In a column blasting USC football coach Pete Carroll's decision to score a last-minute touchdown pass against rival UCLA in Saturday's game, The Orange County Register's Jeff Miller called the move “tacky,” “silly,” “wrong,” “arrogant” and “childish.”
But how can we describe the Register's use of Miller's inflammatory column? In a blatant effort to boost the paper's Internet “hits” for the piece, Register editors made it the paper's lead online item this morning. Yet that move wasn't the shameless part. After all, whether or not USC's coach acted poorly has been a hot topic.
Here's what further demonstrates the sad decline of mainstream journalism: To see the column, the Register made its readers click 17 times for 17 tiny paragraphs.
Tacky.
Silly.
Wrong.
Arrogant.
Childish.
But, at least, the financially struggling, bankruptcy bound Register will have impressive, if fraudulent, online readership numbers to show potential advertisers.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.