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Fastidious celebrity newssource In Touch Weekly recently reported that Russell Crowe was going to honor his friend and countryman Steve "The Crocodile Hunter" Irwin by playing the adventurer in the big-screen depiction of his life. It seemed a perfect fit of actor and role—Crowe knew Irwin intimately, and handling dangerous reptiles would be a natural extension of his considerable field experience in subduing mouthy hotel concierges with the closest available blunt object. As it turns out, however, the widely repeated item was false, giving Crowe an excuse to deliver an angry lecture to a CNN reporter on What's Wrong With The World:

"I'm not doing business over the grave of my friend. I find that appalling. But, you know, that's not just in the tabloid[s]. That's in The Guardian, its in The New York Times. Understand? Absolutely disgusting." [...]

"I don't think that there is such a thing as a fair shake in the media, the way it exists now," he told Hammer.

"I think — I think it's rotten to the core. I think it's full of a whole bunch of people who write late into the night while drinking themselves into oblivion. And I think it's a very nasty situation that we've got ourselves in the world, where you cannot go to a news source and reliably be told the truth."

It's refreshing to see a star willing to risk the potential repercussions of outting the entire news media as the after-hours club of slobbering, mean drunks they really are. Any sober, responsible, 9-to-5 newsgathering outlet would have patiently waited for Crowe to hire a starstruck journalist to make the announcement for him, rather than running with unauthorized stories about the project.