News That's Fit to Punt

Well, what else is big in the news these days? The New York Times has found that one of its reporters was pretty much inventing out of whole cloth the parts of his stories that he wasn't plagiarizing from other news sources. The Times described young Jayson Blair's journalistic perfidy as "a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper."

Well, admittedly it looks bad, even in a paper whose daily ratio of lies to actual facts is fairly high. But if this is the low point, then what about all that fibbing that a certain Walter Duranty did back in the 1930s about a certain totalitarian regime that deliberately starved millions of Ukrainians? The fibbing that won him a Pulitzer Prize that his employer, the New York Times, to this day still proudly includes in its count of awards given to Timesmen?