The Columbus Dispatch and the brain dead

When the Columbus Ohio Dispatch promoted one of modern America's bloodiest preoccupations on its 3/2/07 front page, it contributed as best it could to the popularity of "ultimate fighting."

Strange, then that Benjamin Marrison, editor, would spend an entire column the following Sunday trying to make readers believe otherwise.
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"We don’t always like the stories we cover, but we’re obligated to cover them."
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"That’s why we put such stories on the front page: to get you to think. And possibly even to act."
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"Our goal was to expose you to the cultural phenomenon that is Ultimate Fighting and let you react — either by shaking your head in disgust, calling the newspaper or blessing it as another form of entertainment"
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Oh, Ben, come on. Surely the editor of a major metro newspaper knows exactly how "ultimate fighting" got to be the darling of the brain-dead - including newspaper "sports" "writers" - that it has become. He has to know that this thing called "ultimate fighting," with all its media attention, is exactly what some kids are emulating when they bloody one another in staged street fights.

It's okay if the Dispatch panders to this brain-dead sport and those who profit from it. But don't sit there in your editor's cap and gown and pretend to your readers that it's otherwise. When the editor is hypocritical, so is the image of everything else about his newspaper.