Spitzer Pimped

I have little interest in local politics and hold no brief for Elliot Spitzer, but I was intrigued by the headlines that came screaming off all the cable news networks and web sites on Monday about the New York governor’s “involvement in a prostitution ring” or his “ties to prostitution.” Those headlines had me giggling with schadenfreude imagining this rather self-righteous former Attorney General running a prostitution ring, or somehow being a beneficiary of the business — a kind of super-pimp of a type that would seem too fantastic even for Sin City or The Sopranos or gangsta rap…

Beneath those headlines, though, eventually the story emerges that Spitzer’s “involvement” with the prostitution ring were strictly those of a client. For an officer of the law to break the law is obviously a carreer-killer, and I have no quarrels with that. But the language in which the story was reported, pretty much across the board, was misleading and sensational. If he’d been busted with a bag of weed, would they have said he’d been “linked to a drug ring”? Or that he “had ties to drug trafficking?” Of course not, because that would imply he was involved with the operation that sold him the drugs, not simply one of its clients. How the editors and producers of most of the main national dailies and cable news shows allowed headlines suggesting Spitzer had “ties with a prostitution ring” just because his name was on their client list is beyond me. It would be like saying all of those media organizations who bought the Bush Administration’s prewar lies about Iraq were “linked to” the effort to mislead the American public into a war….