Sometime soon, I'll have to work to find material for this column. But this week, it writes itself. The media follies have swerved into outright absurdity in recent weeks, with two of the seven deadly sins manifesting themselves in two of America's most prestigious media capitals.

Lust took hold in Bristol, Conn., home of ESPN, where one of the channel's Major League Baseball "experts," Steve Phillips (the former general manager of the Mets), was fired after he revealed an affair with a production assistant young enough to be his daughter. The woman later developed a fixation on Phillips' family, cyber-stalking his son and harassing his wife through letters.

This embarrassing sequence of events served to remind us of the sex-crazed culture at ESPN, a culture that has endured since at least the 1990s, when, among other episodes, Mike Tirico (now the respectable voice of Monday Night Football) was suspended for three months for sexual harassment. Despite all the evidence of the locker-room mentality at ESPN, the network seems content to stick to a laissez-faire policy.

"We don't have a policy right now prohibiting relationships in the workplace, [but] clearly, when those relationships do occur, they can present conflicts," ESPN Executive Vice President of Production Norby Williamson told the New York Post Monday. "And when those relationships present a conflict or potential conflict, we'll take appropriate action."

Now that's what I call being proactive. So let's review: A lack of a clear policy has led to a sex scandal that's embarrassed the network and one of its most prominent analysts. ESPN's response: Eh, just be careful out there, you crazy kids. Can't have any "conflicts." Obviously, though they cover professional sports, the concept of professionalism has eluded the folks in Bristol.

Also this week, wrath found a home at the Washington Post, as a veteran style editor rained blows on a writer who called him a world that rhymes with "smockmucker."

Now, I have a hate-hate relationship with newspaper style sections, which are mostly the repository for overly long, sloppily written essays about the social import of (fill in the mediocre new film, album, exercise fad and/or dog accessory here). Oh, and wedding announcements of people you don't know. As the website washingtonian.com reports, this brawl seems to have been the result of a feature gone awry:

"Playing off of an inadvertent disclosure last week that many congressmen are being investigated for ethics violations, [Post Style Editor Ned] Martel asked the two Style writers, Monica Hesse and Manuel Roig-Franzia, to compile a list of similar disclosures in the past. They came up with a 'charticle' with a dozen examples, starting with Robert E. Lee's Civil War battle plans for Antietam showing up wrapped around cigars."

You know what — forget what I was going to write here. All I know is, if I had writers who called one of the biggest blunders in American military history an "ethics violation," they'd be lucky to leave my office with two working kidneys.