From Susan's link:

Sports writers may inject into their stories a bit of personal opinion and local sympathy, but whatever biases they might have, the facts of the game are never in dispute.

This made me laugh, however, because I can think of 3 or 4 "news" stories in the last year which do just that think. Laura Vecsey in the Baltimore Sun and Jon Heyman in one of the NY rags -- the Daily News? -- both claimed that "it wasn't really blood" in the camera closeups of Curt Schilling's bloody ankle. Plenty of fans, and a couple of columnists, claimed that the A-Rod slap play wasn't interference. Dagger Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe is notorious for creating a story where there isn't one, by selectively quoting one person to another, and soliciting inflammed reactions (the "who's got the ball" controversy, which he manufactured out of thin air).

Now, none of these bias-or-outright-lies stories changed the outcome of a game, because one of the rules is that umpires are the ultimate judges and their rulings cannot be overturned. But they certainly change public perception about the games, and in some cases they can affect things like trades and contract talks.

And after all, baseball is riddled with accepted truths that turn out not to be true at all. That's what sabermetrics is all about.

I dunno about the mouse pad.

One full-color sublimated mouse pad

What precisely is a Sith mouse pad sublimating? The mind quails.

I don't think I'd go as far as to declaim the entire profession's laziness and/or timidity. Journalists are professionals, and, like most things, inadequacies or omissions are probably the result of money and time. It is difficult to investigate every claim made by every party, while it is still news people will read to just report on what each side says. So if you're a cash-strapped newspaper, what do you do?

On the other hand, I have had a relationship with a journalist who was covering something I was involved in. He was fairly shocked about what was going on, but when he would write stories that reflected the absurdity of the events, the paper's editors would change them to better fit in with the pre-conceived notions of their market.

Darth Maul was robbed.

He never got the Sith-style mousepad?

Oh, he's not even on the Sith-style mousepad. Everyone knows he was the most stylin' Sith....

The Wall Street Journal tends to have very good, fair investigative reporters

Heh. tell that to Don Imus.

Apparently Mitch Hedberg died: [link] He was a very good comedian. [link] Although with a very bad addiction.

I like the Sith-Style Mouse Pad. I wanna get one - then I can say, "I'm mousin' Sith-Style." Or is Sith-Style something that one can possess independent of mousing?

Psst, tommyrot does it Sith style - pass it on.

I don't think I'd go as far as to declaim the entire profession's laziness and/or timidity.

Well, me neither. One of the things I like a lot about the Columbia Journalism Review (link) is that they occasionally go into raptures over good reporting, too. But they're marvelously snarky at the bad reporting, and there's a lot of it.

I should say, sports journalism also has the problem where most columnists do not report news. By which I mean, they rely on interview quotes and news releases for their facts, but don't do much actual investigating of their own. Murray Chass of the Times is one of the few who does it, and as a result, he sometimes breaks stories cold. (He was the one who discovered that the Yankees had deleted steroid language from Jason Giambi's contract.)

So if you're a cash-strapped newspaper, what do you do?

Well, there is a cash-strapped newspaper, which probably relies a lot on wire feeds, and then there are the wire reporters, who I think mostly specialize by topic. If your words are going to grace 100 newspapers instead of just 1, and if you're a specialist anyway, it behooves you to actually do your homework.

Some of the AP reporters are awesome, but some of them are really, really not.

Monterey Bay Aquarium released the great white shark. She was getting too big for the tank, and she started hunting tankmates. oops.

t eta link to full press release

She gained 100 pounds while in captivity!

Monterey Bay Aquarium released the great white shark.

Let's just hope they did so far, FAR away from any public beaches (private beach owners can be chum for all I care).

cue Jaws theme