Quite Possibly the Most Deserved Hatchet Job in Celebrity Journalism History

I know that my esteemed colleague Anne Thompson already checked in about this a few days ago on her exquisite, informative and much-linked Risky Biz Blog, but I simply have to add my own two-cents (or three) about last week's brilliant, damning, sublime, riveting piece by writer Jack Marx in the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. Not only did it superbly illustrate the perils of a journalist's getting too close to a subject, it also appears to be a monumentally damning indictment of one Russell Crowe and his pathological need to exert control over his press and his world.

While Marx admits freely in the story that he went too far in agreeing to be Crowe's "stooge" as far as singing the praises of his music -- and in copping to his own culpability in encouraging what he thought was a relationship between the two -- his narrative is chillingly revealing in terms of what it says about not only Crowe but the nature of star treatment by the media. It took tremendous courage for the guy to write it. I'm a little bit in awe.