QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES: Granted, Fox is the pot calling the kettle black, but I’ve been harping on the failure of news organizations to conduct and publish serious and genuinely independent autopsies for quite a while. And I must be right, because Prof. Jacobson and I are in are agreement:

Cornell University law professor and Legal Insurrection founder William Jacobson said [NBC President] Lack had no business overseeing the investigation. “It’s hard to see how an internal investigation that reports to senior executives would be viewed as complete and transparent when the conduct or lack of conduct of senior executives, such as Andrew Lack, necessarily should an issue,” Jacobson told Fox News.

Jacobson continues:

“Anything other than an independent outside investigation that reports to the NBC Universal Board of Directors would raise questions as to whether responsibility is being pushed down to lower corporate levels.”

And going a step further, not only is a secret investigation in-house insufficient, it seems to me that media organizations — who live and die on readership trust — should not allow their usual outside law firms to do this, because they have a vested interest in client relations.