Patriots president Jonathan Kraft appeared on WEEI radio in Boston on Thursday, and he discussed in candid detail the situation involving the retraction of the February 2 Boston Herald story accusing the team of videotaping the Rams’ walk-through practice prior to Super Bowl XXXVI.

Here, as we’ve been saying a lot lately, are the highlights.

Kraft said that the Herald gave the team roughly one hour of advance notice before going to print with the story, at 9:00 p.m. EST on the evening of Friday, February 1.  He said that the team and the lawyers were adamant regarding their denial of the contention.

Later in the interview, Kraft explained what had occurred when the Herald called the team, as the Patriots were preparing for the league championship game against the Giants.  And the situation became a real distraction for the franchise the next day, one day before the Super Bowl.

“A significant number of people in our organization,” Kraft said, “from Robert [Kraft] to myself to Bill [Belichick] to Scott [Pioli] to Jimmy Dee to Fernando Neto, our assistant video director, to Stacey James and his staff and our lawyers had to spend a significant amount of time with people at the league office dealing and addressing this issue on a day that, I think, maybe not for my father and myself, but for certainly most of the rest of the people, we would have preferred that they spend preparing for the Super Bowl and the opportunity that we had to finish an undefeated season.”  

Kraft implied that the team won’t be taking legal action against the Herald, focusing instead on a desire to “move forward.”  Still, he called the damage to the team as a result of the false story “significant,” citing more than 300,000 stories that have run in the past three-plus months referencing the false story.

Kraft also pointed out that the apology could have come sooner, if Matt Walsh wasn’t the source for the Herald story.  “If Matt Walsh wasn’t the source,” Kraft said, “why did it take until the day after he spoke to get the apology?”

There was a little sparring regarding the notion that coach Bill Belichick “misinterpreted” the rule prevening videotaping of defensive coaching signals.  The contention is that the practice wouldn’t have been secretive if Belichick thought that the practice was permissible.  (In this regard, the only possible explanation is that Belichick didn’t want other teams who might not be videotaping defensive signals to realize that it’s something that might be a good idea to do.)

As to Senator Arlen Specter’s interest in the matter, Kraft pointed out that the absence of any comment from other U.S. Senators in support of taking action regarding the cheating scandal. 

Regarding the media coverage of the situation, Kraft pointed out that several media outlets have been chasing the story in an effort to uncover new wrongdoing by the Patriots, but have found nothing.  “[N]o professional sports team has been under this much scrutiny in the history of professional sports,” Kraft said.

In this regard, Kraft took a shot at the Internet operation of the company that pays the league $1.1 billion per year for the privilege of televising its games.  “I would argue that there are certain people at ESPN.com who have shown journalistic standards that are not up to snuff,” Kraft said.