....To step back a bit, the most interesting aspect of this saga (one which I had time to put together a full post for) is how propaganda has evolved in the internet age, and how effective it can still be. Deflategate at its heart is the same as the Birther movement, 9/11 Truther movement, Climate Change Denialist movement, and Putin's Little Green Men movement, and these all share a heritage going back to Goebbels and beyond.
From these, there are a lot of great (and frightening) lessons to learn about how to operate a successful propaganda / misinformation campaign:
Always take the initiative. People make their conclusions based on the first facts that they hear on a subject, and few are willing or able to re-evaluate those conclusions as contradicting information comes in.
As a corollary, "Breaking News" is the only type of news that will get noticed by people not following your story closely. It is also a scarce resource - it can by definition only ever happen once for any particular story. Ensuring that your message is the "Breaking News" ensures that your opponent's response will only ever be heard by a small fraction of the people, no mater how strong that response is.
"Manufacturing Consent" is an important ongoing part of this strategy. Build an ecosystem of media outlets that have a dependence on you for their own success. These outlets can and will be weaponized to push out your messages and to ignore your opponents'. Don't ignore modern media: back in the day, those that learned how to use newspapers, radio, film and TV first got a huge leg up; nowadays, media personalities that have Twitter followers count as their own media outlets.
It is better to have a lie that tells a compelling story than to rely solely on the truth. But even better than that is to have some fragment of truth that can be twisted in some way to fit the narrative. Look at the "The team fired the equipment people involved" above example, which I think was an excellent play by the NFL. Just Thursday, I saw this particular argument thrown at a a vehement Brady advocate on a national TV show covering the court case, who didn't know how to respond; he was fortunate that he was rescued by another participant who did know the full context of that argument.
There are plenty of other strategies and tactics to learn from this whole process, but I will jump straight to one last one that is perhaps the most important: 
Successful minorities make the best targets. I'm not going to go deep into historical parallels because they're quite obvious, but the interesting thing about this case is how well it works at multiple levels.
For non-Patriots NFL fans, Brady is the ultimate successful minority; 31 other teams have had to watch him and the Patriots win for the last 15 years, often when they've thought their own team was legitimately better. There's no better salve to the ego than to think that your own failures are a result of a long-running conspiracy rather than your own inadequacy or even worse, dumb luck. It doesn't hurt that he's rich and is married to a beautiful, rich, foreign model wife.
For people that aren't fans of the NFL, it works too. Tom Brady is hugely rich and successful because he had the fortune to win the genetic lottery to become a professional athlete. He's the 1%, all for playing a game rather than for doing something useful to society. Here on Metafilter, how many comments have we seen that say something like "I hate the NFL and maybe Brady is a victim, but there are other far worthier victims that I need to reserve my outrage for"?
These are all reasons why I hope people pay attention to this controversy. Not so much because of the outcome (though I am personally far too invested in that to be neutral) but because this is such a great example of how a propaganda war works in the modern world. There are lots of smart people watching and taking notes.
posted by 
Harvey Byrd at 
7:44 AM on September 6