This blog is overrated.

The Times’ media reporter David Carr gives us an unsparing account of his life as a drug abuser. His life as a domestic abuser? I’d say that two offhand references to his violence against his ex-girlfriend in a sprawling, self-flagellating 9-page essay constitute a fairly sparing account. “I hit her, for one thing.” Oh, well, just for one thing. “If I said I was a fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke, would you like my story? What if instead I wrote that I was a recovered addict who obtained sole custody of my twin girls, got us off welfare and raised them by myself, even though I had a little touch of cancer?” Yeah, I don’t know about you, but I like the story much better knowing that the domestic batterer ended up with custody.

It’s nothing new to see domestic violence treated with a lack of seriousness in the world of journalism. A couple years ago, firebrand Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg was charged with, and admitted to, hitting his wife. Steinberg’s bitter enemy, the Tribune’s Eric Zorn, proclaimed piously on his blog, “My hope is the hope I’d have for anyone laid so low–that he’s bottomed out, and that this terrible event marks the beginning of his recovery and of a reconciliation with his family.” Domestic abuse is a private issue, a “terrible event” that just kind of happens to a family, and certainly something that one should be polite enough not to discuss. Unless the abuser is using it to put the touches on a bad-boy image to sell a memoir.