After watching the soon-to-be-released documentary, The [Pat] Tillman Story, LA Times sports columnist Bill Dwyre felt “mortified” and “ashamed” of his (and fellow journalists’) Pat Tillman coverage, noting that “heroes are a columnist’s best friend.” From Dwyre’s column Saturday:
Dannie Tillman [Pat’s mother] did what a nation full of high-paid, overblown journalists should have done. She went after the real story while the beautiful people on TV and the nerds with notepads broadcast and wrote morality plays. She got in the military’s face, in the government’s face. She didn’t let up. She was doing journalism while journalists were doing what we mostly do now — chase Web hits and take short cuts to higher profits.
A housewife got the real story, or as much of it as anybody probably will. Professionals trained to do so gathered moss and wrote slop.
(h/t, LAObserved)
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.