« The NAACP retreats | Tina Brown's race to the bottom »
September 17, 2005

Mitch Albom update

By

Matt May wrote about the journalistic integrity problems of Detroit Free Press star columnist Mitch Albom here. Matt has an update here.

The Detroit Free Press and publisher Carole Leigh Hutton have decided that Mitch Albom is too big of a star to be subject to the rules and regulations under which every other journalist and writer live and work.

In today's Freep, Hutton writes a letter to readers announcing that Albom's column will return.

There will be much more to say later on, but the key to Hutton's reasoning lies in the first paragraph of her letter:

"Detroit Free Press management has completed its internal review of an April 8 Mitch Albom column that contained inaccurate information by describing an event that had not yet occurred.

Not yet occurred? This leaves the impression that even though Albom wrote about something happening before it happened (in itself a glaring breach of ethics), events later backed him up and his account indeed came to pass. But that is not the case. What he wrote as fact did not occur. It was fiction. Albom's subsequent reaction was not remorse or acknowledgment that he violated the first principle of newspaper writing. Rather, he said he should have known better than to trust two professional athletes.

That's it for the Free Press. Their management cannot be trusted to do the right thing and hold the right people accountable. It will be comical when the paper tries to hold people in government corporate business to task for indiscretions or criticizes the star system in other industries. The paper is a joke and the latest self—inflicted casualty in the slow destruction of the mainstream media.