Great Moments in Journalistic Ethics

As the Newsweek scandal rages on, I thought you might be wondering about some of the other heavy issues that are defining serious discussion of journalistic practices. Always your faithful servant, I give you this, from the New York Post and its continuing probe into journalistic practices at the New York Daily News:

May 20, 2005 -- DAILY News editor-in-chief Michael Cooke brazenly indulged his famous fetish for female feet in yesterday's Snooze. We knew something was afoot when we turned to Page 4 and found a large photo of the bare soles of two college co-eds (above). Cooke stubbed his toe again on Page 14 with a half-page photo of a woman standing in a pile of shoes she won in a contest tied to the circulation-plunging paper's recent "Shoe Week." Cooke recently denied to a Chicago magazine that he had a foot fixation, but some of his staffers say otherwise. Jennifer Hunter, a columnist for his old paper, the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote that Cooke "had a fetish for women's footwear" and "kept commissioning stories about them, over the protest of women staff members." Neil Steinberg has also alluded to Cooke's fondness for feet in his Sun-Times column, in which he ribbed Cooke for being turned on by a pair of gold slingbacks worn by the wife of Mexican president Vicente Fox. But although the shoe would seem to fit, Daily News spokeswoman Eileen Murphy claims we're the ones who are weird. "These are some very happy Columbia students and they're sunning themselves," she said of the bare feet photo. "It was a beautiful day. I think your noticing their feet is what's unusual."

Fiddling (or fetishing?) while Rome burns, eh? (h/t Media Bistro)