If you need a reason to never give Los Angeles Times sports columnist Bill Dwyre a modicum of credibility ever again, just read today’s column.

In a special Martin Luther King Jr. Day column – special, if only because it touches upon race in media – Dwyre argues that our industry’s terrible and mostly ineffectual approach to discussing society’s ultimate taboo is because “we blog before we report, when it should be the other way around. We write more about ourselves than we do about our subjects.”

Okay, that second sentence is true, which is likely why Dwyre got this argument so wrong.

His news peg is the “lynching” scandal surrounding Golf Channel anchor Kelly Tilghman, and the resulting fallout at Golfweek, which dared put a noose on its cover to illustrate the situation.

But did since-fired Golfweek Dave Seanor make a bad call because he was in a sprint to be first with the story? To generate buzz over substance?

Seanor said last week: “We knew that image would grab attention, but I didn’t anticipate the enormity of it.”

So: It was a little about buzz. But most importantly, Seanor published a story by senior writer Scott Hamilton that remains unmatched by any other media outlet, golf-oriented or not. It’s an article we’re guessing few people discussing the ordeal even took the time to look at, since the cover was so much more accessible. Dwyre himself makes no mention of the substance of the article. Just that (admittedly not-inconsequential) noose on the cover.

In the Golfweek cover story, Hamilton makes a critical point: “Golf rarely contends with controversy, and the few flaps that do occur usually are limited to the insular world of golf. Tilghman’s remark escaped golf’s biodome and slipped into the mainstream where it is fair game to everyone with a microphone or a computer. Change of some sort – major or minor, right or wrong – was bound to result.” He also opens the discussion to the matter of women in golf and golf media, and how a negative situation like this could harm their ladder-climbing in the male-dominated arena.

Does this sound like an editor-in-chief who blogged first and asked questions later? Certainly not. And the argument from Dwyre, a 25-year veteran sports editor for the LAT, that Golfweek fell victim to that mentality? It’s a disservice to the entire debate.

We’ll be the last to praise mainstream media for doing justice to race discussion, but Dwyre’s column misfired. So hyped was he about the chance at a misnomered analogy to blogging, he’s got caught up in the banal dialogue a la Juno. Honest to blog!

Is Golfweek’s Seanor a “product of the current age and rage of media, as well as society in general,” as Dwyre argues? Given Seanor’s singular ability to tackle the sport’s latest controversy where others, including Dwyre’s own LAT, have faltered … we’re guessing no.