Lowlights of bad press deserve more bad press

Thanks to Jayson Blair, Howell Raines and several of their colleagues at the New York Times, it would be relatively easy to compile a Times-only list for this year’s report on the worst moments in American journalism. But as another famous, unindicted co-conspirator once said, “it would be wrong.”

Well, OK, maybe it wouldn’t be wrong. I mean, just look at the year that was on West 43rd Street:

Blair’s serial fabrications. Raines’ arrogant reign and forced resignation. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger’s bullying the Washington Post into leaving their partnership at the International Herald Tribune.

Judith Miller’s dubious WMD reports from Iraq -- and the equally dubious ground rules under which she obtained those reports. Rick Bragg’s lazy use of stringers to do his reporting for him.

Photographer Ed Keating leaving the paper under fire after having been accused of staging a photo of a boy with a toy gun. The Times obituary on Katharine Sergava, a singer and actress who appeared in the original production of “Oklahoma!” -- and who was very much alive when the Times reported her death on Dec. 4.

The Times story that said a prominent Harlem photographer was so close to his twin brother that when the brother died of testicular cancer, he “had his own testicles removed” -- except that, as a subsequent correction acknowledged, the first brother died of prostate cancer and the second brother did not have his testicles removed.

That’s almost a full top -- bottom? -- 10, right off the top of my head.

On the other hand, its manifest shortcomings notwithstanding, the New York Times remains -- day in and day out -- the best newspaper in America. So in the interest of fairness -- and to avoid picking over incidents that I and others have already spent a forest worth of newsprint on -- I think I’ll leave the New York Times out of my list of the Terrible 10.

With that in mind, I can’t really call the list the 10 worst, so here are 10 among -- alas -- many, in no particular order:

* Just because we’re giving the New York Times a pass, there’s no reason to be equally charitable to the second-most-talked-about Manhattan daily, the New York Post, of “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headline fame. Indeed, a list of this sort without at least one Post entry would be as unimaginable as it would be illegitimate.

So for 2003, how about the Post reporting that a certain Hall of Fame pitcher “cooperated with a best-selling biography only because the author promised to keep secret that he is gay.” Both the author (Jane Leavy) and the pitcher (Sandy Koufax) said there was no such deal, and the Post apologized -- but not before Koufax severed ties with the Dodgers because they’re owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which also owns the Post.

Now that Murdoch is also severing his own ties with the Dodgers, maybe Koufax will return -- and not just as a coach or consultant. Even now, nine days shy of his 68th birthday, he’d be better on the field than that collection of losers and spoiled brats that Murdoch’s executives have assembled.

* The aptly named Michael Savage, responding to a gay caller on his MSNBC “Savage Nation” show, said, “You should only get AIDS and die, you pig!”

MSNBC termed Savage’s comment “extremely inappropriate” and canceled his show. He was not, alas, sentenced to spend two weeks in a gay bathhouse.

* The Washington Post was one of several U.S. news organizations to swallow the Pentagon’s public relations hooey on how Jessica Lynch was “fighting to the death” and “did not want to be taken alive” in Iraq. The Post, citing unnamed U.S. officials, said Lynch fought fiercely after her unit was ambushed, shot several enemy soldiers and continued firing until she ran out of ammunition and had sustained multiple gunshot wounds. The Post also said she was stabbed by Iraqi soldiers. As a subsequent Post story acknowledged, none of that actually happened.

Oh, well, it could have been worse. The Post could have said Lynch personally captured Saddam Hussein. Of course, then President Bush would have said that she caught Hussein and Osama bin Laden together but that Bin Laden slipped away -- with the help of the Democratic National Committee.

* Bob Ryan, a sports columnist for the Boston Globe, didn’t like it when Joumana Kidd, whose husband, Jason, is a star guard with the New Jersey Nets, brought her young son to a Nets game. “She wants face time on camera,” Ryan said on a Boston TV show. “The great way to get face time is to bring the cute, little, precocious kid. Oh, great. I’d like to smack her.”

Globe editors suspended Ryan for a month. They should have had Jason and Joumana Kidd each smack him. Simultaneously.

* Brian Walski, a Los Angeles Times photographer since 1998, used his computer to combine elements of two photographs, taken moments apart in Iraq, into one photograph that was then published on the front page of The Times. That’s a no-no. Times policy prohibits altering the content of news photographs. So The Times altered Walski’s career. He was fired.

* Mitch Albom, the bestselling author of “Tuesdays With Morrie,” wrote a new, equally treacly book, “The Five People You Meet in Heaven.” Albom is also a columnist for the Detroit Free Press, so when a freelance writer assigned to review the new book turned in a negative review, Carole Leigh Hutton, the executive editor of the Free Press ... killed the review.

Her reasoning: “We put this guy’s writing in the paper all the time, often on the front page. We obviously think he’s talented. And we heavily promote our association with him because we know how popular he is with so many of our readers. Somehow, using him to sell newspapers one day and publishing something hurtful about him the next felt dishonest and hypocritical.”

No. Killing the review was dishonest and hypocritical. But Knight Ridder, parent company of the Free Press, clearly likes the way Hutton thinks; two weeks ago, Knight Ridder made her publisher and editor of the Free Press.

* Walter Isaacson -- long one of the smartest (and best-connected) journalists in America, formerly the top editor at Time magazine and chairman of CNN -- wrote a well-received biography of Ben Franklin. Guess which national newsmagazine decided to put the book on its cover. And to devote 28 pages to the book.

Hint: It rhymes with “crime.” And “slime.” Or as Carlin Romano, book critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer put it, “at the top of ... Time Warner, they probably call this type of journalistic bad judgment ‘synergy.’ I’d say the accent falls on the first syllable.”

* Sportswriters who cover major league baseball often complain about how boring their jobs are. Who can blame them. As exciting as one game -- or a short series of games -- can be, who wants to watch 162 of them in a row? That must be what Jim Van Vliet of the Sacramento Bee was thinking when the San Francisco Giants played the Pittsburgh Pirates at Pacific Bell Park last August.

He decided to watch the game on television instead “at a location away from the stadium,” as the paper later acknowledged. He also decided to use quotes in his story that “came from other media outlets, that were unattributed and old, made to reporters on a previous occasion.”

Van Vliet no longer works at the Bee. Maybe he should apply for a job at the New York Times.

* Eason Jordan, then the chief news executive at CNN, confessed that in the course of 13 trips to Baghdad during the 12 years before the U.S. invasion, he’d seen all manner of government-sponsored torture, terror and violence but CNN has not reported any of it, in part to preserve access.

Now that’s my kind of logic: Let’s not report anything that will prevent us from having access to information we’re not going to report anyway.

* In the course of bashing the movie “Kill Bill,” distributed by Disney through its Miramax subsidiary, Gregg Easterbrook raised a rhetorical question in his personal blog, Easterblogg. Having identified Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney, and Harvey Weinstein, chairman of Miramax, as being Jewish, he asked if it were “right for Jewish executives to worship money above all else, by promoting for profit the adulation of violence.”

People who know Easterbrook far better than I swear that he’s not anti-Semitic. And I know from my limited personal contact with him that he’s not stupid. That leaves only one other possible explanation:

Jayson Blair actually wrote that blog entry for Easterbrook.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.