Pool party probe

Have you heard about this thing out in Chicago? Local TV reporter captured wearing a bikini at the pool of the estranged husband of a missing woman.

It sounds incredibly tawdry, although, upon actually reading the agreed-upon facts, I think it's merely mildly sleazy in the way big city television news is often mildly sleazy.

I mean, the station employed her to get these scoops and, had another station's cameras not happened to catch her there, her station wouldn't have had any qualms about running a story based on sucking up to that family. As the Sun-Times story says: "Throughout her 11 years at the station, Jacobson has been known as an aggressive reporter who ingratiates herself with sources and sometimes employs questionable methods to get stories. Though she was a lightning rod for rumors, her bosses generally looked the other way and praised her for bringing them the scoops."

It goes without saying that if she'd been captured having a nice, fully-clothed dinner with the family, nobody would give a fig. Maybe in a better world, her bosses would care where those scoops came from, but in this one, they only discovered their ethics after this story blew up in their faces.

As Jacobson said herself: "I know I made a lapse in judgment. I know it and I apologize for it. But I'm a competitive person and I did it to advance the story. I learned some things about the case that were pretty interesting that I never got to report.
"The competitive pressure is unbelievable."