Diploma Mill Coverage: Unfair?

The Interagency Ethics Council Journal makes the case today that recent coverage of an investigation of an alleged diploma mill based in Spokane, Wash., was skewed to highlight potential malfeasance by federal employees.

"The diploma mill contained about 9,000 names in its customer database," IEC Journal notes. "Though only about a hundred or so of these names could be identified as federal employees, the headline for the USA Today story focused on those few: 'Probe: Fed employees may have bought fake degrees.' By this time, the news media pattern should be clear: Federal employees are favorite targets."

At the risk of being an apologist for the news media in general, I think there's a simple reason for the way this story has been covered. There's not much public interest at stake in the case of someone in the private sector who happens to buy a fake degree. But Americans have every right to be concerned about people who may have padded their resumes to win appointment to federal jobs for which they aren't actually qualified -- or to receive higher pay for higher education they don't actually have. That's defrauding the taxpayers, and focusing on it seems justified to me.