Some of my friends have Livejournal sites and I sometimes wish I had the little signifiers that site adds ("Current Mood: Happy!") but I'd need a lot of space for the explanations:

Current Mood: Some residual crankiness from too much travel, sore from two ballet classes this week, tired of my hair
Current Music: I Am The World Trade Center, for their wan yet upbeat dance sound

Anyway:
Much has been written about the abrupt firing of a certain notorious columnist. Since then the hot air has been a-flowing from media outlets galore. Some representatives want to pat their profession on its collective back ("Of course he should have been fired, violation of the public trust, yadda yadda, besides, this is icky"). Others wax defensive ("He should not have been fired, nobody's business, 14 years ago, blah, blah, get me some coffee, honey").

This article actually attempts to look at the big picture a little more, from a journalistic perspective:

The media are always insisting that politicians and others come
clean, but these selfsame media usually clam up when dealing with their
own embarrassments.

Said columnist was not without his critics. Cocokat has already highlighted a couple of the better ones.

And yet, I am still disappointed. Part of my difficulty with this particular writer is personal: He graduated from my high school. (Or, depending on how you look at it, I graduated from his.)

Yes, all those bylines from Columbus, all those memories of being true to his school, all those bygone days are referring to my past, too. Except it's a past I don't remember and a romanticized view that was already dated by the time I came along in the mid-'80s.

The good old days he lamented were already history by the time I came along; in lamenting them, he effectively wrote off my present. The subtext of much of his writing for me was, "Sorry, kid! Take your New Coke and breakdancing over there, away from my classic car, and turn down that Duran Duran, I can't hear my Beatles record."

But let's step away from the intergenerational friction--those wacky Gen Xers vs. those nostalgic Boomers. The argument's been made to me that because of his "serious" columns about child abuse, Baby Richard, the insanity of the courts, and so forth, that I should be a little more patient. That he really did so much "good work."

But I maintain that his work was not even good. If it is "good work" to repeatedly point and scream, "Look! Child abuse! BAD!" as a career choice, then yes, he was effective. But where do you go from there?

There were 101 ways to cover this issue interestingly. In failing to attempt to understand or investigate any of the larger related issues, he did not do "good work." For instance, these questions were never really answered in his particular canon:

What are the social implications of a community that produces people who treat children so horribly? What are the long-term effects of such abuse on children, and what do we do about it? Why does the legal system fail to protect children like this?

The answer is NOT "BAD! BAD! It's BAAAAD! And, hey, things ain't what they used to be" but that's what it nearly always came down to.

Mind-numbing repetition and heartstring-pulling became replacements for intellectual inquiry and engagement. It embarrassed me. As a fellow alumna. As a journalist. As a human being.

As a feminist I feel I should be more indignant about the sex scandal. But as a journalist I just want to close my eyes and rest for a while. This stuff had been burning my eyes for a long, long time.