There are plenty of stories to cover on the west coast.  Here's a hint from the Wall Street Journal Avian Flu News Tracker (subscription required):

9:50 a.m.: alaska, a key stop on migratory routes, is putting its order in early for antiviral medication to help protect its residents against bird flu. officials plan to spend roughly $1 million to buy enough medication to treat one-fourth of the state's population of 650,000. new york state, by contrast, is going to have to spend about $23 million for 1.3 million courses of antiviral medications, which would treat only about 7% of its 19 million people.


A newspaper could be investigating county and state preparedness for the possible pandemic, and analyzing the degrees of seriousness given by various political types to the threat and the rationality of both high response jurisdictions and zero response jurisdictions.

That sort of reporting would be a genuine public service.

Or newspapers can act as funnels for the disgruntled and the politically motivated and relay the nation's secrets to the front page and then stand in wonder as the nation rejects the publication as anything other than disgusting.

Or a paper can do is best to destroy the reputation of retired bicycling superstar Lance Armstrong, as the Los Angeles Times does today, in a massive, two-full page story titled "Allegations Trail Armstrong Into Another Stage," which begins with two columns on the top left-hand side of the Sunday paper and then jumps to pp A14-15.

The jump headline gives you an idea of where this story is headed:  "1999 EPO Levels Questioned."

You don't have to be an Armstrong fan or a bicycle enthusiast to wonder if the lede is about 1999, how in the world could the Times have discovered anything?

So what's the story behind the story?  It looks to me as a losing partu in a contract dispute with Armstrong has done a document dump, and the Times --unable to resist the lure of the "secret" made public-- just ran the whole sorry tale:


"Sworn testimony as well as exhibits and other documents constitute the record of confidential arbitration proceedings, a series of closed hearings conducted early this year in Dallas in connection with a contract dispute.

The Times reviewed the files — including thousands of pages of transcripts, exhibits and other records. They are filled with conflicting testimony, hearsay and circumstantial evidence admissible in arbitration hearings but questionable in more formal legal proceedings.

The record shows no eyewitnesses to Armstrong's alleged drug use. And in his own sworn testimony, Armstrong unequivocally denies that he ever doped. Records also show he has never failed a competition drug test."


Only on the jump page do we get to the key disclosure:


"The arbitration case stemmed from a business dispute between Armstrong and SCA Promotions Inc. — a Dallas company that had offered to pay a bonus to the racer if he won the Tour in 2004, which he did. The company resisted making the payment after allegations of doping surfaced that summer.

The case was settled before any action by the presiding three-judge panel, with SCA Promotions agreeing in February to pay the contested $5-million fee, plus interest and attorney costs."


And at the very end of the story:


"Armstrong sued in a Texas court and the case was sent to arbitration.

In a key decision prior to settlement, the arbitration judges ruled that SCA was acting as an insurer — a role that exposed it to potential triple damages, at least $15 million, if it lost the suit.

The $7.5-million settlement SCA paid to Armstrong included interest and attorney fees."


There are plenty of people who might have a motive to dump the docs, including the lawyers who lost, smarting from their embarassment.

But why a paper would want to give this story this treatment is beyond me.  Does it sell papers?  Perhaps, for a day.

But if you admire Armstrong --and tens of millions of Americans do-- the disgust at the paper for trading in discredited and already aired allegations --on the front page and at such length-- has to be significant.

Proposition:  Big MSM has really lost its way, concluding that anything "secret" is in fact wrongfully hidden from public view, and that its function is to act as a conveyer belt to the front page for whatever a party or person doesn't want revealed.

Thus any celebrity with a lawsuit, or any government agency with a classified document, become targets for the "reporters" who are really just glorified Xerox machines.

The only secrets we never get to see are those concerning newspapers.

How many subscriptions have been lost at the Los Angeles Times since June 23 in response to the terrorist-assisting story on the Swift program?

And how many will be lost because of this gutter journalism concerning Armstrong?

And who decided this was a huge story, deserving this much ink, even though it is so obviously based on a biased set of docs from the losing side in a legal action, and even after NPR and others ran the story over a week ago? 

In short, who is running this out-of-control and rapidly collapsing once-great paper?

Perhaps  Patterico or someone from the Powerline trio can add their two cents here.  Litigators look at these things differently, but most lawyers know payback when we see it, and this looks like payback that ought never to have gotten to page 5 of the sports page, much less this treatment.