They say the media is dangerous, but some parts of it are more dangerous than others. Reporters routinely lie for stories, but how about killing as part of a story?

Last Sunday, The Boston Globe published a powerful front-page centerpiece story: “Dying on Lynda’s terms.”

It chronicled the story of Lynda Bluestein, a 76-year-old retired nurse who had terminal cancer. Unable to die by assisted suicide in her home state of Connecticut, Bluestein filed a lawsuit to be able to go to Vermont to have her life ended there. She died by assisted suicide on Jan. 4.

With a media assist.

Last July, Cullen was reporting on Bluestein while she was meeting with the doctor who was going to help her end her life. The doctor explained that Vermont law required Bluestein to get signatures from two people who would say she was in a clear state of mind when she made her decision. Furthermore, the signatures could not be from family members, beneficiaries or anyone associated with the doctor’s clinic.

Cullen wrote in his story that Bluestein asked a “Globe columnist” and an unaffiliated documentarian who also was chronicling her story to sign the form. The “Globe columnist” clearly was Cullen. He signed the form.

And therein lies the issue. Cullen signed the form that helped Bluestein to proceed with the plan to end her life.

While Poynter uses it to debate journalistic ethics, to paraphrase the old Seinfeld line, there are no more journalists and they have no ethics.

To me the scene harkens back not to the contemporary postmodern media in which any lie or smear goes, but the really old school hacks who were willing to do anything.

Ben Hecht, before he went to Hollywood where he wrote The Front Page (no relation) and His Girl Friday and rewrote everything else, was a bare-knuckled journalist in Chicago where he actually did that kind of stuff. And described plotting to halfway hang a murderer and then later inject him with adrenaline to bring him back from the dead. The plan goes awry when the hanging is too effective and there’s no one left to bring back. Where Hecht tried to raise the dead, Cullen helps make them.

(Now that I’m revisiting Ben Hecht, it puts me in mind of his story about a transvestite butcher who murdered his wife and disposed of her body by putting her in some sausage. Before his execution, the butcher wanted to dress up like a woman. Hecht titled it as, “Fred Ludwig lived as a cowardly man but he died as a brave woman.”)

Then there’s Ace in the Hole (1951) (that’s where the scene above comes from.) in which Kirk Douglas plays a sleazeball reporter who turns a man being trapped in a hole into a circus by dragging out the rescue and leading to his death.

Back then reporters didn’t pretend to have any kind of moral high ground. There were no discussions about journalistic ethics. Now we have endless discussions and no ethics.