At the Herald, we used to call it the “full Herald treatment,” i.e. pumping a story up by splashing it across the front page, accompanied by a damning inside sidebar piece, a no-mercy pummeling by a columnist (usually Howie Carr), a well-timed indignant editorial, etc., and the bombardment could last for days. Some would tut-tut the well-choreographed full-treatment as shameless tabloid-ism. Which, of course, it gleefully was. I used to love it when the Herald gave subjects the full Herald treatment, especially when they deserved it. … 

But other non-tabloid news outlets routinely dish out their own heavy-handed, full-treatment coverage of stories. They just won’t admit it. Take the NYT’s coverage this morning of a new football C.R.E report (“Study’s Alarming Finding: At Least 1 in 4 N.F.L. Players Gets Brain Disease”), accompanied by a scare-the-moms sidebar (“Your Child Plays Football. How Can You Minimize Risk of C.T.E.?”) and a blatant demand-for-action piece (“Many N.F.L. Players Get Brain Disease. Why Hasn’t OSHA Intervened?”). No sign of an accompanying indignant editorial this morning, But you know it’s coming. … Of course, the C.R.E. package simultaneously comes out as the Times’s sports section tries to make a buck by hyping the upcoming college and NFL football seasons. 

Just pointing all this out as I eagerly await the start of the Pats season. … Btw: I view CRE seriously. I’ve long thought player weight limits, at least at the high-school and college levels, are part of the solution to head and other injuries. It’s all about the physics of two freakishly fast and large players slamming into each other. But coaches, athletic directors, league boosters, etc. routinely pooh-pooh the weight-limit idea, saying it would dilute the quality of the game. They’re wrong, but that’s their argument.