Whew. What a game. We made it through the whole roller coaster ride of Hawaii’s win over UW, aided by beer, burgers, raw fish, and other supplies from Tamura’s Market in Hauula. Great game. But remember, Washington is a team with a losing record this year. That’s an indication of the weakness of Hawaii’s schedule. How good is the Hawaii team? It’s sacrilege, I suppose, but we don’t know because their schedule didn’t really give the team an opportunity to find out. So it goes.

Check this Glenn Greenwald rant from Salon.com several days ago which presents a pretty damning assessment of the current state of “he said, she said” journalism. Be sure to get down to Update IV and check out those Basic Rules of Modern Journalism.

As Robert Niles writes in the Online Journalism Review, while linking to Greewald’s item:

Makes me wonder if some newspaper publishers won’t decide to release the hounds, rather than continue to sit idly while their market share crumbles. If your reporting points you to take someone or something down… do it. And without neutering the piece with out-of-proportion qualifiers like the New York Times did with its attempted dress-down of the Rudy Giuliani campaign this morning.

Fairness and balance are appropriate goals for journalists. But being fair to sources and providing balance among them should not outweigh the need to be fair to the readers, and to the facts. And balance should not be reduced to giving various points of view equal time or space in a story. It ought to mean that truth gets treated like truth and lies get treated like lies.

If you’re going to lose audience anyway, why not take a stand for something on the way down? Maybe that’ll inspire some more readers to stick around, too. Or even to take a fresh look at their local paper again.

And then, by coincidence, the Washington Post provided another example of the syndrome in its handling of Karl Rove’s claim that it was Congress, rather than W, that insisted on war in Iraq.

As The Carpetbagger Report comments:

For what it’s worth, the WaPo did a report on this, but seemed reluctant to use the “f” word (”false), or the “l” word (”lie”). The Post headline reads, “Rove’s Version of 2002 War Vote Is Disputed.”

I think the phrase editors were looking for was “proven false.”

The Idaho Statesman entered uncharted territory today with another broadside in which four men go on the record about having sex or being approached for sex by Senator Larry Craig. The story includes some audio clips of interviews.

From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune–a fine multimedia project, “13 seconds in August“, part of the newspapers ongoing coverage of this summer’s bridge collapse. An excellent example of what can be done.

One source I just ran into for info on the next Bush episode of the “public opinion follows military force” approach to politics is a blog called Iran Nuclear Watch, which is also carefully watching U.S. policy.

Enjoy your Sunday.