Bad City Beat, Bad

I am guessing the editor-in-chief of CityBeat was on vacation last week. I say that because I would think he might have wanted this puff piece written by someone else, or maybe not even written at all. The News Editor at the weekly, Greg Flannery, was the author and the article was a straight-laced form of Journalistic fellatio that Peter Bronson would be proud of. Sure, Greg pointed out the facts about the subject of the article (over 98% of primary voters voted against him for mayor, for example), but he didn't hide his school girl affection and sounded like he was maneuvering to get his 98 Degrees lunchbox autographed.

When you thought it couldn't be worse, Greg writes on his blog about his admiration for Justin Jeffre, the subject of last week's cover story, specially about what Jeffre did during a protest Greg personally took part in. It was bad enough when Greg got into the business of creating news with his protests, instead of covering it, but here he his doing favors for his friends, throwing journalistic integrity out with the trash.