Media Overboard

Last Sunday, a gunman opened fire in a shopping mall in Tacoma, Washington, wounding several shoppers and taking hostages. But when the phone rang in the store where the gunman was holed up, it wasn't a hostage negotiator, it was a reporter. The media, in its zeal to get the story, tied up the phone lines and even talked with a hostage in the middle of the incident.

Ed Troyer, Pierce County sheriff, took them to task. "We thought the media was supposed to report, not participate." The sheriff told them, "If you do it again, there will be problems."

We should send Sheriff Troyer to talk to Bob Woodward, Bob Novak, Judith Miller, Matt Cooper, Walter Pincus, and all the other reporters who participated so much in the Valerie Plame non-outing incident that they became the story. Every time that incident starts to fade away, somebody in the media "remembers" some conversation or "hints" at their source's name, or writes a book to generate a new headline - often with their own names in it.

Are there NO ethics in "journalism"?