June 3, 2008

The dean of the class action bar is headed to prison: a judge has sentenced Mel Weiss to 30 months, near the high end of the plea-negotiated range, in the still-not-wound-up Milberg scandal. It would be easy for readers of Weiss's hometown paper to miss this news, however, since the issue of today's New York Times in front of me relegates it to page 3 of its business section. Which can fairly be described as burying one of the year's biggest New York-related law stories. Might this relate to the Times's long having drawn on Milberg Weiss as a cornucopic source for hostile material about whatever businesses Mel Weiss was suing at the time?

The problem is not with the story itself, by reporter Jonathan Glater, or its related item on the Times's DealBook, both of which are fine. But in relegating the coverage to a snoozy inglenook deep inside the paper the Times' editors again reinforce the impression -- as we noted two years ago -- that they view the giant Milberg scandal as an embarrassment they wish would just go away. Nor are we going to hold our breath waiting for the editorial -- any more than for the (still-nonexistent) one about the Scruggs scandal. More: some funny observations from Larry Ribstein.