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2009 may turn out to be the year that America completely loses what little faith it has in the media. We just got done spending hours watching a balloon the media told us had a little boy in it. TMZ was credited with the scoop of the year when it broke the Michael Jackson death by basically guessing it happened. And now our thirst to get stories on the air first, and right second, has hit home for me.

A man I worked with for a number of years early on in my radio career is serving a 2 week suspension and possible termination for a horrible mistake. Jerry Bader is a highly regarded News Director and talk show host at WTAQ in Green Bay. Under his leadership, the station has been named Wisconsin Station of the Year two straight years. He used his talk show and blog this week to report that Wisconsin's Lieutenant Governor Barbra Lawton was withdrawing from the 2010 Governor's race because of an extra-marital affair. The sources that leaked the story to him turned out to be wrong, and Bader has apologized, but the damage has been done.

This story bothers me because I know how important journalistic standards are to Bader. I worked in his newsroom occasionally, and can attest to the standards he practices. How these got thrown out the window on this story is in one way shocking, but given the trend in journalism the last few years, not all that surprising.

This errant story was a complete character assassination, made worse by the fact that Bader is a conservative Republican and Lawton a liberal Democrat. This will likely cost a man with 25 years of award-winning excellence in journalism his job, and maybe his career. It's a chilling reminder of how even the most professional of journalists are getting caught up in this "get the scoop" mentality.