In your malicious Monday media column: the Detroit newspaper situation grows more depressing, Mika Brzezinski is one honest lady, Denver Post sportswriters have no opinion on these "sports," and Howard Kurtz is still the King of Boring Conventional Wisdom.

The Detroit Free Press ran a series of articles about Medicare on the suggestion of the health care company Humana, which also bought ad space to go with the series. Incredibly, the Detroit media situation just got slightly more wretched.


Mika Brzezinski says that when she was canned from her CBS gig a while back she tried to act all brave and happy for her kids but then one day her daughter got really upset about her losing her job because she knew mommy loved that job so much and ever since then Mika resolved not to lie to her kids about how she felt about being fired. Not sure what the point of all that is.


Sportswriters at the Denver Post are no longer allowed to make predictions about sporting contests they're covering. Sez their editor: "It is an ethical move. Sports writers are no different than other news-beat reporters. We would not have political reporters picking sides in a political contest." Huh. Cause I could swear that sort of horse race coverage is the majority of what political reporters do? Reporting on who's winning. With polls and things like that? So you have a good idea, by election day, who's going to win? And also I could have sworn that you just made sports beat writing 50% more boring? Ah well. You don't want sports beats writers changing the outcome of a game by predicting one team will win. Which always makes that team win. So.


The Washington Post's ombudsman brings back the ol' throwback question, "Does Howard Kurtz have a conflict of interest because he's a WaPo media reporter and also has a show on CNN, which he covers?" The answer of course is "Yes." Jesus. Please stop discussing this face-smackingly obvious "question." A better question is, "Why doesn't Howard Kurtz ever have anything interesting to say?"