Thursday, March 13, 2008

Gray Lady, Fallen Woman

How low is the New York Times going to go? After outing Eliot Spitzer, with a little help from the Bush Administration Justice Department, today as a coda we get the heartbreaking story, complete with photographs, of a 22-year-old from a broken home who only wants to be a singing star.

In today's low-rent world, with the Times' help, the wayward young woman may get her wish, after she testifies in court against her former employers at the Emperor's Club.

The Gray Lady's excursion into tabloid journalism yields 25 paragraphs of gush, including every detail of the aspiring singer's MySpace self-advertising (“I am all about my music and my music is all about me. It flows from what I’ve been through, what I’ve seen and how I feel”) and her understanding mother's judgment about it all (“She is a very bright girl who can handle someone like the governor. But she also is a 22-year-old, not a 32-year-old or a 42-year-old, and she obviously got involved in something much larger than her.”)

"In a series of telephone interviews on Tuesday night," the Times' team of five reporters reveals about their cooperative subject, "she said she had slept very little over the past week, with all the stress of the case.

“'I just don’t want to be thought of as a monster,' the woman said as she told the tiniest tidbits of her story."

And the newspaper of record is making sure we get them all. Ergh.

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