Like good parents we start to give the potential speech only to discover The Timid has a secret to share

Well what a proud week it's been for The New York Timid.

They gave blanket coverage to the most pressing issue of our time, the Michael Jackson case.

Equally proud must be John M. Broder and Nick Madigan who usually file seperate pieces but when the news is really breaking fast and quick they can tag team and share a byline.

"Hey Mom, great news! I'm on the front page of this morning's Times! Yeah, yeah, I'm psyched! Uh . . . no, it's not about social security. No, Mom, it's not about the bankruptcy bill! Mom, Mom, listen. Listen, I'm covering the Michael Jackson case. Mom? What do you mean you and Dad didn't pay all that money for college so I could end up being a glorified Rona Barrett? Mom, I take offense at that! This is the story of our lifetime."

Obviously The Times feels that way with their daily coverage. Why else the constant front page photos (our personal favorite is Kimberly White's photo that appeared on the front page of the March 11th edition showing Michael Jackson in pajama bottoms but a close second is Marcio Jose Sanchez's photo of Jackson arriving at court for the opening of the trial that graced the front page on March 1st).

This past week, The Timid didn't really want to even be a booster for the Bully Boy (Elisabeth Bumiller was nearly AWOL the whole week!), they just wanted to let their hair down, kick off those tight shoes and revel in the power of being trashy.

Hey, they're phoning in it at this rate. We wish they'd give us something worthy to critique.

Instead, they gave us breathless reporting over Michael Jackson.

They noted:

*Michael Jackson, dressed in blue print pajama bottoms and looking more spectral than ever, listened on Thursday in obvious distress to more than four hours of damaging testimony from the boy who has accused Mr. Jackson of sexually molesting him.

*At one point on Monady, after Judge Rodney S. Melville had overruled a defense objection to some testimony, Mr. Jackson threw up his hands and said, in a sarcastic tone, "Thank you, thank you, Judge."

*A day after telling jurors that he had twice seen Mr. Jackson masturbate while groping his brother, the boy, 14, admitted to the defense lawyer, Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., that he had given conflicting accounts in previous statements to a psychologist, investigators and a grand jury.

*While the younger brother said on Monday that Mr. Jackson had shown him, his brother and another boy a pornogarphic magazine called Barely Legal, Mr. Mesereau said the issue of the magazine was published in August 2003, several months after the boys had left Mr. Jackson's ranch for the last time.

*The judge also said that the comedian Jay Leno, who is expected to be a witness in the trial, can make jokes on television about Mr. Jackson if he avoids the facts of his testimony, which concerns a call he received from the boy's mother.

Take that, New York Post, The Timid snaps, tossing a feather boa over its shoulder.

There's real news going on. There's news that effect our lives, that will effect our lives. And The Timid has not one but two reporters working this infotainment story. This ain't Julius & Ethel Rosenberg here. And this ain't a real proud time for the paper.

The Timid's "scoops" consist of things like reporting on reports they're given a summary of.
(And as The Common Ills has pointed out, doing that a day after the LA Times has already reported on it.) They can't even seem to fake it enough to pretend to be overly interested in the Bully Boy.

They only come to life when they can Girls-Just-Want-To-Have-Fun-it enough to splash Michael Jackson's ever altering mug on the front page. They are all that is wrong with the media and they've been that for some time. Only they've never been so naked about their deficiencies.

Maybe Paris Hilton's fame has convinced them that people love the dysfunctional? Maybe they're hoping for their own train-wreck of a reality show? (Fat and Fluffy, tonight on Fox.)

But this is the paper of the record. (Yes, they have used that phrase, Daniel Okrent.) And this is the paper of "all the news that's fit to print."

And they give us daily reporting on the Michael Jackson case?

It's already gone through its middle-age period and it's far too late to blame it on a hot flash, so we must be seeing the early onslaught of senility finally taking over the paper.

What's that, Timid? You have something to tell us? You want us to sit down first? Okay. But what's going on? You look like you're about to cry?

"Hey, I can be young and kicky! Just like one of those freebie dailies they hand out to you before you board the train!"

Yeah, you could be that. But remember, those dailies are freebies. No one's paying for them.
Certainly, no one's paying a buck a piece for each one.

So next time before you grab the body glitter and faux fur, you might want to try to remember that at a certain age, there's a limit to what you can pull off. Walter Cronkite, for instance, doesn't try to dash around a speedo. Barbara Walters has yet to show up on The View in a belly shirt. Somethings are just unseemly.

What do you mean you're being the real you? What's all this talk about stepping out of the closet?

"This is me. This is the real me. I'm just a useless piece of crap that whores itself out for any story that doesn't require doing more than sitting down in a chair all day and taking notes on things said publicly."

Oh. That. Honey, we knew you were that way long ago. Way before you outed yourself. There are some things that, well, a reader just knows. And we knew.

It was probably something about the way you were always showing up quoting unnamed sources. Kind of a newsprint version of the pronoun-game. Or maybe it was from the attacks on the BBC in 2003 when you went to great strides to tell us that they weren't what they seemed. We got the subtext, baby, we understood.

You were hiding your own secret. You were living your own lie.

Sister-girl, come give us a hug. We put you down and trashed you all this time because we thought you thought we thought you were a real newspaper. Now that you're not pretending, maybe we don't have to anymore?

It must be a great relief for you not to have live a life anymore, not to try to keep it on the down low. But to just toss your hair, throw the arms in the air and cry out, "I'm here/I'm a tabby/
Get used to it!"

We hear you, honey. And we look forward to more editorials advocating the superficial. We understand now why you were never able to muster up the courage to defend Lynne Stewart after the verdict. She just wasn't tabloid people, was she? You tabloids are all about the fluff.
We like to think that Elisabeth Bumiller and her Elite Fluff Patrol squad helped you face up to what you were. We kind of think now that you were running the squad stories to tip us off.

"Mom, Dad, this is my friend, Elisabeth."

Yeah, we're getting it now. It's making sense. Who wants to be the Grey Lady when you can be the Snap Girl? Whoomp there it is!