The Financial Times story is no great shakes, either. It gets to neither the Lewis-on-the-ropes angle nor the $33 million-is-a-slap-on-the-wrist-one. Then again, being the FT, its reporters only had 419 words to play with.

Bloomberg’s story quotes someone up high saying that Lewis is likely to be gone “sooner rather than later.” Fine, if a little weak tea. Again, though, no talk about the $33 million fine being disproportionately small.

But there is one piece that gets it right, and it was posted by my old pal Michael Corkery online yesterday afternoon at the WSJ’s Deal Journal blog. Here’s the lede:

By some measures, the $33 million fine Bank of American agreed to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle charges related to Merrill Lynch bonuses doesn’t fit the alleged crime.

Consider that the four highest paid Merrill executives were paid a combined $121 million in 2008, nearly four times the settlement. The SEC fine also seems measly compared with the $50 million that New York Attorney General forced American International Group to pay back of the total $80 million it doled out in retention bonuses in 2008.

But the real damage to BofA isn’t the monetary size of the SEC fine, but rather its impact on the reputation of the bank’s embattled chief executive, Ken Lewis. The settlement exposes another instance in which Lewis tried to pass the buck for the fallout from BofA’s $50 billion acquisition of Merrill Lynch, which was completed in January.

That’s just about note-perfect, and it’s not suffocated by newspaper-ese like the paper’s page-one effort or muddled by thinking like this from the print story (the only discussion of the severity of the penalty is to say it’s “steep”!):

The $33 million payment is steep for disclosure-related cases where fraud isn’t alleged. In 2004, Wachovia Corp. agreed to a $37 million settlement of allegations that it didn’t sufficiently disclose stock purchases related to a takeover, among other matters.

And Corkery brings up another excellent point I didn’t see anywhere else in the outlets mentioned above: This raises the likelihood that Ken Lewis lied to Congress in February.

That would seem to contradict Lewis’ testimony in Congress in February 2009, shortly after the deal was finalized:

“They were a public company until the first of the year,’” he said, speaking of Merrill. “They had a separate board, separate compensation committee, and we had no authority to tell them what to do just urged them what to do.”

Lying to Congress is bad. Bad!

But you won’t find this good piece of analysis in the newspaper—not even stuffed inside the Money & Investing section, which sometimes runs best-of-WSJ-blog columns. Why not?

The problem with that is deeper than you might suspect. Many more people will read the Journal’s lackluster effort on A1 than will see this blog post on WSJ Online. If my calculations last week were correct (and nobody’s really challenged them) some 95 to 98 percent of all time spent reading The Wall Street Journal is spent with the print newspaper.

The small minority of readers who see Corkery’s piece are far better served than the large majority of those who read the newspaper.

That’s a shame.

Ryan Chittum , a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is deputy editor of The Audit, CJR's business section. If you see notable business journalism, give him a heads-up at rc2538@columbia.edu.