Sink to gossip, or turn the page

This is a nicely media-savvy variation on the DeLorean defense, which won the late automaker's acquittal, even though the feds caught him on tape with a pile of drugs and a suitcase of money. Stern's lawyer might want to recall, however, that Howard Weitzman's winning move in that case turned on proving that the authorities had provided automaker John Z. DeLorean with both the drugs and their purported purchaser at precisely the moment he was facing bankruptcy. As it turned out, he wasn't any smarter a drug dealer than he was a carmaker, and the jurors not only were moved by pity but also recognized entrapment when they saw it.

It's interesting that Stern extends his defense to Page Six's alleged journalism and to his colleagues there, who -- as it subsequently has emerged -- accept freebies by the literal carload from the people they write about. "You just have to know how the game is played," he told Gawker, "and know the playing field isn't 110% level. It's a gossip column, for chrissakes."

Call us simple-minded, but if you put it in a newspaper, aren't you supposed to believe it's true, and aren't the readers supposed to have some degree of confidence that you weren't paid to put it there?

Stern takes a more sophisticated view of these matters. As he told the Toronto Globe and Mail this week, "If we do an item and we say, 'There's a rumor that so-and-so is doing something,' it's not inaccurate that there's a rumor of something. We report on what people are talking about."

Oh, sort of like laundering.

Somehow, images of the drug trade keep intruding into consideration of this story -- and there's a reason for that. Just as every attempt to stamp out drug production is going to fall short, so long as Americans and Western Europeans are willing to spend vast sums of money on illicit chemical recreation, so the sleazy trade in innuendo and phony items will continue so long as this generation of readers and viewers insists that it has a right to be entertained at every moment.

It's that appetite that fuels the current vogue for what is euphemistically called "celebrity journalism."

It's somehow appropriate that one of the better and more pointed analyses of this whole incident has appeared in PRWeek, which pointed out that questions of normative journalistic ethics are not "terribly relevant to the staffers of Page Six, whose industry sits far outside that world.