Thanks to the quick work of Kogod, I was able to talk with Mike Wise of the Washington Post this afternoon about becoming public enemy #1 on Twitter today after posting this tweet: “Roethlisberger will get five games, I’m told.”

It’s unsourced, and was followed by other erroneous and misleading tweets, as part of a bit for his radio show. The problem? Not everyone was listening to his radio show. Most notably, ProFootballTalk. They are not fans of Mike Wise today.

Listen to the audio below, but here are some of Wise’s comments about the situation. First, technology failed him, and cause a lot of people a lot of wasted energy tracking down (and writing about) this news.

“Where I screwed up was, I literally put a tweet right after that saying, ‘can’t reveal my sources…oh yeah, it’s a casino employee in Lake Tahoe’ and so I get this ‘Twitter is over-booked, try back later.’ So the actual secondary tweet doesn’t go come out until…a half hour to an hour later and I was on the radio show at the time and I didn’t even look up for 20 minutes to see that it hadn’t tweeted.”

On making people track down stories based on a joke tweet:

“Bottom line: I picked a lousy way to show we have no credibility in this medium, in the social networking medium, and that nobody checks these things out. It was just not a good way to do it. If i had to do it all over again I would have picked another way.”

Jason La Canfora tweeted this (and other things) about Wise: “If I’m the Washington Post, I’m thinking seriously about suspending a sports columnist. No surprise the Big Ben tweet was a hoax.”

The reply:

“In these kind of instances, you find out who is making sure you’re okay and who has your back and who wants to pile on. This is a good moment for me personally to find out who is a peripheral friend and who actually is a person who has no idea the genesis of this and how it came about.”

On using his Twitter account to break news (or on the fact that people thought he was breaking news):

“I’ve never broken news on my Twitter account in my life. The only news I ever broke on my Twitter account was that Shaq is not, in fact, engaged to Hoops. That’s not exactly what I would call breaking news.

“I’m a columnist. I have fun on that Twitter account. It’s used as an outreach for other readers and other people, that’s what the Post gave me the account for. Now, that does not preempt me from any of the Twitter rules that we have that apply to this kind of stuff, and I have ever reason to apologize for…not everybody is listening to the radio show. It’s my fault.”

On Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk:

“This is what he does. This is a guy…of all people. I don’t mind some people, with what I would call integrity in this business, saying ‘you’re an idiot.’ In Florio’s case, I guess he called me a D-I-C-K…I don’t mind some people doing that. Mike Florio is probably the last person on Earth that should be criticizing anybody on this. This is the reason why I did something like this. Again, I picked a lousy avenue.

“You’re not checking out a major story like that before you post it?