In the end, who will be sunk by Sheen's torpedo?

I have written before about what I can only call “hold-your-nose” journalism — stories we run because we know the public has become consumed by them. Tiger Woods' sex life. A small-claims court battle over a stolen iPod. Any of scores of periodic missing-attractive-young-women mysteries. These stories begin with an event that is not that surprising (a celebrity having marital issues? Stop the presses!) or unusual (hundreds of missing persons cases languish in Chicago and suburban police files at this very moment) but that nonetheless catch the attention of some blogger or national news reader, make their way into the bloodstream of the legitimate daily news report and come to dominate conversations across the nation and suburbs. Suddenly, we have to cover them regardless of whether they satisfy our usual news judgment standards. Our readers are hearing and talking about them and expect some details from us. So, we hold our nose and do our job.

Few stories fit this description better than the — dare we hope? — waning controversy around Charlie Sheen. But there's also something a little different about this one, something disturbing not on a cultural level but a personal one.

More than one psychologist has noted that Sheen's rants, his “violent torpedo of truth,” have the familiar ring of addiction and psychosis. Self-aggrandizement. Hyperbolic language. Thrill seeking. Escapism. A self-delusion so profound that it can lead one to claim he can beat a crack cocaine addiction just by blinking his eyes.

Such images have led some of us in the Daily Herald newsroom to wonder about our own involvement in Sheen's potentially self-destructive freak show. It's not so much a fear of whether he is using us — or the media in general — to promote and perhaps profit from his possible delusions. It's more a fear that we are using him, despite signs that he genuinely may need help.

Such thoughts figured closely into our judgments over the weekend as we struggled with how to play the story of his debacle in Detroit and his — as it turned out — redemptive show in Chicago. Saturday's disaster led national and local broadcast news outlets all day Sunday in advance of his appearance here. He seemed at last to be drowning in the roiling pool of his shallow ideas — and the public interest, if not eagerness — to watch the spectacle was both palpable and, from a newspaper point of view, alluring.

Now, on a story that we had purposely sought to downplay for the past two weeks, we found ourselves wondering whether its drama and its local proximity shouldn't justify space on the front page. In the end, we settled on a teaser at the top of Page 1 to a longer story on the Back Page. We let readers know we had the story, and we gave it to them in enough detail to satisfy, we hope, at least basic curiosity.

As we all know now, Sheen somehow saved himself in Chicago and his traveling talk show now will go on to beguile audiences in a dozen and a half other American cities. Assuming he doesn't repeat his Detroit disaster, I suspect we'll continue to see ever smaller reviews of each successive performance until the full measure of this story's interest value is sapped.

And I'm sure from time to time, we'll still feel the need to hold our nose and pass along some salacious detail. But I wish, and I know many other editors here wish also, it didn't feel so much like this stinker is going to take some still uglier turns before it's all over.

Ÿ Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.