Friday, May 26, 2006

Journalism's finest hour

I swear to God, my head is about to explode. Just go read this, uh, "profile" of Bill Frist in the freaking Washington Post -- NOT The Onion -- but make sure you have a bucket handy, because it's going to make you want to heave.

Meanwhile, as the excellent Harry Shearer points out on Huffington Post, the whore-iffic New York Times has run a front-page story claiming the levees are pretty much fixed in New Orleans -- and buried the inconvenient news that they're actually, well, not so much fixed ("The overall New Orleans flood protection system...must be considered suspect") in the last paragraph.

I had a crotchety old journalism professor (is there any other kind?) named Seth King at Boston University who would have blown a gasket had this spectacular display of ass-kissing, ignoring of inconvenient facts, and general ineptitude been in evidence in the news business back then. (Back in the distant past of 1988, when I took his Journalism 101 class.)

I have no idea if old Seth is even still among the living, but if he's not, he is surely spinning in his grave.

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