Morning, my fellow lizardoid minions.

The St. Petersburg Times in Tampa Bay, Florida, won a Pulitzer for their reporting on Scientology back in the day. Now, Dan Rather is being invoked by Scientology in a futile attempt to counteract the paper’s recent series of articles on the cult by paying journalists to investigate the paper.

Scientology Church hires reporters to investigate newspaper
[LGF link %P% original]
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 22, 2010

After decades of digging into the Church of Scientology, reporters and editors at the St. Petersburg Times are accustomed to being denounced by its leaders.

But they find it unsettling that three veteran journalists — a Pulitzer Prize winner, a former “60 Minutes” producer, and the former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors — are taking the church’s money to examine the paper’s conduct.

(…)

Asked about Brown’s view that the study could not possibly be objective, [Tommy] Davis says: “It’s easy for the St. Pete Times to pop off and say that, but oh, please. It’s a normal thing. It’s done all the time.” He likened the effort to CBS hiring an outside panel to investigate Dan Rather’s 2004 story on George W. Bush and the National Guard, which the network later retracted. That report was a self-examination, however, and was made public.

The reporters hired for the study are Russell Carollo, who won a 1998 Pulitzer for Dayton, Ohio’s Daily News for a series on medical malpractice in the U.S. military, and Christopher Szechenyi, an Emmy-winning former television producer who has worked for the Boston Globe’s Web site.

(…)

More at link

At least these journalists refused to do what a journalist did earlier, which was to write for “Freedom Magazine”, the cult’s own magazine.

Tommy Davis could use some help making better PR for Scientology though, so if there are any latent Iraqi Information Ministers out there, you can send in your resum.