It’s a dull Sunday, which means it’s time for a Rathergate essay on media problems. This week presented a good one that fell under the radar because of the “talking points memo.” Sit back, grab a cup of coffee, open the windows for some breeze and learn a little bit about the Fourth Estate. This is a long one, but it will give you an accurate look at one of journalism’s greatest problems.

Alert reader John Smyth e-mailed me a heads-up that Detroit Free Press columnist/best-selling author Mitch Albom is in a bit of a pickle, and he has brought his newspaper along for the ride.

And in doing so, Albom and the Freep, like many columnists and newspapers that found themselves in similar ethical conundrums, have unveiled Journalism’s Second Dirtiest Little Secret. Today you all will learn the reason behind nine out of every 10 journalism scandals. Read more:

Albom’s column on April 3 said that two ex-Michigan State basketball players were at the Final Four game April 2 pitting Michigan State against North Carolina. They weren’t. Albom wrote the column Friday for a section printed before the game was played, and passed it off as if he had seen them at the event. The players, Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson, apparently told Albom that they would be there, but both had changes of plans.

Albom has apologized in his Thursday column, and the newspaper is looking into what it should do. From Mitch:

While it was hardly the thrust of the column — which was about nostalgia and college athletes — it was wrong just the same. You can’t write that something happened that didn’t, even if it’s just who sat in the stands. Perhaps, it seems a small detail to you — the players still love their teams, they are still nostalgic, they simply decided not to go after the column had been filed — but details are the backbone of journalism, and planning to be somewhere is not the same as being there.

Unless more discrepancies are found in Albom’s multitude of Freep columns, I would be disappointed if the newspaper fired him. He screwed up — big time — but I’m not feeling that what he did is a first-time firing offense. Albom at minimum deserves an unpaid suspension.

Media bias sites and blogs tend to pile on the offender in these cases, but there is more than enough blame to go around here. As a start: Why didn’t Albom’s editors (yes, more than one person reads a column) catch what Albom attempted? Where were the copy editors who read the piece, and the layout editors who should have noticed in Albom’s lede that he was trying to see the future?

I believe I have an answer, and I don’t place fault in this case with the rushed and deadline-driven nature of the business.

Two months ago, I revealed to the world Journalism’s Dirtiest Little Secret: Any person with above-average intellect and writing skills can be a journalist. Anyone. So what is Journalism’s Second Dirtiest Little Secret?

News agencies preach equality and the needs of the underdog to the public, but their newsrooms tend to be hotbeds of favoritism.

Despite exhortations to the contrary from editors, brown nosing and sucking up never hurts a journalism career, just like any other office job in America. A journalist with a modicum of talent and a whole lot of social skills can shoot up the ladder and become a “superstar” that editors will not touch. And 95 percent of the time, said journalist sprouts an ego to match.

They become the pampered pets of the editors, who will give them first pick at juicy stories and promotions on a silver platter while holding interviews to deceive co-workers with a veneer of fairness. Editors sing their favorites’ praises and denounce their foes — and if the perceived enemy happens to be another reporter or a junior editor, watch out.

This is what I think happened in Albom’s case. I have no inside information, but I’ve been around enough newsrooms to have a damned good idea:

1) Albom screwed up, but I don’t think he was being lazy. The guy just has too much on his plate besides a column, from writing and hawking best-selling books to a radio show to ESPN appearances. He took an unethical shortcut.

2) Editors didn’t even bother to look at his work, either because they trust him too much or because they fear upsetting the superstar. Maybe he’s one of those egomaniacs I’ve heard of who writes “DON’T CHANGE A WORD” on top of his column, and editors happily comply or are cowed into not offending the talent.

3) Anyone who said something, be it a copy editor or someone else, was told to shut the hell up, lest they anger Mitch or his golf buddy in the large corner office with the leather furniture.

Like I said, I wasn’t there, but my theory sure as hell meshes well, as Mary Mapes might say. Let’s take a look back at the list of high-profile journalism screw-ups that I posted during Rathergate.com’s “Sunshine on the Media Week” and see how newsroom favoritism factored in:

* Jasyon Blair, reporter, The New York Times: Editor favorite? Check. Fair-haired golden boy? Check. Warnings about his work repeatedly ignored? Check. Newsroom morale shattered due to editorial favoritism? Check.

* Jack Kelley, reporter, USA Today: Editor favorite? Check. The newspaper’s high-profile talent and fair-haired golden boy? Check. Warnings about his work repeatedly ignored? Check. Newsroom whistleblowers silenced or terminated? Check. Newsroom morale shattered? Check.

* Mike Gallagher, reporter, The Cincinnati Enquirer: Editor favorite? Check. Fair-haired golden boy with a blank check to do whatever? Check. Newsroom resentment about his secret project? Check. People kept in the dark? Check. Newsroom morale shattered? Check.

You get the idea. The same can be said for Boston Globe columnists Mike “Boston Mike” Barnacle and Patricia Smith, who both got canned weeks apart from each other in 1998. Smith’s predicament was doubly inexcusable — her editors long suspected her of fabrication, and set up a system to double-check her work, but she fell through the cracks because of differences between her column schedule and the schedules of her proofers.

The report that USA Today commissioned on Kelley was even more damning — editors did in fact investigate reports of fabrication, but they set out from the start to prove that their buddy did nothing wrong.

This all may sound like envy on my part (the only deadly sin that is no fun at all, to quote Joseph Epstein), but it’s not. You will always have Alphas in any endeavor — a lot of people climb to the top simply because they have earned it. But the problems and resentment arise when journalists can reach a level where they become exempt from the rules that govern everyone else in the newsroom.

As you can tell, I have a vested interest in this subject. Many journalists complain about favoritism, legitimately or out of jealousy, but few see it as the 900-pound gorilla at the root of all these journalism scandals. Click here for a collection of letters I have posted at Poynter on the subject, among others.

And as I said about Albom and the Freep in my latest letter, I’ll bet a bottle of whatever it is that you folks drink that the Freep’s editors would have caught a rookie columnist red-handed for trying to pull off a stunt like this.

There are ways to stop this crap from happening, a few of which I point out in one of my earlier Poynter letters:

1) Harder j-schools is not enough. I have a dozen journalism awards, and I never took a journalism class. It has to happen at the real-world level.

2) Hey, editors, don’t just have an open-door policy in your policy manual — enforce it. An editor who refuses to listen to his co-workers (I had the privilege of watching one get fired) won’t be an editor once someone is caught whith [sic] his/her hand in the liar jar.

3) Put your ethics policy on your newspaper’s Web site, and print in the paper’s correction section how readers can access it.

4) Hire ombudsmen and “public editors” who will listen to people. With the exception of NYT’s Daniel Okrent, most ombudsmen columns are dry and defensive (”we’re not biased/wrong/arrogant, you readers are just too stupid to understand us”).

5) Publishers, draft and enforce a fraternization policy. If editors are being too chummy with “star” reporters, step in. Editors aren’t there to make friends, they’re there to enforce standards.

6) Stop the star system. In almost every high-profile journalism screw-up, from Kelley to Blair to Gallagher, etc. etc., editors were instead enablers. Editors, if your newsroom’s pampered pet hands you a story with anonymous sources and you don’t bother to ask for their identittes [sic], find another line of work.

7) Hire a graphics designer so copy editors can do their jobs and carefully read copy. Most copy editors I’ve worked under have a great nose for fishy items or factual errors. That ability is lessened when they are too busy creating outboxes, points of entry and other miscellaneous stuff.

8) Take the time in a weekly writers’ group or two to make The Siegel Report (NYT) and USAT’s analysis of Kelley required reading among newsroom staff.

This whole mess reminds me of an old journalism tale, likely as apocryphal as waking up in a hotel room without your kidneys, but interesting nonetheless. A journalist somewhere gets an advance copy of a politician’s speech (not an uncommon occurrence by any means). He decides to blow off the speech, he pre-writes the story as if he attended it, and spends the evening throwing back a few wet ones at the bar. The editor calls him in the next day to congratulate him for the lively story, but promptly fires him because the politician called the day before and canceled his speech due to a scheduling conflict.

This old wives’ tale needs to be updated for 2005. How about two reporters, a rookie and an editor favorite, pull the same scam together? The rookie gets canned, and the favorite gets a quiet and polite request to knock it off.

To conclude, I’m reserving judgment on Albom. My theory on what happened is exactly that — take it for what you believe it’s worth — but newsroom favoritism and the black eyes it causes are as real as the computer you’re staring at right now.

I have a feeling Albom is suffering from the same disease that the CBS report on Memogate said afflicted Dan Rather — Albom is just too busy. He needs to look at his plate and drop a responsibility or two before he does something like this again and loses it all. I call it Gen. Custer’s Law: A perfect record aside, it only takes one arrow to make you go down in history as a horse’s ass.

It’s likely that Albom and the Freep wouldn’t be pulling an arrow out of their hineys had management held Albom to the same level of accountability as its reporters and junior editors in the trenches.