as much as anyone, with their effort to squeeze Lawyer Milloy into a lower deal reportedly undermined by improper communications between Milloy’s camp and the Redskins.  Ditto for receiver Deion Branch, with whom the Pats were convinced the Jets had tampered in 2006.

But it was the 49ers, not the Patriots, who were made to be the example of a practice so embarrassingly widespread that the league considered earlier this year the possibility of simply allowing tampering in the week or so before free agency opens.

Make no mistake about it — rules violations like tampering create as much, if not more, of a benefit than videotaping defensive coaching signals.  By engaging in impermissible negotiations with the agent of a player who is under contract with another team, the team that tampers has an opportunity to make the other team worse and to make itself better, if the player ultimately moves to the new team, once he’s officially on the market.  Even if the player stays put, the act of tampering potentially fractures the relationship between the player and the team.

But the Times makes no mention of tampering or any other rules violations that other teams are or might be committing.  Instead, the focus is squarely on the Patriots.

The Patriots recognize what the Times is doing, and to his credit team spokesman Stacey James is willing to call it what it is.  “We believe that this inquiry is patently biased and that a truly objective report would investigate all instances of these complaints, not exclusively those against the Patriots,” James wrote in an e-mail to the Times.

If the Times has an agenda against the Pats on this story, the reason for it is unclear.  The New York Times Company also owns the Boston Globe, which has become the favored newspaper of Patriots fans in the wake of the February 2 item from the Herald that accused the hometown team of videotaping the Rams’ walk-through prior to Super Bowl XXXVI.

But, then again, Matt Walsh and his lawyer, Michael Levy, have given the Times plenty of information about the whole Spygate II situation, and perhaps the Times has developed (intentionally or otherwise) a pro-Walsh, anti-Pats approach in the hopes of keeping the Walsh-Levy pipeline open, especially with Walsh scheduled to sit down with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell in two days.

Regardless of the reason, we think that the story shows at best a fundamental misunderstanding of the NFL, and at worst an outright bias against the New England Patriots.