Sensationalist media cheapen journalism

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Too often these days, the media don't react, they overreact. They overreact to the Duke lacrosse case — cranking out more than a year of breathless, rush-to-judgment coverage — only to look foolish when the three players are exonerated. Five months later, they take the Spygate football and run with it, lend credence to the unproven charge that the Patriots filmed a Rams practice the day before Super Bowl XXXVI and are embarrassed yet again.

What will be the next "scandal," the next hot-air balloon the folks in the news gathering business foist upon their customers, all in the name of public service ... and profit? Fear not, it'll be along soon enough — like the next bus. And as with the previous buses, it'll wind up in a heap on the side of the road, waiting for the tow truck. With too many in the media, you see, it's more about the trip — the continuing saga, the filling of nearly limitless air time and newspaper space — than the destination.

The 24-hour news cycle, after all, is a monster that must be fed, and sometimes the entree is filet mignon and sometimes it's Mad Cow. Lately, sad to say, there's been a lot of the latter on the menu. Enough to make you wonder what they're teaching in our journalism schools. Enough to make you wonder whether the media have lost their sense of smell. Whatever happened to the journalist's most prized asset, his/her built-in, uh, poop detector?

The Boston Herald, the newspaper that broke the "story" about the Patriots spying on the Rams, apologized in large letters yesterday. This came after Matt Walsh, erstwhile cameraman for the team, told NFL commissioner Roger Goodell he had never taped St. Louis' walkthrough and didn't know anybody who did.

In its mea culpa, the paper admitted — stunningly so — that before running the article, it "neither possessed nor viewed [such a] tape ... nor did we speak to anyone who had. We should not have published the allegation in the absence of firmer verification."

In other words, it was too good a "story" not to print, no matter how flimsily sourced it was.

Just as the Duke lacrosse case, which also got the Saturation Treatment, was too good a "story." Why, it had everything — race, class, gender, violence, everything but proof. Sure, you can blame former district attorney Mike Nifong for filing bogus rape charges in the first place, presumably for his own political gain, but that still doesn't excuse the guilty-until-proven-innocent tone of much of the reportage, especially in the early stages.

On the same day Walsh met with Goodell — which was also the same day the Herald prepared its "Sorry, Pats" apology — Tom Brady discussed the issue on a Boston radio station. In the process, he ripped ESPN for making too much of the Patriots' spying, for exaggerating the advantage it gave the Pats.

"It's just kind of the environment right now," he said. "They just say the craziest things. That's what ESPN has become. ESPN, to me, is like MTV without the videos. They just have highlights instead."

ESPN as MTV. There's certainly some truth to that, to the idea that the Worldwide Leader has turned sports into a cartoon, a special effects extravaganza. Most of the sportswriters shouting at each other on "Around the Horn," I can attest, become exaggerated or alternate versions of themselves when on camera. The medium, it appears, makes them so.