Part of me wanted to be understanding and sympathetic to Boston Herald writer John Tomase for the mess that has taken over his life.

Part of me wanted to kick him in the backside, but I’d have to wait in line way too long.

It has to do with “Spygate” and his role in reporting, erroneously, that the New England Patriots taped a walk-through by the St. Louis Rams prior to Super Bowl XXXVI. The story exploded in his face like a circus cigar and now he has had to issue a written apology in the Herald.

There were nearly 600 reader comments tacked onto the end of the story. I stopped reading after 50 or so because people want him drawn, quartered, bent, folded, spindled, mutilated, and then fired.

I’ll just say this: Wow.

It’s like that line in the movie “All The President’s Men” after Woodward and Bernstein messed up a story, “I knew we had enemies but I didn’t know we were this popular.”

I’ve been in this business almost four decades and I’ve never felt out-and-out hatred from the public toward the media in general like the way it is now. Some of it is a sign of the times - talk radio and the Internet empowers people to rant, rave, and dehumanize - and part of it is the media’s own fault. Too often, as Tomase did, we rush something to print before we have all the facts. Yeah, we want to sell papers but we also want people to believe what we say and we endanger that with every shortcut.

But I will say this: It wouldn’t matter to some people what is put in the paper. What if Tomase’s story had been correct? Many fans would have then held him responsible for the Patriots losing the Super Bowl to the Giants (his story came out just before that game). A lot of folks seem to want only cheerleading. A guy jumped my tail last year because he said, roughly, how dare I cover the Bucs if I’m not a fan of the team.

Wow.

There’s no sense fighting it, though. The media has made mistakes in the past and will make more. And you know what? There are parts about this overall business that I detest, too. I don’t blame some of the anger and mistrust. There is far more accurate and necessary reporting going on than the kind of slipshod stuff that caused this flap, but mistakes like that one bring us all down.