ONE of the troubles with political journalism, especially American political journalism, is that its attention span is so short. A story is front-page news today, but by tomorrow the media spotlight has moved on and the story disappears. Or some minor aspect of it catches the journalists’ imagination and the main thrust of the story is overlooked and then forgotten. Take as an example what has...
NEW YORK: The Wall Street Journal 's parent company is seeking to expose sensitive material relating to Judith Miller of The New York Times in court. The Journal's editorial page revealed today that Dow Jones & Co., this newspaper's parent company, filed a motion late Wednesday requesting that the federal district court unseal the infamous eight pages of redacted information that the special...
To the list of challenges faced by newspapers -- declining circulation, rising newsprint costs and increased competition from more up-to-the-minute media -- add another: rising pressure from investors to make more money and reverse sliding stock prices. On Tuesday, newspaper giant Knight Ridder Inc.'s largest shareholder demanded that the company either seek a buyer for the entire company or sell...
The old joke asks what do you do when the only way to save an endangered species is to feed the animal endangered plants. The serious question is what do you do when the only way to protect freedom of the press is to kill the biggest story of your career. This Solomonic stumper arose last weekend when an independent US prosecutor charged the top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney with perjury. The...
The most intriguing revelation of Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's news conference last week was his assertion that he would have presented his indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby a year ago if not for the intransigence of reporters who refused to testify before the grand jury. He said that without that delay, "we would have been here in October 2004 instead of October 2005." Had that...
Oct. 31, 2005 issue - Judith Miller wanted a restful weekend. Days after her newspaper published a blistering account of her role in the Valerie Plame leak case, The New York Times reporter went home to tony Sag Harbor, N.Y. On the agenda: walks on the beach and playing with her dog. But as she opened up an e-mail last Friday afternoon from Times editor Bill Keller to the paper's employees, all...
In pressing his indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr., the special prosecutor is pitting three prominent journalists against their former source, a strategy that experts in law and journalism say has rarely been used or tested. It is all but unheard of for reporters to turn publicly on their sources or for prosecutors to succeed in conscripting members of a profession that prizes its independence. Yet...
All is woe and darkness in the house of media. If you were measuring journalists' public standing on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best, right now we're in less-than-zero territory, thanks to The New York Times and its dodgy handling of the Plame spy case. A few days ago, as the entire politico-media establishment was on 24-hour indictment watch, The New York Sun reported that widespread...
Here in media world, we're all quite cross at The New York Times and its former star reporter, Judith Miller. She is widely believed to have sought her martyrdom as a career move. And then she gave up after a mere couple of months in jail. What a wuss! And the Times: this great institution let a mere reporter lead it around by its nose, with predictable results. What a superwuss! But this latest...
WASHINGTON -- In the latest fallout from the CIA leak investigation, reporter Judith Miller and The New York Times are engaging in a very public fight about her seeming lack of candor in the case. In a memo to the staff, Executive Editor Bill Keller says Miller "seems to have misled" the newspaper's Washington bureau chief, Phil Taubman, who said Miller told him in the fall of 2003 that she was...
