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Notice how we’re avoiding the traditional terms for this position. We don’t really want ombudsmen because that doesn’t really define what we need. The same can be said of news councils. Truth vigilantes don’t fill our needs either.

Newspaper photographs should be accurate. Readers know that. So do photographers, photo editors and managing editors.

But what should a news organization do when a photojournalist’s work is less than accurate – or not completely truthful? When the Sacramento (Calif.) Bee discovered earlier this year that Bryan Patrick’s page one nature photo was actually a compilation of two photos, the newspaper suspended the award-winning photojournalist. Was suspension the right response of the newspaper, or was the Los Angeles Times correct when it fired Brian Walski in 2003 when he also merged two war-front photos to create a more dramatic image?

Media like their subjects to be easy: their heroes to be heroes, their villains to be villains.

Celebrities are wonderful, until they do something that proves they aren’t wonderful. Stories must be framed to make it easy for readers to understand what really is happening.

And then a story like that of Joe Paterno comes along and it makes media’s job so much more difficult. For 50 years, Paterno was the ideal of college football coaches. His 409 wins were the most of any Division I football coach. He graduated 80 percent of his students. He gave money back to his school. He was easily framed as the granddad of college football — until last fall when news about Jerry Sandusky broke. Sandusky, the former Paterno assisted is currently charged with over 40 counts of sexual abuse with boys under the age of 15. Another Paterno assistant, Mike McQueary told Paterno that he saw Sandusky raping a young boy. Paterno notified his superiors but never approached Sandusky or the police about the incident. Paterno could have done more than just report his knowledge of Sandusky’s misdeeds. He should have helped those kids.

The conviction of former Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich on 17 federal criminal counts on Monday is not surprising in light of the high percentage of convictions that federal prosecutors win in retrials of white-collar crimes after they have a chance to streamline complicated cases to appeal to juries.

A jury found Blagojevich guilty of 17 counts of wire fraud, attempted extortion, bribery, extortion conspiracy and bribery conspiracy. He was acquitted on one bribery charge, and the jury deadlocked on two counts of attempted extortion.

Venturing into a new frontier of First Amendment law, the Supreme Court gave constitutional protection to those seeking to use the vast stores of data and information collected by modern information technology.

The court ruled 6-3 that Vermont could not stop pharmaceutical companies from obtaining data on doctors’ prescription-writing practices – data the companies used to market their more expensive, brand-named drugs to the doctors. Vermont had tried to block this data mining of prescription information in order to protect the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship and to keep down health care costs.

Justice Samuel Alito didn’t direct his remarks at the press when he spoke to a ballroom full of lawyers in St. Louis. But it was clearly the press he had in mind when he described the misconceptions that people have about the Supreme Court.

Alito even singled out for criticism the star Supreme Court reporter of the past generation, Linda Greenhouse, who writes a column about the court in her retirement from the New York Times. He noted that Greenhouse had wondered in her column about “topsy-turvy world” Supreme Court where business had not won as high a percentage of cases this term as in the past.

“Maybe the law has something to do with it,” said Alito with some sarcasm. “Maybe the text has something to do with it. I know that is a radical thought.”