Humidity has a way of getting to people. That’s a maxim to which anyone who has spent quality time loitering around a Dade County correctional facility — or a Dade County condominium sales office — will attest. And indeed, the moist horror that this summer has become has touched even myself. Though I prefer to spend my annual dog days retreat in idle repose, I find myself stirred to haul my laptop down to the water’s edge and unfurl a few paragraphs on a fresh new pestilence stalking the American media landscape.

Journalists, like the dogs and garden pests that linger above them in the Great Chain of Being, are not immune from the influence of extreme weather. During my tenure in the public editor’s chair at The New York Times, I witnessed many times how an excess of moisture combined with elevated temperatures battered the cognitive integrity of even the finest reporters. Judith Miller, for example, was led astray in the sands of Iraq not by a nefarious and untrustworthy source in the employ of Ahmed Chalabi, but rather by the oppressive Babylonian humidity that still obtains there, in the world’s most odious inferno of half-baked ideology and extravagant body odor. Under such circumstances you would be eager to trust a questionable source, too — don’t lie and say you wouldn’t. Better to escape the mother of all bad hair days and come home to collect the adulation of your peers and a few sidecars at Elaine’s than to continue on that fool’s errand in the desert.

That is why, given the maddeningly Dubai-like conditions that have held sway over the Northeast this summer, I am not surprised to discover that yet another ink-soaked wretch has fallen by the wayside, and that we have not had to venture out on the road to Fallujah to collect the carcass. What may be surprising to some, however, is that the scribe we find ourselves peeling off the hot pavement with a trendy Michael Graves spatula is none other than George Solomon, ESPN’s ombudsman.

You may be forgiven if you need a moment to collect your thoughts. ESPN has an ombudsman? Let me explain.

Some time ago, the great minds steering the corporate mothership in Bristol decided that the best way to enhance the credibility of a news service that carries the word “Entertainment” in its name would be to appoint an internal auditor. This auditor — yes, this ombudsman — would periodically venture out into the glare of the public eye and glancingly consider some of the criticisms that the rabble lobbed the mighty network’s way. And there were plenty of criticisms upon which the great man could stroke his chin and ponder. The network’s reporters were often only too ready to serve as strategic errand boys for baseball’s general managers around the trading deadline, some critics charged. Other self-appointed watchdogs complained that the news gatherers were far too deferential in their dealings with players, mainly because so many of them were in fact former players themselves and had a natural conflict of interest. Still others claimed to have unimpeachable evidence that a well-known commentator on one of the flagship baseball broadcasts harbored a clear agenda against other journalists and used too much of the network’s time and space to conduct his personal crusade.

These negative nabobs’ penny-ante accusations could have been wiped aside like so much spare suntan lotion by any ombudsman worth his or her salt. But my good friend George Solomon seems more eager to file his column as expeditiously as possible and head straight to the Berkshires than he is to roll-up his sleeves, remove the cap from his can of whoop-ass and swat aside the drooling goons baying for the network’s blood — and more importantly, assure himself that none of the hairwax-huffing pretty boys in Bristol will want to sit with him in the Bristol cafeteria. Celebrating Stephen A. Smith and handing out lollipops for “generally solid coverage of Rafael Palmeiro’s suspension” and “good work on the day of terror in London” surely doesn’t measure up to the high standards we other ombudsman have set for simultaneously smiting our employers’ critics while irritating every notebook-toting hack within a 500-mile radius. George, as an esteemed alumnus of that great journalistic institution The Washington Post, still seems to harbor a desire to cuddle with reporters. However, I feel it would be advisable for our hero to pack away his desire to take his lunch with Trey Wingo and do his cuddling with strangers on Metro North.

All of this may leave good people wondering whether there is any hope that we might hold the arbiters of What Is Fit to Know accountable. Truly the outlook is grim. But there is a silver lining: George appears to be setting up one of his ESPN colleagues to serve as his whipping boy. This technique has many virtues, not the least of which is providing you with the appearance of sober, balanced sagacity. So full steam ahead against Lou Holtz, George! Give ’em hell. Give ’em The Krugman.

Daniel Okrent is the author of Nine Innings: The Anatomy of a Baseball Game and the former Public Editor of The New York Times.