From the Do As I Say Dept.

I found this bit from Richard Roeper’s column today to be interesting:

When [Tim] Russert was felled by a heart attack on the afternoon of June 13, his family was vacationing in Italy. Within an hour, Russert was pronounced dead, but NBC News held off on the announcement as they tried to locate Russert's family.
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Apparently, the other networks agreed to hold the news. Quite decent of them -- but you wonder if they'd enter into the same agreement if the person in question wasn't part of the news business.

But even as NBC News was trying to keep a lid on the news, word was spreading "via the text-messaging service Twitter and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia," reports the Times.

Russert was pronounced dead at approximately 2:30 p.m. Eastern time. Tom Brokaw delivered the news at 3:39 p.m. But Russert's Wikipedia page was updated to include his death at 3:01 p.m.

The entry was made by a "junior-level employee" at a Web-service provider based in St. Paul, Minn. The employee, who thought the news was public record, has been fired.
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One can understand why NBC wanted to hold off on the Russert news in order to notify his family -- but unless the media are going to do that in the case of EVERY celebrity's death, we come across as hypocritical and self-serving.

Double standard indeed.