History > 2006 > USA > Journalism, media (I)

Mike Wallace, right, and Harry Reasoner on "60 Minutes" in 1969.

Mr. Wallace has been with the news program since its inception in 1968.

CBS        NYT        March 15, 2006

Mike Wallace Says He Will Retire From '60 Minutes' in Spring

NYT

15.3.2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/business/media/15mike.html

Iraq

Is a Deadly Assignment for Journalists

May 30, 2006
The New York Times
By MARC SANTORA
and BILL CARTER

By some reckonings, the death of two journalists working for CBS News on Monday firmly secured the Iraq war as the deadliest conflict for reporters in modern times.

Since the start of the war in 2003, 71 journalists have been killed in Iraq, a figure that does not even include the more than two dozen members of news media support staff who have also died, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. That number is more than the 63 killed in Vietnam, the 17 killed in Korea, and even the 69 killed in World War II, according to Freedom Forum, a nonpartisan free speech advocacy group.

"It is absolutely striking," said Ann Cooper, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. While cautioning that the recorded number of journalists killed in past conflicts may be inexact, she said: "We talk to veteran war correspondents who have covered everything going back to Vietnam and through Bosnia. Even those who have seen a number of different wars say they have never seen something like this conflict."

In the latest incident, a veteran cameraman, Paul Douglas, 48, and a soundman, James Brolan, 42, were killed, and a correspondent, Kimberly Dozier, 39, was seriously wounded when the United States Army unit in which they were embedded was attacked.

All three had extensive backgrounds covering wars and each had volunteered to work in Iraq.

They set out Monday morning to do what might seem simple: spend a few hours with soldiers, hoping to give the audience back in America a glimpse of what this holiday was like, far from family barbecues and beach vacations. Ms. Dozier sent a note to her colleagues before leaving, CBS News said, saying she was working on a report about an wounded serviceman who insisted on returning to Iraq.

On this day, their reporting ended less than a mile outside the fortified Green Zone when a car laden with explosives was detonated just as the crew members stepped from their armored vehicle, military officials said.

An American soldier and an Iraqi translator also died, and six more soldiers were wounded in the attack. The condition of the wounded soldiers was not available last night. Ms. Dozier was rushed from the scene to a military hospital in Baghdad, where she underwent an operation, and then was moved to a hospital north of Baghdad for a second operation. When her condition allowed it, she was to be flown to Germany for more care. She suffered extensive wounds to her legs and shrapnel wounds to her head, CBS News reported.

"Terrible is exactly the right word for this day," said Sean McManus, president of CBS News. "The ironic thing of course is that it was Memorial Day. But everyone here is a professional, and we're going to move forward and do our jobs."

Ms. Dozier has reported numerous stories for CBS from Iraq over the past three years. She had been embedded with other units and, like most reporters in Iraq, had endured close calls. "Every time Kimberly has left Iraq she has asked, 'When can I get back in there?' " Mr. McManus said. "She was particularly determined to report on Iraq. This is what really drove her."

Before going to Iraq, Ms. Dozier worked as chief correspondent for WCBS-TV in New York, based in its Middle East bureau in Jerusalem. She has covered news ranging from the hunt for Osama bin Laden to the crises in the Balkans. She was well aware of the risks involved in reporting from Iraq, recalling her frustration with the difficulty of telling the story of ordinary Iraqis during a 2004 interview with CNN.

"The last time I tried to do that — to go to someone's home and sit down with that man and say, 'Are you thinking about leaving Iraq or staying?' — the moment he saw me, blond hair and my two armored vehicles," Ms. Dozier said, "he turned white."

Her colleagues who were killed were equally experienced.

Mr. Douglas, the cameraman, had worked with CBS since the early 1990's. Based in London, he had traveled to some of the most dangerous countries in the world, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bosnia and Rwanda. Big and brawny, he is seen in photos released by CBS smiling and playing the ham, posing with flak jacket on, helmet under his arm and a smirk breaking through his goatee. He left behind a wife, two daughters, three grandchildren and his mother.

Mr. Brolan, a former soldier in the British Army, was a freelancer who, during the course of the past year, worked as a soundman for CBS News in Iraq and Afghanistan. Noted for his quick wit, he once made George Clooney laugh, joking about their physical resemblance during an interview, colleagues at CBS News said. Mr. Brolan was part of the CBS team that won an Overseas Press Club Award in 2006 for its coverage of the earthquake in Pakistan. He had a wife and two teenage children.

CBS, like other major news organizations, has been struggling to cover the war while providing security for its employees, including their Iraqi employees, who often go places Westerners cannot.

Still, it is Iraqi journalists who have been most at risk.

Just this month, three Iraqi reporters were killed in a two-week period, according to Reporters Without Borders. More often than not, no one is ever brought to justice for killing journalists, fostering a climate of impunity, the group said on its Web site.

In addition to those killed, at least 42 journalists have been kidnapped, according to the group.

Even the seeming security of being with the American military carries substantial risk, as it did in January, when the ABC anchorman Bob Woodruff and Doug Vogt, a cameraman, suffered severe injuries in a roadside bombing in Iraq.

The death of the CBS journalists was the first time since 2003 that reporters embedded with the American military had died as a direct result of hostile fire.

Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, the director of the press center for the multinational force in Baghdad, is currently responsible for embedding reporters. He said the military had not changed its policy in any significant way since the start of the war, leaving the final decision to commanders on the ground.

The CBS crew, by all accounts, was wearing the standard protective gear.

"I think Kimberly just saw this as an opportunity to be on the ground with the troops on Memorial Day," he said, "to hear their thoughts, to see what they see."

    Iraq Is a Deadly Assignment for Journalists, NYT, 30.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/world/middleeast/30embed.html

2 at CBS News Die in Baghdad

on Bloody Day

May 30, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 29 — On a day of soaring violence in Baghdad, two Britons working as members of a CBS News television crew were killed on Monday and an American correspondent for the network was critically wounded when a military patrol they were accompanying was hit by a roadside bomb.

The police said at least 31 other people were killed in bombings and shootings in one of the worst days of bloodshed in the capital for weeks.

An American soldier and an Iraqi interpreter were also killed in the attack on a joint United States and Iraqi patrol that killed the two CBS crew members, and six other soldiers were wounded, a statement by the American military command said.

The bombing marked the first time that Western journalists embedded with United States troops have been killed as a direct result of hostile fire since 2003.

CBS News identified the two dead network employees as Paul Douglas, 48, a cameraman, and James Brolan, 42, a soundman. It said that Kimberly Dozier, 39, a correspondent who had worked long periods in CBS's Baghdad bureau in the past three years and had been a correspondent for the network's New York affiliate, sustained serious injuries and underwent emergency surgery at a military hospital in Baghdad. The statement said Ms. Dozier was in critical condition, but that doctors were "cautiously optimistic about her progress."

Later in the day, Ms. Dozier was airlifted by a Black Hawk helicopter to the main American air base in Iraq at Balad, 50 miles north of the capital, a spokesman for the United States Embassy said. Most seriously wounded Americans are airlifted aboard specially equipped transport jets directly from Balad to a military hospital at Landstuhl, Germany, and from there on to hospitals in the United States.

The Iraqi police said the attack that killed the CBS crewmen was only one of a sequence of at least eight bombings which, together with a series of drive-by shootings, killed at least 33 people and wounded dozens of others, a fresh surge in violence that has brought hundreds of deaths in the capital in recent weeks.

The police said 12 Iraqis died and 25 were wounded in a noontime car bombing outside the Abu Hanifa mosque in Adhamiya, a Sunni stronghold in north Baghdad.

They said at least seven others died and 20 were wounded when a bomb planted in a parked minivan exploded at the entrance to an open-air clothes market in Khadhimiya, a mainly Shiite area across the Tigris River from Adhamiya.

At least 25 other people were killed in bombing and shooting attacks elsewhere in the country, including 10 Iraqis working at a camp for members of an exiled Iranian Communist group who died shortly after dawn when a roadside bomb hit their minivan near Khalis, 50 miles north of Baghdad. Two British soldiers were killed Sunday night when an armored Land Rover hit a roadside bomb in the southern city of Basra. The British deaths brought to nine the number of British troops killed in Iraq this month, one of Britain's highest monthly tolls of the war.

The deaths of the two CBS staffers raised to more than 70 the number of journalists killed in Iraq in the 38 months since the American-led invasion, including at least 47 Iraqis.

Monday's attack marked the second time this year that a United States television network crew embedded with American troops has been hit by a roadside bomb.

On Jan. 29, the co-anchor of the ABC News program "World News Tonight," Bob Woodruff, and a cameraman, Douglas Vogt, were seriously wounded while accompanying a joint United States-Iraqi patrol. ABC has said Mr. Woodruff is still recovering from serious head and neck injuries, and Mr. Vogt has returned to his home in France to convalesce.

The American military command in Baghdad said the CBS journalists were embedded with a unit of the Fourth Infantry Division, responsible for security in wide areas in and around Baghdad, when they were hit by a car bomb.

A CBS spokesman said the journalists were filming for a Memorial Day report on American troops and were outside the armored Humvee in which they were traveling, wearing body armor, when the explosion occurred at about 10:30 a.m. in the middle-class Amina district. The site is about a mile east across the Tigris River from the Green Zone.

The statement by the United States command did not specify whether the blast took the form of a suicide attack or a bomb left in a parked vehicle.

Iraqi employees of The New York Times who visited the scene said the bomb exploded on a busy avenue just south of an intersection known as Basil Building Square, opposite a compound containing two schools. They said the blast left a crater in the road and a carpet of broken glass, and shattered windows in neighboring homes and shops.

"This is a devastating loss for CBS News," Sean McManus, its president, said in a statement issued in New York.

"Kimberly, Paul and James were veterans of war coverage who proved their bravery and dedication every day. They always volunteered for dangerous assignments and were invaluable in our attempt to report the news to the American public." He added: "Our deepest sympathy goes out to the families of Paul and James, and we are hoping and praying for a complete recovery by Kimberly."

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Iraq, issued a statement condemning the attack.

"These brave journalists risked their lives to tell the world the story of a courageous people and a proud nation," he said. "The terrorists who committed this evil crime have shown themselves for who they are. They do not want the world to see the truth of what is happening in Iraq, where a determined people are fighting for freedom and liberty."

"That story must and will be told," he said.

Ms. Dozier, who was born in Honolulu and educated at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and the University of Virginia, has spent most of the past 15 years working in Europe, the Middle East and Afghanistan for the CBS radio and television networks. For 19 months in 2002 and 2003, she was the chief Middle East correspondent, based in Jerusalem, for WCBS-TV, the network's New York affiliate. She returned to Baghdad only last week for her latest stint covering the war here.

In the past year, the risks of reporting the war have played a part in the steady reduction of the number of Western journalists based in Baghdad. The main hazard has come not from the bombings that have killed more than half of all American troops but from a rash of kidnappings, including the 82 days that Jill Carroll, an American reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, spent as a hostage of an insurgent group before being released in March.

The surge in attacks in Baghdad on Monday came as the new, four-year government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, which took office 10 days ago, continued to struggle with a step American officials here see as crucial to curbing the violence racking the country: filling the three key security posts in his cabinet, at the Ministries of Interior, Defense and National Security. The positions were left vacant when the Maliki cabinet was sworn in on May 20, with key Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish groups unable to agree on nominees.

The fresh momentum American officials have said the government needs in cracking down on the violence is unlikely to be achieved while jockeying over the security posts continues, American officials have said.

Over the weekend, one American commander said he expected to see the posts filled within two or three days. But an Iraqi official familiar with the negotiations said Monday that Mr. Maliki was considering asking each of the contending groups to submit three names for each vacant post, a process the prime minister's aide said could take another week to complete.

Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Khalid W. Hassan
contributed reporting for this article.

    2 at CBS News Die in Baghdad on Bloody Day, NYT, 30.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/30/world/middleeast/30iraq.html

First Amendment Applies to Internet,

Appeals Court Rules

May 27, 2006
The New York Times
By LAURIE J. FLYNN

SAN FRANCISCO, May 26 — A California appeals court ruled Friday that online reporters are protected by the same confidentiality laws that protect traditional journalists, striking a blow to efforts by Apple Computer to identify people who leaked confidential company data.

The three-judge panel in San Jose overturned a trial court's ruling last year that to protect its trade secrets, Apple was entitled to know the source of leaked data published online. The appeals court also ruled that a subpoena issued by Apple to obtain electronic communications and materials from an Internet service provider was unenforceable.

In its ruling, the appeals court said online and offline journalists are equally protected under the First Amendment. "We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish 'legitimate' from 'illegitimate' news," the opinion states. "Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment."

The ruling states that Web sites are covered by California's shield law protecting the confidentiality of journalists' sources.

Apple had argued that Web sites publishing reports about Apple were not engaged in legitimate news gathering but rather were misappropriating trade secrets and violating copyrights. But in its ruling on Friday, the panel disagreed.

"Beyond casting aspersions on the legitimacy of petitioners' enterprise, Apple offers no cogent reason to conclude that they fall outside the shield law's protection," the ruling states.

If upheld, the ruling could have far-reaching impact in California courts on other writers who publish electronically, including bloggers who regularly publish news and opinion online without the backing of a mainstream news operation.

"This ruling will probably prove instructive to other online writers," said Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization, who argued the case in front of the appeals court last month. "It says that what makes a journalist is not the format but the function."

Apple declined to comment Friday on the ruling or on a possible appeal.

Apple's close guarding of company secrets, particularly unannounced products, is legendary. Friday's ruling arose from a suit filed in December 2004 against the unknown individuals who Apple said had leaked information about unannounced Apple products to two sites devoted to news of the company, AppleInsider and PowerPage.org.

Both sites published reports in November 2004 describing secret Apple projects, including one known at Apple by the code name Asteroid.

Apple did not sue the sites directly but sought to subpoena their e-mail records. As part of the investigation, Apple subpoenaed the e-mail records of Nfox, the company that provided Internet service to Jason D. O'Grady, the publisher of PowerPage.

About the same time, Apple filed a trade-secret suit against Think Secret, another online news site that the company accused of publishing confidential data about its future products. That case is pending.

Friday's ruling is also significant because it addresses whether private e-mail is protected from subpoenas. "The court correctly found that under federal law, civil litigants can't subpoena your stored e-mail from your service," said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

    First Amendment Applies to Internet, Appeals Court Rules, NYT, 27.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/technology/27apple.html

Judge Orders Private Drafts Turned Over in Leak Case

May 27, 2006
The New York Times
By NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON, May 26 — The judge overseeing the case against I. Lewis Libby Jr. ruled on Friday that Time magazine had to turn over drafts of articles so that Mr. Libby, the former White House aide, could defend himself.

The judge, Reggie B. Walton, of Federal District Court, said that because the interviews that Mr. Libby gave to some reporters were at the heart of the criminal case against him, news organizations had no privilege to withhold their confidential materials and drafts of articles from his lawyers.

Judge Walton said he had concluded that most of the documents sought from Time, part of Time Warner; NBC News; and The New York Times would not be relevant or help the defense.

He said lawyers for all the news media organizations had agreed to let him review the documents that were responsive to Mr. Libby's request. That allowed him, he said, to personally review those documents in reaching his decision.

Judge Walton called some of the defense requests nothing more than "a fishing expedition."

He took a different view of internal Time documents that he reviewed. Judge Walton said there were variations in the drafts of articles written by Matthew Cooper after he had testified before the grand jury that investigated and indicted Mr. Libby in the case involving the leaking of a C.I.A. operative's name.

"Upon reviewing the documents presented to it, the court discerns a slight alteration between the several drafts of the articles which the defense could arguably use to impeach Cooper," the judge wrote.

Judge Walton said that he was quashing the subpoena for documents sought from NBC News and two of its journalists, Tim Russert and Andrea Mitchell, and that most documents sought from The Times did not have to be turned over.

But he said the court would hold some transcripts of interviews by Judith Miller, a former reporter for The Times, and the draft of an article that she wrote to see whether they should be turned over in the trial.

Mr. Libby, former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, faces charges of perjury and obstruction of justice over his testimony to a federal grand jury and to F.B.I. agents. A special prosecutor has charged that Mr. Libby lied when he said he did not disclose the identity of the operative, Valerie Wilson, in summer 2003 to Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper.

Judge Walton said some documents from The Times could be turned over to the defense lawyers at the trial if they proved useful in impeaching Ms. Miller's testimony.

The judge suggested that was unlikely because his review showed them to be consistent with Ms. Miller's account to a grand jury.

He reasoned that if her trial testimony, that Mr. Libby told her of Ms. Wilson's role, remained consistent, the documents would have no value for the defense lawyers.

Mr. Libby was indicted after he told a grand jury and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents on two occasions that he did not disclose Ms. Wilson's identity to Mr. Cooper and Ms. Miller. The reporters testified otherwise to the grand jury.

Administration critics have said disclosing Ms. Wilson's identity was part of a campaign to discredit assertions made by her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, that the Bush administration had twisted prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons.

Judge Walton repeated earlier rulings that nothing in the Constitution or law provided a privilege for reporters to refuse to provide information in a criminal case.

He said Mr. Libby's case provided a special reason for reporters to provide relevant testimony because they were not just reporting on events, but were also participants in the events that formed the basis of the criminal case.

"The reporters did not simply report on alleged criminal activity," he wrote, "but rather they were personally involved in the conversations with the defendant that form the predicate for several charges in the indictment."

The judge added, "Their testimony is crucial to the government's case, and challenging it will likely be critical for the defense."

    Judge Orders Private Drafts Turned Over in Leak Case, NYT, 27.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/27/washington/27libby.html?hp&ex=1148788800&en=ca66b7505fcd5401&ei=5094&partner=homepage

In Print, Staring Down a Daily Worry

May 22, 2006
The New York Times
David Carr

A YEAR ago, I was talking on the phone to the editor of a major newspaper for a column I was working on. With business concluded, we had The Conversation, the one about the large boulder that seems to be tumbling through the newspaper business. "How old are you?" he asked. Forty-nine, I told him. "Me too. Do you think we outrun this thing?"

I said I thought so. But I wonder whether it will be the same for my friend Michael Schaffer.

At 32, Michael Currie Schaffer — one of two Michael Schaffers who writes for The Inquirer — is one of many bright young things in journalism. A Fulbright scholar, he was a freelancer who quietly elbowed his way into a staff job at The Washington City Paper when I was the editor there. He became the second in command at age 25, and ran the paper for a month while I was sick.

He became a national correspondent at U.S. News & World Report and then moved on, with a great deal of excitement, to The Philadelphia Inquirer, as a general assignment reporter. He did a tour as a war correspondent in Iraq, and is now working in the City Hall bureau. After three years at the paper, Michael loves the job.

But in March, The Inquirer was sold by Knight Ridder to the McClatchy Company, which promptly put it back on the block because even though it makes $50 million or so a year, it is not growing at a rate that suits McClatchy's corporate strategy. So sometime in the next few weeks, McClatchy will sell The Inquirer, a former crown jewel of American journalism that won 17 Pulitzers in 18 years during its heyday in the 1970's and 1980's under the editor Eugene L. Roberts Jr.

Michael and I sat on a bench in the brilliant sun last Wednesday outside Philadelphia's massive City Hall and chatted between his calls for a daily story about an impasse in the municipal budget.

"There are people at the paper, some of whom have been there for a long time, who are rightfully traumatized," he said.

Several offers for the paper came in last week, including one from a bidder who talked about cutting newsroom jobs by half. Amanda Bennett, the editor of The Inquirer, said that the staff remained focused on the task at hand. "Our people, despite the uncertainty, are producing a fabulous newspaper," she said in a phone call.

Michael is happy to be one of them. "I step back and think, I am getting paid to do something that is really fun and satisfying. But I'm interested in what comes next, and some of those versions of the future are pretty unappealing to me," he said.

While we had our own version of The Conversation, a lucky pigeon in front of us found a lone chip in a foil bag, but it was quickly lost amid a crush of others rushing in for a taste.

This summer, Michael is taking a two-month trip with his wife, but is not precisely sure what kind of paper he will be returning to. In times past, he would have been viewed as a comer, someone who was bound to be snapped up by a large national paper, but newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times have been making their own cuts lately.

"Something happened to our generation where we were not raised to do something that our parents did every day," he said. "I have friends here who are smart people, who are very well informed, but they don't feel the need to get a paper."

The Inquirer was once a sprawling enterprise with bureaus all over the world and a sniper's mentality on the news, picking off story after story, but it slowly abandoned the city, as did many Philadelphia residents, tilting its resources toward the suburbs. But now that Philadelphia is being reinvaded by the middle class and has a vibrant, residential downtown, Michael wonders why a decent daily paper in a resurgent city seems to have gone begging.

"This is a city that never recovered from deindustrialization. Paradoxically, there has been a huge influx of yuppies who want to live in a city and have a taste for cute Belgian bistros," he said.

Over time, the leadership at The Inquirer was pushed hard for cuts and greater profits by Anthony Ridder, chief executive of the papers — even though the paper had earned hundreds of millions of dollars after being purchased from Walter H. Annenberg in 1969. According to The Columbia Journalism Review, Mr. Ridder responded to a huge prize year in 1987 by saying that he would like the paper "to win a Pulitzer for cost-cutting."

He got his wish, with round after round of cuts, but lost control of the papers in an effort to satisfy Wall Street. Fewer reporters and a smaller amount of space for news stories does not generally attract new readers or new revenue. Perhaps Mr. Ridder can use some of his $9.4 million severance to fund a study on the demise of the American daily newspaper.

"I think that quality newspapers could go on for years and attract a very solid readership, but you have an industry with problems that is still struggling to be among the most profitable in the country," said Mr. Roberts, the former editor of The Inquirer (and a former managing editor at The New York Times). He mentioned John Carroll, who left the Tribune Company after tiring of spending all of his time on the cost side of the business. "John said there used to be a dozen ways to measure success in our business and now there is only one."

Back on the bench, Michael took a call from one of the council leaders who suggested that a compromise was imminent. He hustled several blocks to The Inquirer's gorgeous newsroom, a churchlike place of soaring ceilings animated by the controlled chaos of a daily paper on deadline. Michael tapped in a new lead on his story — a nice, tidy 15-inch tale of conflict, competing agendas and a denouement. Nothing fancy, just a bit of craft that will give the people who read it a little better idea of what's happening with their money.

"I love city politics and I cover a doozy of a city," he said.

He's right about that. With mass transit, a downtown full of history and warm bodies, a tabloid (The Philadelphia Daily News, which is also owned by McClatchy and also on the block) to stir the pot and newsstands on many corners, Philadelphia is a glorious newspaper town. I happened to stop by one of those newsstands near city hall for the second time last Wednesday. The guy behind the counter recognized a repeat customer. "See you tomorrow," he said.

    In Print, Staring Down a Daily Worry, NYT, 22.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/business/media/22carr.html

Question:

Who Is MediaNews's Dean Singleton?

May 22, 2006
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

SUNDANCE, Utah — William Dean Singleton, the maverick chief executive of the MediaNews Group, had a special announcement for the editors of his 55 daily newspapers when they met in this rustic mountain resort early in May.

"We're buying Gannett," he deadpanned.

In the seconds before he acknowledged the joke, the editors fell silent. Mr. Singleton is just brash enough, and has been on just enough of a newspaper-buying spree, that making a move on the biggest newspaper company in the country was not entirely implausible. After all, he had been in the hunt for Knight Ridder's 32 dailies and wound up plunking down $1 billion for four of them. And he has bid for two more big ones, The Inquirer and The Daily News in Philadelphia.

"It wasn't that far-fetched," said Becky Bennett, editor of Public Opinion in Chambersburg, Pa. "He's pulled rabbits out of hats before."

Mr. Singleton, 54, a bantam figure with flinty blue eyes, is indeed thought of as something of a magician in the newspaper world — having transformed himself from the son of a ranch hand in a tiny town in Texas to a media baron who now controls a newspaper empire that sprawls from coast to coast. He has, in a manner of speaking, sawed many of his competitors in half, only to have them hop off the table and become his partners.

His company, the privately held MediaNews based in Denver, owns 55 dailies including The Denver Post, The Detroit News, The Daily News of Los Angeles and The Berkshire Eagle, plus more than 100 nondailies. With the addition of the Knight Ridder papers — The San Jose Mercury News, The Contra Costa Times and The Monterey County Herald, all in California, and The St. Paul Pioneer Press — MediaNews has become the nation's fourth-biggest newspaper company, up from seventh.

For his next trick, Mr. Singleton hopes to lead the industry into a prosperous future as it seeks its footing in an increasingly Web-based world. This may be his most daring act yet. The newspaper business is in the midst of transformation, and no one, including Mr. Singleton, really knows what it is transforming into or how long it may take.

The big challenge, he says, is figuring out how to make money from the Web, where most news is free and ads are cheap. "If we don't start getting paid for news, we can't continue to afford to produce it," he said.

Mr. Singleton wants to help steer the industry collectively toward a solution; no one paper, he says, can do it alone.

He may seem an unlikely captain for this effort. He earned a reputation as a merciless cost-cutter early in his career and is still known for "clustering" properties — buying contiguous papers so he can combine back-office and even editorial operations.

The performance of his papers is uneven — some are profitable, others less so; some are adding pages, others are shrinking news space; some, like The Detroit News, have become bright and Web-like (he calls Detroit "the paper of the future") while others are burdened by old presses and poor color reproduction.

John McManus, the director of GradetheNews.org, at the journalism school of San Jose State University in California, said many of Mr. Singleton's papers were low-wage and mediocre, and allowed advertisements to bleed all too easily into news content. But he does not underestimate Mr. Singleton's ambition.

"He aspires to be a mogul in the ranks of Pulitzer and the Hearst of old, and I think he's going to achieve it," Mr. McManus said.

Partly as a result of added expenses, MediaNews posted a loss of $3.6 million for the first three months of the year, in contrast to net income of $2.3 million in the quarter last year. The losses came on revenue of $208.4 million, compared with $184.7 million a year earlier.

Mr. Singleton began buying newspapers in the 1970's, and his first major effort, reviving The Fort Worth Press, backfired. He closed it three months later. As he bought more papers, he stripped them down, laid people off and used the cash to buy more papers, almost all of them failing dailies that no one else wanted. Sometimes he saved them and sometimes, notably in Houston and Dallas, he let them die.

He and Richard Scudder, now 93, a newsprint manufacturer in New Jersey, founded MediaNews in 1983; each of their families owns 45 percent of the company, with the remaining 10 percent owned by outside investors. He said he would never dream of taking the company public because having Wall Street dictate to him "would drive me nuts."

These days, Mr. Singleton no longer looks at distressed properties. Instead, he is pouring $500 million into new printing presses around the country and building airy newsrooms for his employees.

Indeed, Mr. Singleton intends to make a showcase of The San Jose Mercury News, in the heart of Silicon Valley, as a kind of laboratory for how to meld print with the Web. He is so excited about the prospects that he plans to buy a home in the Bay Area, while keeping his primary residence in Denver.

"All the issues we're dealing with as an industry happened first in San Jose and are more dramatic in San Jose," he said in an interview. "And if you begin to find solutions to the dramatic changes that are going on there, you've found them for all newspapers."

Mr. Singleton has also started free youth-oriented supplements and Spanish-language editions in a number of markets, acting with an energy, admirers say, seldom seen on the print landscape.

"The industry needs Dean Singleton," said Peter Appert, a media analyst with Goldman Sachs. "It needs someone who is still passionate about the business."

Mr. Singleton's freedom from Wall Street has given him the flexibility to convert competitors into partners, usually through complex financial deals. He achieved this in Denver and Salt Lake City by driving the competition — The Rocky Mountain News and The Deseret News, respectively — into joint operating agreements with his Denver Post and Salt Lake Tribune. He is also partners with Gannett and the Stephens Media Group, and they share ownership of several newspapers.

"You'll see us more and more working with other companies, both print companies and online companies," Mr. Singleton said, including Google and Yahoo, in a strategy he calls "sleeping with the enemy."

Most recently, and strikingly, he enlisted the Hearst Corporation, which owns The San Francisco Chronicle, his chief rival, to help him buy Knight Ridder papers, completing a ring of 30 papers around San Francisco.

"He is an astonishing story," said Donald E. Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company, who has watched Mr. Singleton assemble his empire from scratch. "There have been lots of people who have invested in newspapers and some who have started a group, but Dean is the only person in our lifetime who has done that."

Once a year, Mr. Singleton has been taking his editors on retreats, usually at one of his ranches in Colorado (he owns four). They include mountain hikes at dawn and raucous skits satirizing the newspaper business. This year's skit featured Mr. Singleton in a turban and swami outfit as his editors sang their own lyrics to "Do You Know the Way to San Jose?" ("Writers here/are thinking fast/of parking cars/and pumping gas.")

For some, that may have been painfully close to the truth. The Mercury News has been through considerable turmoil since the dot-com bust. Mr. Singleton said he had no plans to reduce the staff, change the guard or consolidate operations in the Bay Area under one roof. But Luther Jackson, executive officer of the San Jose Newspaper Guild, which represents news employees at The Mercury News, said they remained wary of Mr. Singleton and his practice of clustering.

Skeptics like Mr. McManus at San Jose State said that while local editors had autonomy, they had to work within budgets handed down by Mr. Singleton. And he said he expected Mr. Singleton to lie low until any threat of an antitrust challenge to his Bay Area holdings passed and then begin to achieve economies of scale.

While Mr. Singleton said he had no worries about antitrust violations, the Justice Department and the California attorney general's office are reviewing his arrangements.

Mr. Singleton received a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 1986. He travels constantly, but his walk has slowed and he says that sometimes his legs give out, leaving him to shuffle or just sit still. This has led some to suggest that his investments in the business stem from a desire for a positive legacy.

"He's paving his way to heaven," said David M. Cole, editor of NewsInc., a newsletter about the industry. "He's trying to salve the wounds of Dallas and Houston, and the cuts he made in newspapers that upon reflection maybe he shouldn't have made."

Mr. Singleton dismissed such speculation, and so do his editors. Greg Moore, former managing editor of The Boston Globe whom Mr. Singleton tapped to become editor of The Denver Post, said Mr. Singleton was driven not by wanting to change his legacy but by sheer competitiveness.

"He's had to scrape and scratch for everything he's ever gotten," Mr. Moore said. "He loves a good fight. That's what drives him. It's about competition and winning."

    Question: Who Is MediaNews's Dean Singleton?, NYT, 22.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/business/media/22singleton.html

Gonzales Says Prosecutions of Journalists Are Possible

May 22, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

The government has the legal authority to prosecute journalists for publishing classified information, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales said yesterday.

"There are some statutes on the book which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility," Mr. Gonzales said on the ABC News program "This Week."

"That's a policy judgment by the Congress in passing that kind of legislation," he continued. "We have an obligation to enforce those laws. We have an obligation to ensure that our national security is protected."

Asked whether he was open to the possibility that The New York Times should be prosecuted for its disclosures in December concerning a National Security Agency surveillance program, Mr. Gonzales said his department was trying to determine "the appropriate course of action in that particular case."

"I'm not going to talk about it specifically," he said. "We have an obligation to enforce the law and to prosecute those who engage in criminal activity."

Though he did not name the statutes that might allow such prosecutions, Mr. Gonzales was apparently referring to espionage laws that in some circumstances forbid the possession and publication of information concerning the national defense, government codes and "communications intelligence activities."

Those laws are the basis of a pending case against two lobbyists, but they have never been used to prosecute journalists.

Some legal scholars say that even if the plain language of the laws could be read to reach journalists, the laws were never intended to apply to the press. In any event, these scholars say, prosecuting reporters under the laws might violate the First Amendment.

Mr. Gonzales said that the administration promoted and respected the right of the press that is protected under the First Amendment.

"But it can't be the case that that right trumps over the right that Americans would like to see, the ability of the federal government to go after criminal activity," he said. "And so those two principles have to be accommodated."

Mr. Gonzales sidestepped a question concerning whether the administration had been reviewing reporters' telephone records in an effort to identify their confidential sources.

"To the extent that we engage in electronic surveillance or surveillance of content, as the president says, we don't engage in domestic-to-domestic surveillance without a court order," he said. "And obviously if, in fact, there is a basis under the Constitution to go to a federal judge and satisfy the constitutional standards of probable cause and we get a court order, that will be pursued."

    Gonzales Says Prosecutions of Journalists Are Possible, NYT, 22.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/22/washington/22gonzales.html

BellSouth demands USA Today retract NSA claims

Thu May 18, 2006 9:12 PM ET
Reuters
By Jeremy Pelofsky

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - BellSouth Corp., the No. 3 U.S. local telephone company, on Thursday demanded USA Today retract claims in a story that said the company had a contract with a U.S. spy agency and turned over customers' telephone records.

BellSouth spokesman Jeff Battcher denied the company had a contract with the National Security Agency and did not give access or provide call records to the spy agency as part of an effort to thwart any terrorist plots.

USA Today reported last week that the NSA has had access to records of billions of domestic calls and collected tens of millions of telephone records from data provided by BellSouth, Verizon and AT&T Inc..

"BellSouth insists that your newspaper retract the false and unsubstantiated statements you have made regarding our company," BellSouth said in a letter to USA Today President Craig Moon and the general counsel at the newspaper's parent company Gannett Co.

The NSA and the Bush administration has refused to confirm or deny the USA Today report.

Last year, President George W. Bush acknowledged that the NSA was eavesdropping without warrants on international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens while in the pursuit of al Qaeda. The USA Today report said the call data program did not include eavesdropping on conversations.

"We did receive the letter this afternoon. We're reviewing it," said USA Today spokesman Steven Anderson. "And we will be responding."

BellSouth's Battcher said the company resorted to demanding the retraction because the newspaper had not retracted the story after the company's denial issued on Monday. Plus, the company was facing lawsuits claiming that customers' privacy rights were violated.

BellSouth on Tuesday was added to a $200 billion lawsuit which accuses the three large telephone carriers of violating privacy rights by turning over customer phone records for use in the NSA program.

"They have not had access through BellSouth," Battcher said, adding that the lawsuits were meritless. "We've had no contact with the NSA."

Verizon has also denied it was approached by the NSA and had a contract to provide the agency with data from its customers' telephone records. But the company has declined to comment on whether it gave the NSA access to its records.

AT&T has refused to comment directly on the USA Today report.

    BellSouth demands USA Today retract NSA claims, R, 18.5.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-05-19T011148Z_01_N18332115_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-TELECOMS-BELLSOUTH.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L3-U.S.+NewsNews-7

A. M. Rosenthal Dies at 84; Editor of The Times

May 11, 2006
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

A. M. Rosenthal, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent who became the executive editor of The New York Times and led the paper's global news operations through 17 years of record growth, modernization and major journalistic change, died yesterday in Manhattan. He was 84.

His death, at Mount Sinai Medical Center, came two weeks after he suffered a stroke, his son Andrew said. Mr. Rosenthal lived in Manhattan.

From ink-stained days as a campus correspondent at City College through exotic years as a reporter in the capitals and byways of Europe, Asia and Africa, Mr. Rosenthal climbed on rungs of talent, drive and ambition to the highest echelons of The Times and American journalism.

Brilliant, passionate, abrasive, a man of dark moods and mercurial temperament, he could coolly evaluate world developments one minute and humble a subordinate for an error in the next. He spent almost all of his 60-year career with The Times — he often called it his life — but it was a career in three parts: reporter, editor and columnist.

As a reporter and correspondent for 19 years, he covered New York City, the United Nations, India, Poland, Japan and other regions of the world, winning acclaim for his prolific, stylish writing and a Pulitzer Prize. The Pulitzer was for international reporting in 1960, for what the Communist regime in Poland, which had expelled him the previous year, called probing too deeply.

Then, returning to New York in 1963, he became an editor. Over the next 23 years, he served successively as metropolitan editor, assistant managing editor, managing editor and executive editor, enlarging his realms of authority by driving his staffs relentlessly, pursuing the news aggressively and outmaneuvering rivals for the executive suite.

After being named managing editor in 1969, Mr. Rosenthal was briefly outranked by James B. Reston, the executive editor. But Mr. Reston soon accepted a vice presidency, Mr. Rosenthal assumed command of news operations, and the executive editorship was dropped until 1977, when Mr. Rosenthal took the title.

At the helm of a staff of highly regarded editors and writers that included many young stars he had recruited, Mr. Rosenthal directed coverage of the major news stories of the era — the war in Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate scandal and successive crises in the Middle East.

Publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 was a historic achievement for The Times. The papers, a 7,000-page secret government history of the Vietnam War, showed that every administration since World War II had enlarged America's involvement while hiding the true dimensions of the conflict. But publishing the classified documents was risky: Would there be fines or jail terms? Would readers consider it treasonous? Would it lead to financial ruin for the paper?

The Nixon administration tried to suppress publication, and the case led to a landmark Supreme Court decision upholding the primacy of the press over government attempts to impose "prior restraint" on what may be printed. Major roles were played by Times staff members, among them Neil Sheehan, the correspondent who had uncovered the papers. But it was Mr. Rosenthal as editor, arguing strenuously for publication, and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher, who made the crucial decisions.

Despite the crisis atmosphere, there were some light moments. In an oft-told tale, Mr. Sulzberger recalled that when he told Mr. Rosenthal he wanted to read the Pentagon documents before deciding whether to publish them, Mr. Rosenthal, with barely concealed glee, wheeled a grocery cart containing the papers into the publisher's office.

After 17 years as a principal architect of the modern New York Times, Mr. Rosenthal stepped down as the top editor in 1986 as he neared his job's mandatory retirement age of 65. Mr. Sulzberger said at the time that Mr. Rosenthal's "record of performance as executive editor of The Times will last as a monument to one of the titans of American journalism."

He then began the last phase of his Times career, nearly 13 years as the author of a twice-weekly column, "On My Mind," for the Op-Ed page. His first column, on Jan. 6, 1987, and his last, on Nov. 5, 1999, carried the same headline, which he wrote: "Please Read This Column."

As that injunction implied, the columns reflected his passions and what he saw as a personal relationship with readers. He addressed a range of foreign and domestic topics with a generally conservative point of view. But there were recurring themes — his support for Israel and its security, his outrage over human rights violations in China and elsewhere, his commitment to political and religious freedoms around the world, and his disgust at failures in America's war on drugs.

It was an assignment he relished, and he surrendered it reluctantly. He said in an interview with The Washington Post that Arthur Sulzberger Jr., by then the publisher of The Times, had told him "it was time."

"What that means, I don't know," he said, adding, "I didn't expect it at all."

He left, but he did not retire. "I've seen happier days," he said, cleaning out his office, adding, "I want to remain a columnist." In February 2000, he began an untitled weekly column for The Daily News that reflected his increasingly conservative convictions and continued until 2004.

Under the Microscope

Perhaps more than those of any editor in modern times, Mr. Rosenthal's life and career were chronicled closely, and his personal traits and private and professional conduct were dissected and analyzed with fascination in gossip and press columns, in magazines and books, and in the newsrooms and bars where those who had worked for or against him told their tales of admiration and woe.

The extraordinary interest was rooted only partly in the methods, achievements and faults of a powerful figure in journalism; it came, too, from the man himself: a table-pounding, globe-trotting adventurer who shattered the stereotype of the genteel Times editor with his gut fighter's instincts and his legendary bouts of anger.

Canadian-born, reared in poverty in the Bronx, he had a childhood scarred by the deaths of his father and four of his five sisters, and by a disease that crippled his legs for a year, forced him to drop out of high school and left him a teenage charity patient. Friends later called it a hard beginning for a life of struggle.

A gravel-voiced, jowly man with a tight smile, a shock of black hair parted vaguely on the left and judgmental gray-green eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, he was regarded by colleagues as complex, often contradictory. Not least, he saw himself as the guardian of tradition at The Times; but he presided over more changes than any editor in the paper's history.

He often spoke of keeping the paper "straight," and was tigerish in defense of high standards of reporting and editing, which called for fairness, objectivity and good taste in news columns free of editorial comment, causes, political agendas, innuendo and unattributed pejorative quotations.

As managing editor from 1969 to 1977 and as executive editor until 1986, he guided The Times through a remarkable transformation that brightened its sober pages, expanded news coverage, introduced new production technology, launched a national edition, won new advertisers and tens of thousands of new readers, and raised the paper's sagging fortunes to unparalleled profitability.

Time for Change

By the end of the 1960's, The Times, despite a distinguished journalistic history, had a clouded future. Its reporting and writing were widely regarded as thorough but ponderous. Revenues were declining, profits were marginal, circulation was stagnant, and some studies said The Times might be doomed in the age of television to join a dozen New York newspapers in the elephant graveyard.

Mr. Rosenthal's objective, often stated in memos to the staff and in public comments, was a delicate one: to forge dramatic changes in The Times, to erase a stodgy image with a new look and to improve readability and profitability — all this while maintaining the essential character of the newspaper.

Many innovations during Mr. Rosenthal's tenure are familiar components of today's Times. He expanded the weekday paper from two to four parts, including separate metropolitan and business news sections, and inaugurated new feature sections for weekdays: SportsMonday, Science Times on Tuesdays, the Living section on Wednesdays, the Home section on Thursdays and Weekend on Fridays.

Critics said the feature sections undercut The Times's reputation for serious reporting, and some called articles on gourmet cooking and penthouse deck furniture elitist in an age of homelessness and poverty. But defenders said the sections usurped no space from regular news and brightened the paper's tone. The innovations, highly popular with readers and advertisers, were copied by many newspapers across the country.

Mr. Rosenthal also redesigned most of the Sunday feature sections; started suburban weeklies for New Jersey, Connecticut, Long Island and Westchester County; and began a series of Sunday magazine supplements that focused on business, travel, home entertainment, leisure activities, education, fashion, health and other subjects.

The Sunday innovations drew a similarly split critical reaction — defended as stylish and colorful, disparaged as distractions from important news. But most were also popular with readers and advertisers, and the supplements became sources of large advertising income.

In 1980, Mr. Rosenthal also began a national edition of The Times, an abridged version of the regular newspaper that was distributed originally in Chicago and other Midwest cities and has since extended its reach nationwide. The national edition's pages today are beamed by satellite from New York to plants across the country, where they are printed for same-day regional distribution.

Expanding general news coverage, Mr. Rosenthal enlarged the foreign and national news staffs and the Washington bureau, and pressed local reporting out into the suburbs of New York. Winning Pulitzer Prizes, sometimes two or three at a time, became annual events for the staff under the Rosenthal stewardship; The Times and its staff members won 24 Pulitzers during his years as editor.

Ad and Circulation Growth

While many newspapers were struggling to redefine themselves and stay alive, The Times prospered under the presiding team of Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Rosenthal. Lines of advertising rose to 118 million in 1986 from 87 million in 1969. Circulation increases in the same period were more modest — up 80,000 daily to one million, and up 112,000 on Sundays to 1.6 million — but most of the gains were made among higher-income readers, enabling The Times to raise its advertising rates and its profitability.

Revenues of The New York Times Company soared nearly sevenfold, to $1.6 billion in 1986 from $238 million in 1969, while net income in the same period rose to $132 million from $14 million.

As executive editor, Mr. Rosenthal, assisted by top lieutenants, including the managing editor Seymour Topping and the deputy managing editor Arthur Gelb, who was Mr. Rosenthal's closest friend and confidant, decided which articles would appear on Page 1 and what emphasis each would be given. His decisions thus helped shape the perceptions not only of millions of readers but also of government and corporate policy makers and news editors across the country.

Mr. Rosenthal came to be regarded in government, in business, in the arts and in professional journalistic circles as the most influential newspaper editor in the nation, perhaps the world, with only Benjamin C. Bradlee, his counterpart at The Washington Post, as a possible rival.

Behind the scenes, Mr. Rosenthal consolidated his authority over The Times's sprawling news and feature operations, ending the relative independence of the Sunday sections and of the paper's Washington bureau. He eventually assumed responsibility for all material published in the daily and Sunday Times — everything but editorials, Op-Ed articles and advertising.

Throughout Mr. Rosenthal's years as editor, press critics chronicled his rising fortune and the growing success of The Times. But they also described Mr. Rosenthal personally and as an administrator in generally unflattering terms and characterized his staff as rife with grumbling and low morale.

Wielding enormous power to hire, reward and transfer subordinates, he personally approved all news staff promotions, raises and major assignments, shaping the pyramid of personnel under him and approving all major appointments to local news beats and to national and foreign bureaus. In the process, he made and broke the careers and dreams of scores of reporters and editors. Among those whose careers flourished under Mr. Rosenthal were two future executive editors of The Times, Joseph Lelyveld and Bill Keller, who now holds the title, and Anna Quindlen, the author and former Times columnist. In a newsroom atmosphere suffused with Mr. Rosenthal's tempestuous personality, there were stormy outbursts in which subordinates were berated for errors, reassigned for failing to meet the editor's expectations or sidetracked to lesser jobs for what he regarded as disloyalty to The Times. Others, meanwhile, won promotions, raises and access to his inner circle.

Supporters of Mr. Rosenthal said his news and staff decisions were always journalistically defensible. His defenders insisted that his standards were necessarily high and that many staff members who objected to his style or opposed his decisions had themselves failed to measure up.

A Stormy Wake

His critics, however, said that it was loyalty to the editor, not to The Times, that counted, and that many of Mr. Rosenthal's decisions to shuffle assignments or break careers were made in fits of anger. They also blamed what they called his combative and imperious style for many resignations, including those of some highly regarded reporters and editors, from a staff that in former days had rarely lost members except to retirement or death.

Max Frankel, who initially lost out to Mr. Rosenthal in the competition to become executive editor but who later succeeded him in that post, assessed his predecessor in a memoir, "The Times of My Life and My Life with The Times," published in 1999, five years after his own retirement. One chapter was titled "Not-Abe," a reference to Mr. Frankel's belief that one of his tasks as executive editor was to set a more collegial tone in the news department.

"Abe Rosenthal left the newsroom with a reputation for brilliant, instinctive news judgment coupled with an intimidating, self-centered management style," he wrote. "Most of his values were admirable, and many of his tactics were therefore forgivable." But Mr. Frankel added: "His innermost judgments of people depended not just on their value to The Times but on their regard for him and his ideas."

The book began a public feud. Outraged by his successor's evaluation, Mr. Rosenthal, in interviews, belittled Mr. Frankel's tenure, and in an article in Vanity Fair ridiculed his observations and even his professionalism.

Friends said that Mr. Rosenthal had often wondered aloud at the enmity he aroused and that he sometimes expressed hope that his detractors would someday see his objectives and the best interests of The Times as synonymous.

On the day his last "On My Mind" column appeared, The Times, in a rare gesture, devoted an editorial to Mr. Rosenthal's achievements. "His strong, individualistic views and his bedrock journalistic convictions have informed his work as a reporter, editor and columnist," it said. "And his commitment to journalism as an essential element in a democratic society will abide as part of the living heritage of the newspaper he loved and served for more than 55 years."

At a White House ceremony on July 9, 2002, President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, to Mr. Rosenthal and 11 others, including Nelson R. Mandela, Nancy Reagan, baseball's Hank Aaron, the tenor Plácido Domingo and Katharine Graham, the late chairwoman of The Washington Post.

Son of a Trapper

Abraham Michael Rosenthal was born on May 2, 1922, in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, the son of Harry and Sarah Dickstein Rosenthal, both natives of Byelorussia. His father, born Harry Shipiatsky, was a farmer who migrated to Canada in the 1890's, changed his name to Rosenthal and later became a fur trapper and trader in the Hudson Bay area.

The Rosenthals had six children, five of them girls. Abraham was the youngest. When he was a boy, the family moved to the Bronx, where Harry Rosenthal became a house painter and Abraham attended school.

In the 1930's, a series of tragedies enveloped the family. Abraham's father died of injuries suffered in a fall from a scaffold; one of his sisters died of pneumonia; a second died of cancer that had been misdiagnosed; a third died after giving birth to a child, and a fourth died of cancer.

As a teenager, Abraham developed osteomyelitis, a bone-marrow disease, in his legs. It left him in acute pain, able to walk only with a cane or crutches. Because of the family's poverty, he received inadequate medical treatment; one operation was carried out in the wrong place on his legs, and while encased in a cast from neck to feet he was told he might never walk again.

He was forced to drop out of DeWitt Clinton High School for a year. His family, meantime, appealed to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and he was accepted as a charity patient. There he underwent a series of operations and eventually recovered almost completely, though he experienced pain in his legs for the rest of his life.

Finishing high school, he enrolled at City College, joined the staff of the school newspaper and discovered that he liked, and was good at, reporting. In 1943, he became the campus correspondent for The Times. He wrote about campus life and, as did many others who became Times reporters, covered Sunday church sermons and wrote occasional brief commentaries, "Topics of The Times," for the editorial page. He was diligent and eager, and editors soon eyed him as a promising young reporter.

In February 1944, at a time when many staff members had gone to war, Mr. Rosenthal was hired as a staff reporter. Though he had only a few credits to go for a degree, the 21-year-old cub quit City College to devote all his energies to his new job. (Four years later, after he had established himself as one of the city's best reporters, City College awarded him a bachelor's degree. In 1951, he cleared up another long-pending formality, becoming a United States citizen.)

After two years of local reporting that included several exclusive stories on Andrei A. Gromyko, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Mr. Rosenthal was assigned to cover the United Nations.

His byline began to appear regularly on the front page over articles about global tensions, economic and health problems, Security Council walkouts and figures ranging from world leaders to the men who shined their shoes.

Reporting on the World

In 1954, he was assigned to New Delhi and for the next four years covered the tangled affairs and kaleidoscopic cultures of the Indian subcontinent. He reveled in its exotic diversity and developed a deep emotional attachment to India and its people.

Mr. Rosenthal quickly established himself as an outstanding foreign correspondent. He was perceptive and aggressive, sensitive to the nuances of people and politics, fascinated with culture, art, history. He could write against a deadline with grace and a distinctive style, and he did not rely excessively on the American Embassy.

Instead, he traveled almost constantly to cities and villages all over India. He made forays into Pakistan, Ceylon, Nepal and Kashmir. Once he traveled 1,500 miles into the Hindu Kush for the dateline, "AT THE KHYBER PASS." His reporting from India was recognized in awards from the Overseas Press Club and Columbia University.

In 1958, Mr. Rosenthal was transferred to Warsaw and covered Poland and other nations of Eastern Europe for two years. Writing articles that the censored Polish press could not print, he portrayed a nation whose political, economic, artistic and cultural life had been choked by Communist controls.

He disclosed a food shortage that necessitated shipments of Soviet meat to Warsaw; wrote of Polish admiration for Western literature, films and art; and described Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev's chilly reception by the people of Warsaw and, a week later, a tumultuous greeting for Vice President Richard M. Nixon.

Mr. Rosenthal's writing style was disarmingly personal: it was as if he had written a letter home to a friend. An article for The New York Times Magazine, based on a visit to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, was typical.

"And so," he wrote, "there is no news to report from Auschwitz. There is merely the compulsion to write something about it, a compulsion that grows out of a restless feeling that to have visited Auschwitz and then turned away without having said or written anything would be a most grievous act of discourtesy to those who died there."

The 1959 dispatch that led to Mr. Rosenthal's expulsion called the Polish leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, "moody and irascible," adding: "He is said to have a feeling of having been let down — by intellectuals and economists he never had any sympathy for anyway, by workers he accuses of squeezing overtime out of a normal day's work, by suspicious peasants who turn their backs on the government's plans, orders and pleas."

His expulsion order charged: "You have written very deeply and in detail about the internal situation, party and leadership matters. The Polish government cannot tolerate such probing reporting." Those phrases were cited by the Pulitzer committee the following spring when Mr. Rosenthal was awarded the prize for international reporting.

After a brief tour in which he was based in Geneva and covered assignments in Europe and Africa, Mr. Rosenthal was sent to Japan for two years. He relished the assignment. Again, he wrote of people and politics, traveling frequently through the Japanese islands and to Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, New Guinea, Okinawa and other destinations.

Ascending in New York

In 1963, Mr. Rosenthal was persuaded by his mentor and friend, The Times's managing editor Turner Catledge, to give up the correspondent's life to become an editor.

His first assignment was command of a large, tradition-bound city news staff, not with the usual title of "city editor," but as "metropolitan editor," reflecting new authority that he had demanded over a previously independent cultural news staff and a mandate for change throughout the newsroom.

He soon transformed the staff. Ignoring seniority that had long determined which reporters got the day's top news assignments, he began favoring the best writers, regardless of age; he changed beat assignments that had stood for years; he began emphasizing investigative journalism and sent reporters out to capture the flavor, complexity and conflict of neighborhoods.

He encouraged his staff to abandon the stiff prose and lockstep ideas that had long characterized local news in The Times, and invited articles written with imagination, humor and literary flair. He assigned pieces on interracial marriage and other topics atypical for The Times. And he assigned far more work than had been customary. While his moves upset many staff members, they also won praise from readers and his superiors and awards for the staff.

One article assigned by Mr. Rosenthal, focusing on New Yorkers' fear of involvement in crime, recounted the murder of Kitty Genovese, a Queens woman whose screams were ignored by 38 neighbors while her killer stalked and attacked her repeatedly on a street for 35 minutes. The article shocked New York, and Mr. Rosenthal later wrote a short book on the episode, "Thirty-Eight Witnesses."

Propelled by his performance as metropolitan editor, Mr. Rosenthal was named assistant managing editor in 1966 and associate managing editor in 1968. Later, as managing editor and executive editor, he often traveled abroad to meet correspondents and foreign dignitaries, sometimes wrote reflective magazine articles and spoke publicly on freedom of the press and other matters.

Mr. Rosenthal and his first wife, Ann Marie Burke, who married in 1949, had three sons, Jonathan, of Clifton, Va., Daniel, of Milford, N.J., and Andrew, of Montclair, N.J., who is the deputy editorial page editor of The Times. The couple were divorced in 1986.

In addition to his first wife and sons, Mr. Rosenthal is survived by his second wife, Shirley Lord, whom he married in 1987, and by a sister, Rose Newman of Manhattan, and four grandchildren.

A funeral will be held at 10:30 a.m. Sunday at Central Synagogue, at Lexington Avenue and 55th Street in Manhattan.

Mr. Rosenthal's final column for The Times was a summation of his life and his career in journalism. "As a columnist," he wrote, "I discovered that there were passions in me I had not been aware of, lying under the smatterings of knowledge about everything that I had to collect as executive editor — including hockey and debentures, for heaven's sake."

Returning to those passions, chief among them human rights, he closed by saying that he could not promise to right all wrongs.

"But," he wrote, "I can say that I will keep trying and that I thank God for (a) making me an American citizen, (b) giving me that college-boy job on The Times, and (c) handing me the opportunity to make other columnists kick themselves when they see what I am writing, in this fresh start of my life."

    A. M. Rosenthal Dies at 84; Editor of The Times, NYT, 11.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/11/nyregion/11rosenthal.html?hp&ex=1147406400&en=ad1506f445874e6a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Time Wins Top Award for Magazine Excellence

May 10, 2006
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Time won the top national magazine award last night, placing first in the general excellence category for magazines with a circulation of more than two million.

The weekly was honored for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its look inside the interrogation rooms at Guantánamo Bay, covering both with what the judges said was in-depth reporting, insightful analysis and striking photography.

"Time keeps reinvigorating its role as a newsweekly," the judges said.

The magazine's Katrina coverage also won the award for a single-topic issue, for what the judges called "a triumph of the newsmagazine's craft." The recognition comes as Time has been cutting jobs and is preparing to change editors later this year.

The magazine awards, the industry's most prestigious honor, are sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors in association with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In the past, they have been presented at a lunch at the Waldorf-Astoria. But this year, in an effort to draw more publicity to the magazine industry, the awards were presented at a reception at the Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

The event featured celebrities, including Anderson Cooper, the CNN anchor, and Meg Ryan, the actress. The magazine association has been calling the ceremony the Oscars of the magazine industry. More than 1,000 editors and others attended.

Other winners of the general excellence awards for their category of circulation were ESPN The Magazine, Esquire, New York Magazine, Harper's Magazine and The Virginia Quarterly Review.

For general excellence online, the award went to the National Geographic Online, cited for its "stunning photography, innovative interactive applications of text and video, and first-class journalism."

One surprise was that The Atlantic Monthly, which was nominated in eight categories, was shut out in all eight.

The public interest award went to Elizabeth Kolbert of The New Yorker for her series on global warming, which the judges cited for "the clarity and synthesis that only a gifted writer can summon."

The New Yorker, which in recent years has walked away with a chestful of trophies, was nominated in five categories and won in two: in addition to public interest, it won for commentary, for Hendrik Hertzberg's "Talk of the Town" columns.

The New Yorker has won 46 of the awards, the most of any magazine in the competition's 40-year history.

The reporting award was given to Rolling Stone, for an article by James Bamford about the rumors, imagery and information that were used to sell the Iraq war.

There were several unusual citations this year. In feature writing, one of the most prized categories for magazines, The American Scholar won for a piece by Priscilla Long about the human genome.

Vanity Fair won in the essays category for articles published posthumously by Marjorie Williams, who chronicled her struggle with liver cancer.

And The Virginia Quarterly Review, in addition to its general excellence award, won the prize for fiction for stories by Joyce Carol Oates, R. T. Smith and Alan Heathcock.

Self was cited for personal service, for a handbook about breast cancer, and Golf Magazine won in the leisure interest category for "The New Way to Putt," described as "a breakthrough technique for getting the ball in the hole."

In profile writing, Esquire took the prize for an article by Robert Kurson about a man who had been blind since childhood and became a Central Intelligence Agency analyst and skydiver, then received a stem cell and cornea transplant and regained his sight.

Backpacker magazine was cited for its Basecamp section, which the judges said neatly stuffed exactly what its readers needed to know "without an extra ounce of verbiage."

Harper's won for reviews and criticism by Wyatt Mason.

In addition to its general excellence award, New York magazine won the design award. W won the photography award for what the judges said "shatters the conventional boundaries of fashion imagery." Rolling Stone won the photo essay award for "The Edge of the World," by Sebastião Salgado about Antarctica and Patagonia.

    Time Wins Top Award for Magazine Excellence, NYT, 10.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/10/business/media/10mag.html

Attorney subpoenas reporters in steroid case

Sat May 6, 2006 5:34 PM ET
Reuters

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - An attorney probing steroid use by professional athletes has subpoenaed the San Francisco Chronicle and two of its reporters to testify on leaks in the investigation.

In subpoenas issued on Friday, U.S. Attorney Debra Wong Yang demanded the newspaper turn over grand jury transcripts and that reporters name the sources of the documents, which held admissions by well-known baseball players of steroid use.

Newspaper articles in 2004 by reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, which relied in part on secret grand jury transcripts, exposed the use of steroids by elite professional athletes and led to U.S. congressional hearings on the matter.

The resulting scandal has focused attention on Barry Bonds, the star baseball slugger of the San Francisco Giants, who is close to surpassing Babe Ruth's home-run record. It also has fueled demands for more stringent drug testing in pro sports.

The demand that reporters testify in the sporting scandal case reflects a growing trend by federal prosecutors to pressure journalists to reveal their confidential sources or face contempt of court charges.

The two reporters and the paper were ordered to appear before a grand jury in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Thursday, May 11, according to court documents.

The government investigation centers on the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), a local company that distributed performance-enhancing drugs to pro athletes.

A spokesman for the Chronicle was not immediately available to comment on the government orders.

In a story on the subpoenas in the Chronicle, Executive Editor Phil Bronstein said reporters were not subject to secrecy rules governing grand jury proceedings.

"The San Francisco Chronicle unconditionally stands by its reporters in fighting this effort by the government to force them to reveal their confidential sources," Bronstein was quoted as saying. "Our reporters broke no laws, nor is the government accusing them of having done so."

    Attorney subpoenas reporters in steroid case, 6.5.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-05-06T213350Z_01_N06260051_RTRUKOC_0_US-STEROIDS-SUBPOENAS.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L3-U.S.+NewsNews-10

Washington Letter

At Annual Correspondents' Dinner, a Set of Bush Twins Steal the Show

May 1, 2006
The New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
WASHINGTON

It was love at first sight. When President Bush met Steve Bridges, a Bush impersonator, three years ago in the Oval Office, he immediately thought that he and his doppelganger could gang up at the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner.

As Mr. Bush told Mr. Bridges, according to Mr. Bridges's manager, who attended the meeting: "Every year they have the White House correspondents' dinner, where everybody goes and leaves having had a good time except for the president."

So on Saturday night, in a duet of a stand-up routine at the annual press Bacchanalia, Mr. Bush seemed to have a less painful time than usual with Mr. Bridges as his sidekick and inner voice.

Mr. Bush, from the stage in the cavelike Washington Hilton ballroom: "As you know, I always look forward to these dinners."

Mr. Bridges, standing aside the president at an identical lectern: "It's just a bunch of media types, Hollywood liberals, Democrats like Joe Biden there. How come I can't have dinner with the 36 percent of the people who like me?"

Mr. Bush: "I'm sorry that Vice President Cheney couldn't be here tonight. I agree with the press that Dick was a little late reporting that hunting episode down in Texas. In fact, I didn't know a thing about it till I saw him on 'America's Most Wanted.' "

Mr. Bridges: "You reporters would go nuts if you knew the full story. He was drunk as a skunk! On one beer! Light beer! Oh, people were duckin' and divin' for cover. I wish I'd been there. I saw him coming down the hall the other day, I looked at him and said, 'Don't shoot!' "

White House officials and Mr. Bridges said the double stand-up was the idea of the president, who last year ceded his spot on the program to his wife and in previous years relied on slide shows as visual props for his routines. As the 2,500-plus guests at the annual event know, by tradition the president is supposed to make fun of himself in an effort to establish his regular-guy credentials and ingratiate himself with the press.

With his approval ratings in the mid-30's and a White House beset by troubles, there is some evidence that Mr. Bush worked harder on his performance this year than in the past. At the very least, he started focusing on his stand-up as long ago as January, when he asked Dan Bartlett, the White House counselor, to contact Mr. Bridges and Landon Parvin, a longtime speechwriter.

For Mr. Bush, the timing seemed right. He had known about Mr. Bridges, who appears regularly as a Bush impersonator on "The Tonight Show," since 2002. At Christmas that year at the president's ranch, Barbara Bush, the president's mother, showed her son and the assembled clan a video of Mr. Bridges imitating Mr. Bush that had been used to introduce her at an appearance in Texas. Mr. Bush, amused, asked to meet Mr. Bridges, and eventually got together with him in Washington on Feb. 24, 2003, three weeks before the American-led invasion of Iraq.

"Maybe he needed a break or something," said Randy Nolen, Mr. Bridges's manager. "We had him laughing."

Mr. Nolen said that Mr. Bush greeted Mr. Bridges by opening his arms and asking, "Is this me?" and that the president and the impersonator spent 20 minutes together. Mr. Bridges did his imitation of Mr. Bush and talked about the two and a half hours it takes to apply the makeup he needs to morph into the president.

"Everything but his eyes and teeth are fake," Mr. Nolen said.

Mr. Bush told Mr. Bridges, Mr. Nolen said, that the time was not right for comedy, but that in the future they had to get together and do "something big." This year's correspondents' dinner was apparently big enough, and by mid-April Mr. Parvin had a script. Mr. Parvin, who has written jokes for Mr. Bush and former President Ronald Reagan, then had a run-through with Mr. Bush in the Oval Office.

Last Friday was the dress rehearsal with Mr. Bridges in the White House family theater. Mr. Bartlett and Joshua B. Bolten, the new White House chief of staff, attended, but many other senior aides were kept out to keep it secret. Mr. Bush and Mr. Bridges did two straight run-throughs.

"I was so nervous," Mr. Bridges said yesterday by telephone from California, after a morning flight from Washington. "I had a twitch in my eye for two weeks." The session soon dissolved into laughter, but Mr. Bush was instructed to keep a straight face during the actual performance.

It was at the dress rehearsal, Mr. Parvin said, that Mr. Bush suggested adding a line for Mr. Bridges that the first lady "is hot," and Mr. Bridges suggested following up with "muy caliente," or "very hot." Both additions were in the final routine.

Other lines came from Mr. Bridges's regular spoof of Mr. Bush, like "Yes, my fellow Americans, in the words of Sigmund Freud, 'I have a dream.' " One line, delivered by Mr. Bush, was particularly topical: "I'm feeling pretty chipper tonight — I survived the White House shake-up."

Other lines made fun of Mr. Bush's pronunciation difficulties.

Mr. Bridges: "We must enhance noncompliance protocols sanctioned not only at I.A.E.A. formal sessions but through intercessional contact."

Mr. Bush: "We must enhance noncompliance protocols sanctioned not only at E-I-E-I-O formal sessions but through intersexual contact."

So did the laughter in the ballroom help Mr. Bush in his time of political trouble?

"I have no idea," Mr. Parvin said. "The way we looked at it, we were just going to have a good time and get through it."

    At Annual Correspondents' Dinner, a Set of Bush Twins Steal the Show, NYT, 1.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/washington/01letter.html?hp&ex=1146542400&en=991091c2061e22db&ei=5094&partner=homepage

In Leak Cases, New Pressure on Journalists

April 30, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

Earlier administrations have fired and prosecuted government officials who provided classified information to the press. They have also tried to force reporters to identify their sources.

But the Bush administration is exploring a more radical measure to protect information it says is vital to national security: the criminal prosecution of reporters under the espionage laws.

Such an approach would signal a thorough revision of the informal rules of engagement that have governed the relationship between the press and the government for many decades. Leaking in Washington is commonplace and typically entails tolerable risks for government officials and, at worst, the possibility of subpoenas to journalists seeking the identities of sources.

But the Bush administration is putting pressure on the press as never before, and it is operating in a judicial climate that seems increasingly receptive to constraints on journalists.

In the last year alone, a reporter for The New York Times was jailed for refusing to testify about a confidential source; her source, a White House aide, was prosecuted on charges that he lied about his contacts with reporters; a C.I.A. analyst was dismissed for unauthorized contacts with reporters; and a raft of subpoenas to reporters were largely upheld by the courts.

It is not easy to gauge whether the administration will move beyond these efforts to criminal prosecutions of reporters. In public statements and court papers, administration officials have said the law allows such prosecutions and that they will use their prosecutorial discretion in this area judiciously. But there is no indication that a decision to begin such a prosecution has been made. A Justice Department spokeswoman, Tasia Scolinos, declined to comment on Friday.

Because such prosecutions of reporters are unknown, they are widely thought inconceivable. But legal experts say that existing laws may well allow holding the press to account criminally. Should the administration pursue the matter, these experts say, it could gain a tool that would thoroughly alter the balance of power between the government and the press.

The administration and its allies say that all avenues must be explored to ensure that vital national security information does not fall into the hands of the nation's enemies.

In February, Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales whether the government's investigation into The Times's disclosure of a National Security Agency eavesdropping program included "any potential violation for publishing that information."

Mr. Gonzales responded: "Obviously, our prosecutors are going to look to see all the laws that have been violated. And if the evidence is there, they're going to prosecute those violations."

Recent articles in conservative opinion magazines have been even more forceful.

"The press can and should be held to account for publishing military secrets in wartime," Gabriel Schoenfeld wrote in Commentary magazine last month.

Surprising Move by F.B.I.

One example of the administration's new approach is the F.B.I.'s recent effort to reclaim classified documents in the files of the late columnist Jack Anderson, a move that legal experts say was surprising if not unheard of.

"Under the law," Bill Carter, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said earlier this month, "no private person may possess classified documents that were illegally provided to them."

Critics of the administration position say that altering the conventional understanding between the press and government could have dire consequences.

"Once you make the press the defendant rather than the leaker," said David Rudenstine, the dean of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York and a First Amendment scholar, "you really shut down the flow of information because the government will always know who the defendant is."

The administration's position draws support from an unlikely source — the 1971 Supreme Court decision that refused to block publication by The Times and The Washington Post of the classified history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers. The case is generally considered a triumph for the press. But two of the justices in the 6-to-3 majority indicated that there was a basis for after-the-fact prosecution of the newspapers that published the papers under the espionage laws.

Reading of Espionage Laws

Both critics and allies of the administration say that the espionage laws on their face may well be read to forbid possession and publication of classified information by the press. Two provisions are at the heart of the recent debates.

The first, enacted in 1917, is, according to a 2002 report by Susan Buckley, a lawyer who often represents news organizations, "at first blush, pretty much one of the scariest statutes around."

It prohibits anyone with unauthorized access to documents or information concerning the national defense from telling others. The wording of the law is loose, but it seems to contain a further requirement for spoken information. Repeating such information is only a crime, it seems, if the person doing it "has reason to believe" it could be used "to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation." That condition does not seem to apply to information from documents.

In the Pentagon Papers case, Justice Byron R. White, joined by Justice Potter Stewart, said "it seems undeniable that a newspaper" can be "vulnerable to prosecution" under the 1917 law.

Indeed, the Nixon administration considered prosecuting The Times even after the government lost the Pentagon Papers case, according to a 1975 memoir by Whitney North Seymour Jr., who was the United States attorney in Manhattan in the early 1970's. Mr. Seymour wrote that Richard G. Kleindienst, a deputy attorney general, suggested convening a grand jury in New York to that end. Mr. Seymour said he refused.

Some experts believe he would not have won. The most authoritative analysis of the 1917 law, by Harold Edgar and Benno C. Schmidt Jr. in the Columbia Law Review in 1973, concluded, based largely on the law's legislative history, that it was not meant to apply to newspapers.

A second law is less ambiguous. Enacted in 1950, it prohibits publication of government codes and other "communications intelligence activities." Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who took part in terrorism investigations in New York after the Sept. 11 attacks, said that both The Times, for its disclosures about the eavesdropping program, and The Post, for an article about secret C.I.A. prisons, had violated the 1917 law. The Times, he added, has also violated the 1950 law.

"It was irresponsible to publish these things," Mr. McCarthy said. "I wouldn't hesitate to prosecute."

The reporters who wrote the two articles recently won Pulitzer Prizes.

Even legal scholars who are sympathetic to the newspapers say the legal questions are not straightforward.

"They are making threats that they may be able to carry out technically, legally," Geoffrey R. Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago and the author of "Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime," said of the administration. The law, Professor Stone added, "has always been understood to be about spying, not about newspapers, but read literally it could be applied to both."

Others say the law is unconstitutional as applied to the press under the First Amendment.

"I don't think that anyone believes that statute is constitutional," said James C. Goodale, who was the general counsel of The New York Times Company during the Pentagon Papers litigation. "Literally read, the statute must be violated countless times every year."

Rodney A. Smolla, the dean of the University of Richmond law school, took a middle ground. He said the existing laws were ambiguous but that in theory it could be constitutional to make receiving classified information a crime. However, he continued, the First Amendment may protect newspapers exposing wrongdoing by the government.

The two newspapers contend that their reporting did bring to light important information about potential government misconduct. Representatives of the papers said they had not been contacted by government investigators in connection with the two articles.

That is baffling, Mr. McCarthy said. At a minimum, he said, the reporters involved should be threatened with prosecution in an effort to learn their sources.

"If you think this is a serious offense and you really think national security has been damaged, and I do," he said, "you don't wait five or six months to ask the person who obviously knows the answer."

Case Against 2 Lobbyists

Curiously, perhaps the most threatening pending case for journalist is one brought against two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac. The lobbyists, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, were indicted in August on charges of violating the 1917 law by receiving and repeating national defense information to foreign officials and reporters.

The lobbyists say the case against them is functionally identical to potential cases against reporters.

"You can't say, 'Well, this is constitutional as applied to lobbyists, but it wouldn't be constitutional if applied to journalists,' " Abbe D. Lowell, a lawyer for Mr. Rosen, said at a hearing in the case last month, according to a court transcript.

In court papers filed in January, prosecutors disagreed, saying lobbyist and journalist were different. But they would not rule out the possibility of also charging journalists under the law.

"Prosecution under the espionage laws of an actual member of the press for publishing classified information leaked to it by a government source would raise legitimate and serious issues and would not be undertaken lightly," the papers said. Indeed, they continued, "the fact that there has never been such a prosecution speaks for itself."

Some First Amendment lawyers suspect that the case against the lobbyists is but a first step.

"From the point of view of the administration expanding its powers, the Aipac case is the perfect case," said Ronald K. L. Collins, a scholar at the First Amendment Center, a nonprofit educational group in Virginia. "It allows them to try to establish the precedent without going after the press."

    In Leak Cases, New Pressure on Journalists, NYT, 30.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/washington/30leak.html?hp&ex=1146456000&en=67c81f3c48cf2489&ei=5094&partner=homepage

The Nation

There Are Leaks. And Then There Are Leaks.

April 30, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON

AN intelligence leaker is a hero, risking career and more to reveal warrantless eavesdropping, interrogations bordering on torture, prisons out of reach of American law. Or the leaker is a villain, whose treachery endangers the lives of American operatives, exposes intelligence methods and scares off foreign agents.

Or a little bit of both.

In fact, American intelligence leaks have created divisions since the Revolutionary War, when the pamphleteer Thomas Paine publicized documents containing a state secret: that the United States received covert aid from France before it openly became an ally. Paine was forced to resign as secretary of a Congressional committee in 1779.

America's mixed feelings on leaks have rarely been on such striking display as they were this month. Three days after The Washington Post and The New York Times won Pulitzer Prizes for articles based on classified intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency fired a senior official, Mary O. McCarthy, for unauthorized disclosure of secrets to the press. And last week, Karl Rove, President Bush's political adviser, was back before a grand jury investigating whether administration officials had leaked a covert C.I.A. official's identity.

Without leaks, says Anthony A. Lapham, a former C.I.A. general counsel, there might never have been public debate over some measures used by intelligence agencies to fight terrorism. He thinks the debate may be worth whatever damage the leaks have done. But he cannot bring himself to approve of the leakers.

"There's a premise that it's O.K. for someone to leak because they're serving a higher purpose, a higher loyalty," he said. "Well, the next thing you know, you have a whole building full of people with a higher loyalty, each to a different principle. And pretty soon you don't have a functioning intelligence agency."

In the last three decades, there have been several other episodes in which an intelligence leak generated a national debate over the benefits and harm of such disclosures.

In 1974, for example, Seymour Hersh, then a reporter for The New York Times, chronicled the details of what government sources had leaked to him: a 690-page compilation of agency break-ins, wiretapping and reading of mail, plus files on 10,000 Americans.

Mr. Hersh began his Dec. 22, 1974, article: "The Central Intelligence Agency, directly violating its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States, according to well-placed government sources."

The article prompted a presidential commission and two Congressional inquiries, leading to new laws governing the spy agencies. Mr. Hersh, now with The New Yorker, declined to comment on his reporting or on leaks. "I never talk about sources," he said.

But Loch K. Johnson, an intelligence expert at the University of Georgia who served as a staff member on the Senate's Church Committee in 1975, did. "It's a beautiful example of how the press is really the most important overseer of intelligence in this country," Mr. Johnson said.

Then there was the case of Philip Agee, a C.I.A. officer from 1957 to 1969, serving mostly in Latin America. Mr. Agee gradually became not just a critic, but an avowed enemy of the agency and its mission. In a series of articles and books, he published the names of undercover C.I.A. officers and their agents. His books named more than 4,000 alleged C.I.A. operatives. "Millions of people all over the world had been killed or at least had had their lives destroyed by the C.I.A. and the institutions it supports," Mr. Agee told a Playboy interviewer in 1975. "I couldn't just sit by and do nothing."

But Mr. Agee's actions were widely condemned as leaking for the purpose of destruction, not reform; he was a leading figure in a practice that became a cottage industry for some radical publications in the 1970's. Most notoriously, a magazine called CounterSpy identified Richard Welch as the C.I.A. station chief in Athens and 18 months later, he was assassinated there. Mr. Agee has denied any responsibility for the death.

The work of Mr. Agee, who in recent years has run a travel agency in Cuba, inspired its own reform: the Intelligence Identities Act of 1982, which banned the disclosure of the names of undercover officers. One of the few investigations conducted under the law is the one in which Mr. Rove is now involved.

While liberals have generally been more inclined to suspicion of intelligence agencies, leaks have also come from conservatives. David S. Sullivan, for example, was forced to resign as an agency analyst in 1978 after he gave classified documents on strategic arms limitation talks with the Soviet Union to Richard Perle, then an aide to Senator Henry M. Jackson. Like Mr. Jackson, Mr. Sullivan was a hawk who believed, as he argued in a 1978 article, that the Soviets used arms talks as a "smokescreen" to hide their nuclear superiority.

Mr. Perle had a security clearance, but the leak to him was unauthorized.

Stansfield Turner, then director of central intelligence, later told a reporter that Mr. Sullivan had "jeopardized important secrets for our country." "He quit 30 seconds before I fired him," Mr. Turner said. Mr. Sullivan's conservative admirers disagreed, and he was hired as a Senate staffer.

A leaker does not have to work for an intelligence agency to face discipline. In 1996, the C.I.A. forced Richard A. Nuccio, a State Department official, out of his job by stripping him of his security clearance.

Mr. Nuccio had found evidence that a Guatemalan Army officer and C.I.A. informant, Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, might have played a role in the death of Efraín Bamaca, a Guatemalan guerrilla leader married to an American, Jennifer Harbury.

Mr. Nuccio gave the information to Senator Robert G. Torricelli, Democract of New Jersey, who quickly made it public. The C.I.A. director, John Deutch, fired two agency officials for their roles in the Guatemala affair. But he upheld a decision to revoke Mr. Nuccio's clearance.

Mr. Deutch also began to require special approval for the use of unsavory characters as agency informants — a policy suspended after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when officers argued that only terrorists would know of plans for the next attack.

The change in policy was immediately leaked to the press.

    There Are Leaks. And Then There Are Leaks., NYT, 30.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/weekinreview/30shane.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Fox Commentator to Join White House, Officials Say

April 26, 2006
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG

WASHINGTON, April 25 — Tony Snow, the Fox News radio and television commentator, has agreed to become the White House press secretary and could be officially named to the post as early as Wednesday, administration officials said on Tuesday.

Unlike the soft-spoken current press secretary, Scott McClellan, who announced his resignation last week, Mr. Snow is something of a showman, having earned his living in a world in which success hinges upon being provocative.

Mr. Snow has even written recent columns critical of Mr. Bush, arguing that his White House had lost its verve and direction in his second term.

A senior administration official said the president chose Mr. Snow, 50, to become one of the most visible faces of the administration because he understood newspapers, radio, television and government, having worked in all four areas.

This official, who was granted anonymity to speak about a major personnel move not yet announced by Mr. Bush, added that the White House was hoping that Mr. Snow would use his television skills to take better advantage of the daily briefings so often televised live on cable news, giving the administration unfiltered time to push its points of the day.

Mr. Snow is also a star in the conservative movement, some of whose members, including him, have been openly critical of the White House in recent months.

Mr. Snow could not be reached for comment Tuesday night.

His appointment would come as the new White House chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, is shuffling the president's top staff as part of an effort to salvage Mr. Bush's second-term agenda. One area on which Mr. Bolten has already focused is Mr. Bush's press operation, which he is trying to make more effective at presenting the president's message, Republicans with ties to the White House have said.

Mr. Snow is the host of "The Tony Snow Show" on radio and "Weekend Live with Tony Snow" on the Fox News Channel; he also had been the host of "Fox News Sunday," one of the five major Sunday morning public affairs programs. Before that, he was a columnist at USA Today and the editorial page editor of The Washington Times.

Mr. Snow took a break from journalism to work as a White House speechwriter for Mr. Bush's father.

His appointment as press secretary has been rumored for more than a week, even before Mr. McClellan's resigned. White House officials had expressed surprise at the rumors, however, and wondered whether the appointment would happen, given Mr. Snow's freewheeling style and some of his commentary.

In a column titled "Thud!" on his radio show Web site, Mr. Snow called the president's domestic policy proposals in his State of the Union address "lackluster" and worried that the president had a dearth of people around him willing to tell him when his ideas were bad. Mr. Snow added, however, that Mr. Bush was "the only figure who counts in American politics."

Late Tuesday, Democrats were already circulating, via e-mail messages, a link to a blog affiliated with the Center for American Progress, which features a list of Mr. Snow's critical comments about the president in his columns.

In a November column, posted on Townhall.com, Mr. Snow wrote of Mr. Bush: "His wavering conservatism has become an active concern among Republicans, who wish he would stop cowering under the bed and start fighting back against the likes of Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Wilson. The newly passive George Bush has become something of an embarrassment."

In a March column, Mr. Snow wrote, "A Republican president and a Republican Congress have lost control of the federal budget and cannot resist the temptation to stop raiding the public fisc." And he derided the new prescription drug benefit that Mr. Bush signed into law.

As press secretary, Mr. Snow would probably have to defend just such a program.

When asked about Mr. Snow's more critical comments, the administration official said, "What better way to pop the bubble that people think there is here."

Senior administration officials consider Mr. Snow to be just the sort of outsider for whom some of their concerned Republican allies have been calling.

Mr. Snow had surgery for colon cancer last year, and he was said to have been waiting for his doctors' approval before signing on as press secretary. He is healthy now, and his physicians carefully monitor his condition.

In the past week, Mr. Snow has also made it clear that he was negotiating for as much access as possible before taking the job. He said in an interview on the Fox News Channel that he was interested in the position because he would be part of "an inner White House circle."

Though White House officials have consistently said that Mr. McClellan has had all the access he wanted, the perception remained among members of both parties that he did not. Either way, the senior administration official who spoke for this article said Mr. Snow would have "walk-in privileges" and an important role in "strategic thinking."

It was unclear when Mr. Snow would start — and even whether the White House would announce his hiring on Wednesday or later in the week. But it seemed likely it would do so before the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner on Saturday — when Mr. Snow will either be sitting with his Fox News colleagues, or not.

    Fox Commentator to Join White House, Officials Say, NYT, 26.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/26/washington/26snow.html?hp&ex=1146110400&en=5ec1e2cd720c5d8a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

News Organizations Try to Block Subpoenas for Notes in Leak Case

April 19, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, April 18 — Lawyers for NBC News, The New York Times and Time magazine filed motions in federal court on Tuesday to quash subpoenas for interview notes, drafts of articles and other records sought by Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff in the C.I.A. leak case.

At the same time, The Washington Post said in a statement that it had received a subpoena last week for notes of the reporter and editor Bob Woodward and had turned material over to lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former Cheney aide who has been charged with lying to the grand jury in the leak inquiry.

"In order to comply with the subpoena, The Post produced the complete version of Bob Woodward's memo of his interview with Mr. Libby on June 27, 2003," the paper said Tuesday. "This action did not pose legal or journalistic concerns to The Post or Mr. Woodward."

The three news organizations that are resisting the subpoenas filed separate motions to block the records request, arguing in briefs that sounded similar themes, that the defense has asked for information that is irrelevant to the specific charges of perjury and obstruction brought in the indictment against Mr. Libby.

In addition, the briefs argued that procedural rules that prohibit unreasonable disclosure of information should be strictly applied in a case involving reporters. Lawyers for The New York Times argued that the newspaper "has a substantial First Amendment interest, and common law qualified privilege against compelled production of unpublished information of the kind sought by Libby."

Last month, Mr. Libby sought subpoenas for notes, calendars, records, interoffice messages, drafts of articles, and documents about communications among reporters and between reporters and editors about their knowledge of Valerie Plame Wilson, the Central Intelligence Agency officer at the heart of the leak case.

Mr. Libby told the grand jury that he believed her identity was known within the Washington press corps and that he needed to show her employment was being discussed in journalistic circles in June and July 2003 when he was meeting with reporters. Time's brief said such an assertion did not allow Mr. Libby to conduct a wide-ranging search for potentially helpful evidence.

"Although Mr. Libby has claimed a right to know what information the press corps in general possessed concerning Mrs. Wilson's affiliation with the C.I.A., under that theory he would be entitled to subpoena all reporters in Washington to learn what they knew, and when they knew it," the Time brief said. "There is no stopping point to this approach."

In addition to the news organizations, lawyers for Judith Miller, formerly a reporter for The New York Times, and Matthew Cooper, a Time reporter, filed separate briefs seeking to overturn subpoenas for their records. Each asserted that the request was too broad and sought material that had nothing to do with the charges against Mr. Libby.

Mr. Libby's lawyers had sought several categories of documents from NBC News and two of its well-known Washington journalists, Andrea Mitchell, a correspondent, and Tim Russert, moderator of "Meet the Press" and Washington bureau chief.

NBC News said in its brief that it had no documents that showed that any network employee, including Ms. Mitchell and Mr. Russert, knew that Ms. Wilson was employed by the C.I.A. before her identification in a newspaper column on July 14, 2003.

    News Organizations Try to Block Subpoenas for Notes in Leak Case, NYT, 19.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/19/washington/19libby.html

F.B.I. Is Seeking to Search Papers of Dead Reporter

April 19, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, April 18 — The F.B.I. is seeking to go through the files of the late newspaper columnist Jack Anderson to remove classified material he may have accumulated in four decades of muckraking Washington journalism.

Mr. Anderson's family has refused to allow a search of 188 boxes, the files of a well-known reporter who had long feuded with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and had exposed plans by the Central Intelligence Agency to kill Fidel Castro, the machinations of the Iran-contra affair and the misdeeds of generations of congressmen.

The columnist's son Kevin N. Anderson said that to allow government agents to rifle through the papers would betray his father's principles and intimidate other journalists, and that family members were willing to go to jail to protect the collection.

"It's my father's legacy," said Mr. Anderson, a Salt Lake City lawyer and one of the columnist's nine children. "The government has always and continues to this day to abuse the secrecy stamp. My father's view was that the public is the employer of these government employees and has the right to know what they're up to."

The F.B.I. says the dispute over the papers, which await cataloging at George Washington University here, is a simple matter of law.

"It's been determined that among the papers there are a number of classified U.S. government documents," said Bill Carter, an F.B.I. spokesman.

"Under the law," Mr. Carter said, "no private person may possess classified documents that were illegally provided to them. These documents remain the property of the government."

The standoff, which appears to have begun with an F.B.I. effort to find evidence for the criminal case against two pro-Israel lobbyists, has quickly hardened into a new test of the Bush administration's protection of government secrets and journalists' ability to report on them.

F.B.I. agents are investigating several leaks of classified information, including details of domestic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency and the secret overseas jails for terror suspects run by the C.I.A.

In addition, the two lobbyists, former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, face trial next month for receiving classified information, in a case criticized by civil liberties advocates as criminalizing the routine exchange of inside information.

The National Archives recently suspended a program in which intelligence agencies had pulled thousands of historical documents from public access on the ground that they should still be classified.

But the F.B.I.'s quest for secret material leaked years ago to a now-dead journalist, first reported Tuesday in the Chronicle of Higher Education, seems unprecedented, said several people with long experience in First Amendment law.

"I'm not aware of any previous government attempt to retrieve such material," said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "Librarians and historians are having a fit, and I can't imagine a bigger chill to journalists."

The George Washington University librarian, Jack Siggins, said the university strongly objected to the F.B.I.'s removing anything from the Anderson archive.

"We certainly don't want anyone going through this material, let alone the F.B.I., if they're going to pull documents out," Mr. Siggins said. "We think Jack Anderson represents something important in American culture — answers to the question, How does our government work?"

Mr. Anderson was hired as a reporter in 1947 by Drew Pearson, who bequeathed to him a popular column called Washington Merry-Go-Round.

Mr. Anderson developed Parkinson's disease and did little reporting for the column in the 15 years before his death in December at 83, said Mark Feldstein, director of the journalism program at George Washington, who is writing a book about him.

His files were stored for years at Brigham Young University before being transferred to George Washington at Mr. Anderson's request last year, but the F.B.I. apparently made no effort to search them.

"They waited until he was dead," Kevin Anderson said. He said F.B.I. agents first approached his mother, Olivia, 79, early this year.

"They talked about the Aipac case and that they thought Dad had some classified documents and they wanted to take fingerprints from them" to identify possible sources, he recalled. "But they said they wanted to look at all 200 boxes and if they found anything classified they'd be duty-bound to take them."

Both Kevin Anderson and Mr. Feldstein, the journalism professor, said they did not think the columnist ever wrote about Aipac, and his health was too impaired to have reported on the group in recent years.

Mr. Anderson said he thought the Aipac case was a pretext for a broader search, a conclusion shared by others, including Thomas S. Blanton, who oversees the National Security Archive, a collection of historic documents at George Washington.

"Recovery of leaked C.I.A. and White House documents that Jack Anderson got back in the 70's has been on the F.B.I.'s wanted list for decades," Mr. Blanton said.

Jack Anderson had a well-documented feud with the F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover, whose trash he once searched and who once described the columnist as "lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures."

Mr. Carter of the F.B.I. declined to comment on any connection to the Aipac case or to say how the bureau learned that classified documents were in the Anderson files.

Mr. Feldstein, whose book, "Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture" is to be published next year, said he found it "a little daunting" when F.B.I. agents came to his house last month to ask about the Anderson documents. He found that they knew little about the columnist and his work.

Asked what the columnist might make of the F.B.I.'s actions, Mr. Feldstein said, "He'd be thunderously outraged, and privately bemused by the ineptness of his old adversaries."

    F.B.I. Is Seeking to Search Papers of Dead Reporter, NYT, 19.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/19/washington/19anderson.html?hp&ex=1145505600&en=ba1614ccd2cc0a5f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Storm-hit newspapers win Pulitzer

Mon Apr 17, 2006 5:53 PM ET
Reuters
By Ellen Wulfhorst

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Two newspapers hard-hit by Hurricane Katrina won the top U.S. journalism prizes on Monday for their coverage of the storm -- even as the deadly water and wind damaged their offices and left many staffers homeless.

The Times-Picayune of New Orleans received the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting. It also shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with The Sun Herald of Biloxi, Mississippi, for their handling of the August 29 storm and aftermath.

The 90th annual Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, Letters, Drama and Music were announced by Columbia University in New York City.

"The Board regards this as extraordinary work by two papers ... in the aftermath of Katrina, which is considered the nation's worst natural disaster," said Sig Gissler, Pulitzer Prize administrator.

The storm battered hundreds of miles of the U.S. Gulf Coast, killing about 1,600 people and leaving hundreds of thousands of others homeless.

In New Orleans, 80 percent of which was flooded, most businesses have not reopened and many residents have not returned. Complaints have persisted that the federal government has failed to provide adequate relief.

The two award-winning newspaper provided their coverage even as they, too, suffered from the storm's wrath.

The New Orleans paper's offices were flooded, and many of its staffers were forced to flee, when the city's levees gave way. A makeshift newsroom was set up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, about 80 miles away.

News of the prizes evoked tears and cheers from the reporters, editors and family members who gathered in the Times-Picayune newsroom in anticipation of the celebration.

"We have an extraordinary team of journalists and employees in this company who are absolutely dedicated to getting this paper out, no matter what the conditions are, people who lost their homes, who didn't know what had become of their families and who kept on working," said editor Jim Amoss.

Biloxi's Sun Herald won "for its valorous and comprehensive coverage of Hurricane Katrina, providing a lifeline for devastated readers," the Pulitzer Board said. The Public Service award is considered the most prestigious.

For photographs that "depicted the chaos and pain" of the hurricane, The Dallas Morning News won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography.

The Washington Post won four Pulitzers, the most of any newspaper this year. The prize for Investigative Reporting went to the Post's Susan Schmidt, James Grimaldi and R. Jeffrey Smith for their probe of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff that exposed corruption and prompted reform efforts.

The Pulitzer for Explanatory Reporting went to The Post's David Finkel for his case study of the U.S. government's attempt to bring democracy to Yemen. The Post's Dana Priest won the prize for Beat Reporting for coverage of secret prisons and other controversial features of the Bush administration's counterterrorism campaign and the Pulitzer for Criticism went to Robin Givhan for her writing about fashion.

The Pulitzer for National Reporting was shared by The New York Times' James Risen and Eric Lichtblau for articles on secret domestic eavesdropping and the staffs of The San Diego Union-Tribune and Copley News Service, with notable work by Marcus Stern and Jerry Kammer, for their disclosure of bribe-taking that sent former Republican U.S. Rep. Randy Cunningham of California to prison.

Also at The New York Times, the prize for International Reporting went to Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley for stories on justice in China. Nicholas Kristof won in the category of Commentary for columns on genocide in Darfur.

For Feature Writing, Jim Sheeler of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver won for his story on a Marine major who helps families of comrades killed in Iraq. The Rocky Mountain News' Todd Heisler won for Feature Photography for his behind-the-scenes look at funerals for Marines who return from Iraq in caskets.

The Oregonian's Rick Attig and Doug Bates won for their editorials on abuses inside a forgotten Oregon mental hospital, while the prize for Editorial Cartooning went to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Mike Luckovich.

(Additional reporting by Jeff Jones in New Orleans and Matthew Robinson in New York)

    Storm-hit newspapers win Pulitzer, R, 17.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyid=2006-04-17T215321Z_01_N17283826_RTRUKOC_0_US-MEDIA-PULITZERS.xml

Report Faults Video Reports Shown as News

April 6, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID BARSTOW

Many television news stations, including some from the nation's largest markets, are continuing to broadcast reports as news without disclosing that the segments were produced by corporations pitching new products, according to a report to be released today by a group that monitors the news media.

Television news directors have said that the segments, known as video news releases, are almost never broadcast, but the group assembled television videotape from 69 stations that it said had broadcast fake news segments in the past 10 months.

The new report was prepared by the Center for Media and Democracy, which is based in Wisconsin and which describes itself as dedicated to "exposing public relations spin and propaganda."

The report said none of the stations had disclosed that the segments were produced by publicists representing companies like General Motors, Capital One and Pfizer.

The center also said that many of the 69 stations took steps to blend the fake segments into their news broadcasts. Some had their news reporters or anchors read scripts supplied by corporations, the report said, and many had altered screen graphics to include the station's logo.

The report said that a few stations had introduced publicists as if they were their on-air reporters. Only a handful of stations added any independently gathered information or videotape, it said.

The 69 stations reach about half the population of the United States.

The report is noteworthy because the use of video news releases has come under fresh scrutiny in Congress and at the Federal Communications Commission.

Congress and the F.C.C. took up the issue last spring after The New York Times reported that the federal government had produced hundreds of video news releases, many of which were broadcast without a disclaimer of the government's role.

Congress passed legislation temporarily requiring videos from federal agencies to clearly disclose the government's authorship.

The F.C.C. warned that stations broadcasting video news releases "generally must clearly disclose to members of their audiences the nature, source and sponsorship of the material that they are viewing."

The agency threatened to fine violators and said it would study whether new regulations were needed.

Television news directors have resisted new rules. They have said that video news releases are an isolated problem. Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio-Television News Directors Association, has compared the releases to the Loch Ness monster. "Everyone talks about it, but not many people have actually seen it," The Washington Times quoted her as saying last summer.

Station managers promised vigilance, and the directors association published guidelines that said video news releases should be used sparingly and always with their origins fully disclosed to viewers.

In an interview on Wednesday, Ms. Cochran said new regulations were an unnecessary and potentially dangerous government intrusion into television journalism. "Where does it stop?" she asked, adding, "It is up to the individual stations to look at their practices and tighten up."

The new report says the guidelines are often disregarded.

The center planned to release its findings today on its Web site and at a news conference in Washington. On the Web site, www.prwatch.org, viewers will be able to view the original video news releases and watch how local stations used them.

The center presented its findings yesterday to F.C.C. officials, including Jonathan S. Adelstein, a commissioner who has criticized video news releases. In an interview, Mr. Adelstein called the cases in the report a "disgrace to American journalism" and evidence of "potentially major violations" of F.C.C. rules.

"I'm stunned by the scope of what they found," he said. "I guess they found the Loch Ness monster."

    Report Faults Video Reports Shown as News, NYT, 6.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/06/business/media/06video.html

US offers Iraq journalists new safeguards

Mon Mar 20, 2006 7:54 AM ET
Reuters
By Alastair Macdonald

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military is offering new safeguards to journalists in Iraq to prevent a repeat of lengthy detentions suffered by several reporters last year.

Abandoning a policy that denied journalists special status -- and under which three Reuters staff were jailed for up to eight months -- the general in charge of detentions said such arrests would now be treated as "almost unique" cases.

Reports of abuse will also be investigated, including a beating in custody that left a Reuters cameraman unconscious.

Responding to requests from international media, Major General Jack Gardner said the US military would conduct swift, high-level reviews in which news organizations could vouch for any reporter suspected of hostile acts.

Troops should also be given better training -- people acting the roles of journalists should be included in simulated combat exercises soldiers undertake before being sent to Iraq, he said.

"We obviously do not want to discourage the press from being present," Gardner told Reuters in an interview at the weekend. "It helps serve the good purposes" of the U.S. mission in Iraq.

Accepting an argument previously rejected by the military that media personnel need special safeguards against wrongful arrest, Gardner said: "Probably more than most professions, journalists may be on the street" during combat operations.

Troops would now immediately report the arrest of anyone claiming to be a journalist to Gardner personally. He would check with employers and release bona fide reporters rapidly.

"Once a journalist is detained ... it comes to me ... Then we work the process more quickly," he added, citing a target of within 36 hours for addressing doubts over reporters' actions.

"We'll make sure ... we don't hold someone for six or eight months," Gardner said. Watching or filming combat or meeting insurgents were not in themselves grounds for arrest, he added.

Since January, no new detentions of journalists had needed his attention, he said. One reporter for foreign media was still in custody, a cameraman for U.S. network CBS arrested in April.

Reuters Global Managing Editor David Schlesinger said: "I am very encouraged that General Gardner is reflecting on ways the U.S. military can work better with professional journalists doing their jobs under difficult circumstances. Better training and better processes are extremely important first steps."

COSTLY CONFLICT

Media rights groups have complained about detentions by U.S. forces and about killings of journalists. Four Reuters cameramen have been killed in Iraq, at least three by American soldiers.

In all, 67 deaths since the U.S. invasion three years ago have made Iraq the costliest conflict for the media since 1945.

Gardner said rules of engagement made clear troops should not fire on cameramen.

Samir Mohammed Noor, 30, a freelance cameraman for Reuters was arrested at his home by Iraqi and U.S. troops -- and then beaten senseless -- in the northern city of Tal Afar on June 1.

Only in December, after the detentions of Ali al-Mashhadani, 36, on August 8 and Majed Hameed, 23, on September 14, both in the western city of Ramadi, did U.S. officers provide anything more than general comments that the journalists were seen as threats.

Noor and Hameed, who also works for Al-Arabiya television, were denounced by unidentified people as "terrorists", a senior officer said in December. He said troops who arrested Mashhadani alleged he had film showing prior knowledge of a rebel attack -- but that film was "destroyed" before investigators saw it.

All three were freed in January.

The United Nations and others have criticized the military for detaining over 14,000 people in Iraq at present, many for months or even years, saying they lack access to legal process.

Gardner said he would look into Noor's complaint that he was beaten unconscious by a unit including Iraqi and U.S. soldiers, and abusive practices at a jail at Tal Afar. U.S. soldiers made detainees stand on one leg for long periods as a punishment.

Hameed said an interrogator introduced himself as an American journalist. Gardner said this was in breach of policy.

Noor said his worst moment was when an American interrogator told him he would to spend 30 years in Abu Ghraib prison.

Over months at Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca, during which they had little or no access to lawyers or families, all were angered by their captors' refusal, despite a lack of evidence, to accept they were simply reporters and not working with the guerrillas.

One U.S. interrogator told Hameed: "Every time you film an attack on Americans it's a shot in the arm for the insurgents."

    US offers Iraq journalists new safeguards, R, 20.3.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-03-20T125401Z_01_MAC957770_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true&src=cms&src=cms

Media Frenzy

Before Its Time, the Death of a Newspaper Chain

March 19, 2006
The New York Times
By RICHARD SIKLOS

ONLY a handful of days have passed since he announced the deal to sell Knight Ridder, but P. Anthony Ridder, the company's chairman and chief executive, already has ghosts to contend with. The biggest, of course, is the pending disappearance of the company his great-grandfather, Herman, founded in 1892 — Ridder Publications, which merged in 1974 with Knight Newspapers to create what has for much of recent memory been the nation's second-largest newspaper group, with 32 dailies.

But he also has to wrestle with the fact — apparently unknown to him until the deal was sealed — that the buyer, the McClatchy Company, plans to turn around and sell 12 of Knight Ridder's biggest papers, representing nearly half its $3 billion in annual revenue. "It's terrible," Mr. Ridder said after the deal was announced. "The whole thing."

Then why did he do it? Mr. Ridder's heartfelt contention is that he was boxed into a corner, and he extracted the best outcome from a tough situation. With its stock lagging and its biggest shareholder, Private Capital Management, agitating for change since last fall, Mr. Ridder had few options.

He personally owns only 1.9 percent of the company's shares, and Knight Ridder isn't governed by the kind of dual-tier share structure that keeps voting control in the hands of a founding family and is quite common in the media industry. (One example is the arrangement at The New York Times Company.) An argument can be made, and has been, that Mr. Ridder struck a good deal with a preferred acquirer. But it doesn't quite add up. The end of Knight Ridder looks like nothing so much as a stunning capitulation in a period when every bean-counting fund manager can fancy himself an activist and media companies are in the investment dog house. It wasn't ever thus, and it may not be thus forever. One wonders if another chief executive — one with the vigor and vision of, say, Gary B. Pruitt of McClatchy, his much smaller acquirer — might have toughed it out and generated a different outcome.

Under Tony Ridder, Knight Ridder over the years faced a seemingly never-ending series of financial struggles at big newspapers in Detroit, Seattle, Philadelphia and elsewhere. Cost-cutting reduced some news staffs to a shadow of their former selves, but overall the company maintained a reputation for respected journalism. Mr. Ridder, well-meaning as he was, did not have an answer for the perennial riddle of why his company's margins didn't measure up to rivals like Gannett and McClatchy.

"He wasn't a good operator," said Christopher H. Browne of the Tweedy, Browne Company, an investment firm that has several investments in newspaper companies, including the Tribune Company. "Look at McClatchy, and it's night and day."

The newspaper industry itself, meanwhile, has come under a cloud because readers and advertisers are migrating to the Internet, where news is largely free and things like classified advertising can be purchased much more cheaply than what the local paper charges.

Despite a long track record of investing in online ventures, and even relocating the company's headquarters from Miami to San Jose, Calif., in 1998 — ostensibly to soak up a little Silicon Valley effluvium — the company never stole a march on the Web-heads down the road. During last summer and fall, newspapers stocks went into the doldrums along with much else in media land.

So in November, Bruce S. Sherman, the accomplished money manager at Private Capital Management of Naples, Fla., wrote to Knight Ridder's board to say that despite recent efforts by the company, he and other stockholders had run out of patience. "We believe the board should aggressively pursue the competitive sale of the company," the letter said, noting that otherwise his firm would consider joining forces with others to replace the board or "take other action to maximize shareholder value."

The Knight Ridder board enlisted Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to do as Mr. Sherman bade. He is, after all, the company's largest shareholder, with 19 percent. But at the end of the process, which attracted interest from Gannett, William Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group and various private equity groups, only McClatchy made a formal bid: valuing the company at $4.5 billion, it would buy Knight Ridder through a combination of cash and stock.

The structure of the deal is a crucial point, with Knight Ridder shareholders to receive $40 in cash and 0.5118 of McClatchy Class A share for each of their shares. When the deal was announced Monday, its value was put at $67.25 a share — a nice premium above the $53.38 Knight Ridder was trading at when Mr. Sherman fired off his letter. But as of Friday that deal's value was down to $65.39 a share as investors worried about the debt McClatchy was taking on. Two years ago, Knight Ridder traded around $70 a share.

Mr. Sherman, in the end, may eke out a small profit on his firm's investment. "When the world thinks you may have struck out, it's not bad when you hit a single," he said after the deal was announced.

Indeed, Mr. Sherman must positively delight at how, with a single letter, he could move a mountain. Let's contrast Knight Ridder's rolling over with how Time Warner recently dealt with demands from the financier Carl C. Icahn to break up that company, which has been a stinker of an investment. Of course, there is a gigantic difference: Mr. Icahn and his allies had only 3 percent of the company's shares behind them, and Time Warner is too vast a company for anyone to take over.

In the immortal words of the media and Internet baron Barry Diller, Mr. Icahn represented a "bad-part-of-town brush fire" for Time Warner. Still, Richard D. Parsons, Time Warner's chief executive, went out of his way to try to work out a deal with Mr. Icahn because he was worried that the wind might change and blow the fire into the better parts of town.

But it is illuminating to compare tactics. Mr. Parsons consistently said his company had a brighter future intact rather than in pieces, that he would seriously consider any ideas to return money to stockholders, and all the while hedged that he could not control market sentiments.

Perhaps most important, Mr. Parsons kept other big investors on his side by shrewdly making this an ideological battle between people who build businesses for the long term and the growing influence of hedge funds and other investors who specialize in exploiting vulnerability for short-term profit.

Last month, Mr. Icahn called off his planned proxy fight, intended to put several directors on Time Warner's board, in exchange for some fairly innocuous concessions from Mr. Parsons. But Time Warner did agree to one significant change: increasing a stock buyback program from $5 billion, when Mr. Icahn began pushing, to an agreed-upon $20 billion.

(By the way, there are influential Time Warner investors, and even senior managers within the company, who think he should have rebuffed Mr. Icahn and fought the proxy battle rather than agree to the big increase in debt that the buyback entails.)

IN the Knight Ridder camp, there are some who depict Mr. Ridder, his senior managers and his board as frustrated and fatigued by their recent travails. Mr. Ridder contends that had he not done the McClatchy deal, Mr. Sherman and other investors would eventually have taken over his board. Thus, he did what he did while he could still control the outcome, seeking to avoid a prolonged period of uncertainty for the papers and their employees.

Here's another ghost: What would have happened if Knight Ridder had made a bold declaration that the sky was not falling on newspapers? It might have said that other media company stocks have suffered just as much in the last year and thanked McClatchy for its kind offer, but decided it could do better as a going concern. It could have said that in order to fulfill its duty to investors it was willing to take bitter medicine, including more painful cost-cutting and selling some of its biggest newspapers to focus on higher-growth markets.

Apparently, this latter bit was just too depressing for Mr. Ridder to contemplate, but was what Mr. Pruitt of McClatchy had in mind all along. It's called creative destruction.

    Before Its Time, the Death of a Newspaper Chain, NYT, 19.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/business/yourmoney/19frenzy.html

News outlets subpoenaed in CIA leak case

Thu Mar 16, 2006 9:31 PM ET
Reuters
By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Lawyers for former vice presidential aide Lewis "Scooter' Libby are seeking records from reporters at several news organizations that might help in his perjury defense, the media outlets said on Thursday.

The New York Times, NBC News and a lawyer for a Time magazine reporter said they received subpoenas from the defense team for Libby, once chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. The Washington Post said it expected to receive a subpoena as well.

The subpoenas again thrust the news media into the thick of the investigation into who in the Bush administration revealed the identity of a CIA official after her husband criticized the administration's Iraq policy.

Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald relied on reporters' testimony to bring perjury charges against Libby last fall after an appeals court ordered them to cooperate. Reporter Judith Miller, then of The New York Times, spent 85 days in jail before agreeing to testify.

The subpoenas issued this week indicate Libby's legal team hopes to enlist reporters for his defense as well.

Libby's lawyers hope to prove he did not intentionally lie to the FBI and a federal grand jury but was simply too distracted with national security matters to accurately remember his conversations with Miller and other reporters about the CIA official, Valerie Plame.

One of Libby's attorneys, William Jeffress, declined to say which news organizations he had subpoenaed.

A subpoena delivered to The New York Times on Wednesday asked the newspaper to hand over notes, e-mail messages, draft news articles and all other documents that refer to Plame before July 14, 2003, when her identity was made public.

Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said the newspaper had not yet decided whether to comply with the subpoena. News organizations have until April 7 to challenge the request.

Mathis said Miller, who has since left the Times, received a separate subpoena. A lawyer for Miller did not return a call seeking comment.

NBC News Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper also received subpoenas, said representatives, who declined further comment.

Washington Post spokesman Eric Grant said, "The Post has not yet received a subpoena, but we anticipate receiving one."

A subpoena to the Post could force star reporter Bob Woodward to reveal who in the government told him Plame's identity more than a month before it was made public. It is against the law for a government official to knowingly expose a CIA agent.

    News outlets subpoenaed in CIA leak case, R, 16.3.2006, http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-03-17T023133Z_01_N16355556_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-LEAK-NYTIMES.xml

New York Times says subpoenaed in CIA leak case

Thu Mar 16, 2006 1:57 AM ET
Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Lawyers for a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney have issued subpoenas to The New York Times and one of its former reporters to provide information in his obstruction of justice case, the Times reported on Thursday.

Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, has pleaded not guilty to five counts of perjury, making a false statement and obstruction of justice over leaks about the identity of a CIA operative.

Former Times reporter Judith Miller testified before the grand jury after serving 85 days in jail to protect a source of the disclosure who was later identified as Libby. She left the Times in November.

The subpoenas from Libby's lawyers request Miller's notes and other materials.

Court papers released in February show that Libby was authorized to disclose classified information to reporters in an effort to counteract a charge by diplomat Joe Wilson that the Bush administration twisted intelligence on Iraq to justify the 2003 invasion of the country.

Libby's charges stem from the leak of the identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, which effectively ended her career at the CIA.

A New York Times Co. spokeswoman could not immediately be reached for comment.

    New York Times says subpoenaed in CIA leak case, R, 16.3.2006, http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-03-16T065740Z_01_N16106428_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-LEAK-NYTIMES.xml

Pennsylvania prosecutors seize paper's hard drives

Posted 3/15/2006 8:13 PM
USA Today
By Maryclaire Dale, Associated Press Writer

PHILADELPHIA — State prosecutors seized four computers from a newsroom as part of a grand jury probe into whether a county coroner gave reporters his password to a secure law enforcement website, the newspaper said Wednesday.

The Intelligencer Journal of Lancaster had offered to provide the information sought through less intrusive means or to search the computers in the newsroom, newspaper officials said. But prosecutors won a court battle to take the hard drives.

Harold E. Miller Jr., the president and chief executive of parent Lancaster Newspapers Inc., said the ruling dismayed his reporters and could have a chilling effect on newsgathering.

"You get to the point where sources have confidence that we'll do the right thing and that our industry's protected. They'll talk to us," Miller said. "Without that confidence, we lose our ability to do our job."

Kevin Harley, a spokesman for state Attorney General Tom Corbett, declined comment, citing grand jury rules.

Prosecutors have pledged to limit their search to items related to the Lancaster County-Wide Communications' Computer Assisted Dispatch website, which contains details about criminal investigations.

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Washington, decried the seizure.

"Once you turn your hard drives over to a government entity and they have your computers, they essentially have access to the newsroom," she said. "It's not like it was in the days when we were all typing out on manual typewriters. It's like going into the brain of the newsroom and dissecting it. I find that horrifying."

Investigators believe reporters used information from the website to write stories or help them ask specific questions.

Lancaster Coroner G. Gary Kirchner has denied giving reporters access to the website. No criminal charges have been filed in the case.

    Pennsylvania prosecutors seize paper's hard drives, UT, 15.3.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-03-15-hard-drives_x.htm

Mike Wallace Says He Will Retire From '60 Minutes' in Spring

March 15, 2006
The New York Times
By JACQUES STEINBERG

When asked in an interview last April if he would ever consider retiring from the CBS News program "60 Minutes," Mike Wallace said that he planned to do so only "when my toes turn up."

"Well," Mr. Wallace said, amending that statement in an interview yesterday, "they're just beginning to curl a trifle."

After serving as a correspondent on "60 Minutes" since its inception in September 1968, Mr. Wallace said yesterday that he had decided to retire this spring, at the end of the current television season.

He said that the move had come at his initiative, and that "CBS is not pushing me."

His decision provides a capstone to a remarkable career in journalism, which he began at CBS in 1951 and during which he became one of the few pioneers who could lay legitimate claim to helping invent the television interview.

Those from whom he coaxed and cajoled information over the years included, according to the CBS News Web site, Eleanor Roosevelt and Louis Farrakhan, Ronald Reagan and Carol Burnett, Kurt Waldheim and Dr. Jack Kevorkian, Vladimir Horowitz and Vladimir Putin, Menachem Begin, Anwar el-Sadat and Yasir Arafat.

"As I approach my 88th birthday, it's become apparent to me that my eyes and ears, among other appurtenances, aren't quite what they used to be," said Mr. Wallace, whose birthday is May 9. "The prospect of long flights to wherever in search of whatever are not quite as appealing."

CBS had announced nearly three years ago that Mr. Wallace was cutting his workload for the program. But he had found it difficult to remain idle, and had 11 original reports on "60 Minutes" last season, including interviews that had ranged, in typical Wallace fashion, from talking international politics with Mr. Putin to talking steroids with Jose Canseco.

When you include updates he did for previous reports about Johnny Carson, Mr. Arafat and others, Mr. Wallace's count last season begins to approach a full load, which, on "60 Minutes," is 20. When asked in the April interview why he kept up this pace, he said, "I wouldn't know what else to do."

In the current television season, he has had six segments broadcast so far, with his most recent, about how some members of the American military were recovering from severe wounds sustained in Iraq, appearing on Feb. 12.

But for all of Mr. Wallace's continued productivity and previous public statements that he had no plans to retire, Jeff Fager, executive producer of "60 Minutes," said that in private "he's been talking about it over the past several years."

"We've all kind of talked him out of it," Mr. Fager said. "This year, he wants to do it."

Mr. Wallace's departure will lower the median age of the corps of correspondents on "60 Minutes" but not by much. Andy Rooney will succeed Mr. Wallace as the oldest contributor, at 87, with Lara Logan the youngest at 34.

The show could further evolve this fall, if CBS succeeds in its efforts to woo Katie Couric of NBC to its ranks with a full-time role as anchor of the "CBS Evening News" and, perhaps, a part-time role on "60 Minutes."

Don Hewitt, the founding executive producer of "60 Minutes" who was himself pressured into retirement in 2004, said he sensed from recent conversations with Mr. Wallace that he had felt conflicted about his future at CBS.

"I don't believe even he is sure this is something he wants," said Mr. Hewitt, 83. "And I'm not sure it's something he doesn't want.

"There's being pushed, and there's being pushed. Did somebody say, 'Get out'? I'm not sure. Did someone kind of make it apparent that the time has come? I think you better ask Mike about that."

Mr. Hewitt added: "You get to a certain age. Your bones ache a little. You get up in the morning and you're not as gung-ho as you thought you were going to be. You hang onto who you were because you don't know any better."

Mr. Wallace said yesterday that he would continue to have an office at CBS, "on the same floor, just around the corner from where I've holed up for 43 years."

Although Mr. Wallace first joined the network in 1951, he departed four years later, returning again as a correspondent in 1963, according to his biography on the CBS News Web site. His title, the network said in a news release, will be correspondent emeritus.

"I'll be available when asked for whatever chores CBS News, '60 Minutes,' 'The Evening News,' etcetera, have in mind for me," Mr. Wallace said.

"Plus," he added, "longer vacations."

    Mike Wallace Says He Will Retire From '60 Minutes' in Spring, NYT, 15.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/15/business/media/15mike.html

Scant Bidding for Knight Ridder Tells Story of Decline

March 13, 2006
The New York Times
By RICHARD SIKLOS

Knight Ridder ended up attracting only one newspaper bidder in its highly publicized auction, underscoring the fog hanging over the industry and the unique challenges facing the company.

It was not much of an auction. No other newspaper company ended up submitting a formal offer for Knight Ridder, including Gannett, the nation's largest publisher, which had looked at it closely. Analysts and industry executives said they were also surprised that various consortia of private equity firms also demurred. Newspapers, these executives noted, have the capacity to generate large amounts of cash flow that can be used to pay down debt.

Not long ago the second-biggest newspaper company in the country would undoubtedly have drawn a fair amount of interest. That it did not does not speak well for newspaper companies; their stock prices have already fallen because of the Internet's increasing popularity with readers and advertisers. But the auction, and its meaning for the newspaper industry, could have been worse: at least Knight Ridder found an acceptable offer.

As the operator of 32 daily newspapers, Knight Ridder offered potential buyers access to major newspapers in such markets as Fort Worth, St. Paul, Kansas City and Miami. Yet over all, the company has underperformed other large newspaper groups as it has struggled to make a financial success of some of its biggest markets, including Philadelphia, where it owns both of the city's major dailies.

And despite the decision of the chief executive, P. Anthony Ridder, to move the company's headquarters to San Jose, Calif., from Miami in 1998 to be closer to Silicon Valley, the company has failed to reassure investors that the digital age represents more of an opportunity than a threat to its business.

In agreeing to be acquired by the McClatchy Company, a significantly smaller enterprise but one with a strong recent history of operating results, Knight Ridder is acceding to pressure from its largest shareholder, Private Capital Management, which said the company's managers had run out of time and chances.

"The group of newspapers are somewhat different from those that McClatchy has operated in the past, and it's going to be tough unless they have some secret plan or secret sauce that Tony Ridder didn't have," said Barry Lucas, a newspaper analyst at Gabelli & Company.

Mr. Lucas said that whether a purchase price of about $67 a share in cash and stock is considered a good one is difficult to say. He estimated that McClatchy was paying roughly 10 times Knight Ridder's cash flow in its last year, and a premium over what the shares traded at when shareholders began agitating for its sale last November.

But Mr. Lucas also noted that when Lee Enterprises acquired Pulitzer Inc. in January 2005, it paid 13 to 14 times cash flow, a considerably richer multiple.

Mr. Lucas said he had a buy recommendation on McClatchy and no rating on Knight Ridder. He owns no shares in either company, but an affiliate of Gabelli does.

In addition to the question of whether newspapers can thrive in the digital age, observers also noted that because Knight Ridder owned many of its newspapers for a long time, a financial buyer would face considerable tax issues if it tried to sell off properties piecemeal.

Knight Ridder had set a floor price of $65 on any potential deal.

"It's a good sign that the bidder who came in above the floor was a newspaper company," said Clark Gilbert, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied newspapers. "That signals that they believe there is inherent underlying value in the stock. If no newspaper company had come in, it would have been a worse signal: 'We don't think our own industry has a great future.' "

Katherine Q. Seelye contributed reporting for this article.

    Scant Bidding for Knight Ridder Tells Story of Decline, NYT, 13.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/business/media/13press.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Newspaper Chain Agrees to a Sale for $4.5 Billion

March 13, 2006
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and ANDREW ROSS SORKIN

Knight Ridder, the second-largest newspaper company in the United States, agreed Sunday night to sell itself for about $4.5 billion in cash and stock to the McClatchy Company, a publisher half its size, according to people involved in the negotiations.

The deal, which is expected to be announced Monday, comes as the newspaper industry is gripped by uncertainty. Readers have begun to drift away from printed newspapers as their Web sites have experienced sharp gains in use.

The sale may help assuage some investors who are nervous about the values of newspaper companies, however, because Knight Ridder commanded a premium of about 25 percent for its shares from the time it put itself up for sale in November under pressure from shareholders who were unhappy with performance of its stock. Still, McClatchy, which is based in Sacramento and publishes The Sacramento Bee and The Minneapolis Star Tribune, among others, was the only major newspaper company to submit a final bid for Knight Ridder, publisher of 32 daily newspapers, including such venerable papers as The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The San Jose Mercury News.

While it attracted interest from some big publishers, including Gannett, the largest chain in the United States, most major newspaper companies like The Washington Post Company, the Tribune Company and Dow Jones passed on the auction entirely, underscoring just how unsettled the biggest players are about their own business.

Under the terms of the deal, McClatchy agreed to pay about $67 a share in cash and stock for Knight Ridder, these people said. About 60 percent of the payment will be in cash, while the rest will be in McClatchy shares. On Friday, Knight Ridder's shares rose 4 percent in anticipation that a deal would be reached over the weekend. But those shares had been trading at about $53 a share when Bruce Sherman, a Knight Ridder shareholder, went public with his efforts to put pressure on the company to put itself up for sale.

The tentative package is not nearly as big as the $8 billion purchase of Times Mirror by the Tribune Company in 2000. But it comes at a time of deep uncertainty for the print side of the newspaper industry, as readers and advertisers migrate to the Internet. That Knight Ridder was for sale at all was perceived as a sign of the industry's weakness.

Because Knight Ridder is so much bigger than McClatchy, the merger is likely to create some upheaval for both companies. McClatchy could sell or close some of the Knight Ridder papers and could take further cost-control measures in its own newsrooms to help finance the deal.

Knight Ridder, based in San Jose, Calif., has almost three times as many dailies as the 12 owned by McClatchy. Knight Ridder's $3 billion in revenue for 2005 was more than twice McClatchy's $1.2 billion.

"McClatchy is a dolphin swallowing a small whale," said Chuck Richard, an analyst at Outsell Inc., a research firm for the information industry.

Still, the prospect of a McClatchy takeover may bring some relief within Knight Ridder, where some had feared a takeover by investors who had little newspaper experience and were likely to strip down the properties and eventually sell them off.

McClatchy has one of the strongest track records in the newspaper business, both for award-winning journalism in its generally small and medium circulation categories, and financially. The industry has faced declining circulation and falling stock prices in the last several years, but McClatchy, through the end of 2004, had 20 consecutive years of circulation increases and 10 consecutive years in which its stock grew at the highest rate of any newspaper stock.

McClatchy's gains have slowed in the last several months as it faces the same challenges other newspapers face, although analysts said that its disciplined management had put it in a stronger position than many.

McClatchy's operating profit margin was 22.8 percent last year, compared with Knight Ridder's 16.4 percent.

While the Knight Ridder papers are profitable, some are more troubled than others and may be a drag on McClatchy's bottom line. Analysts speculate that the company could shut down The Philadelphia Daily News and possibly sell The Inquirer, since the business climate in Philadelphia is sluggish and the papers face tough competition from a ring of suburban dailies. On the other hand, they say, The Inquirer generates a lot of cash, something McClatchy will need as it goes into debt to pay for Knight Ridder.

Analysts have also suggested that McClatchy may sell Knight Ridder's St. Paul Pioneer Press. McClatchy already owns The Star Tribune in adjacent Minneapolis and could face an antitrust challenge if it kept the St. Paul paper. The Pioneer Press's profit margin is just 10 percent, relatively low for the industry, and selling it would also help McClatchy raise money to pay for the deal.

McClatchy's philosophy has been to find papers in growth markets with no direct daily print competition, although Minneapolis and Anchorage, Alaska, were exceptions. The company bought The Anchorage Daily News in 1979 and went against The Anchorage Times, which it bought and shut down in 1992.

Analysts also expect McClatchy to save on costs by consolidating some of its state and national news operations as well as advertising sales with Knight Ridder. For example, it could easily absorb the San Jose paper into its string of northern California papers, and merge operations at its News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., with Knight Ridder's Charlotte Observer.

Such combinations would also greatly enhance McClatchy's presence on the Internet. Like other newspaper companies, McClatchy is on a mission to grow online profits, and the Knight Ridder purchase will increase its presence. In addition to several newspaper Web sites, Knight Ridder has a stake in the popular CareerBuilder.com site.

It also operates the Real Cities network, the largest national network of city and regional Web sites in more than 110 markets.

The deal would bring together two storied newspaper companies. Knight Ridder was formed by the merger in 1974 of two family-controlled companies, Knight and Ridder.

The Ridder company's roots date to 1892, when Herman Ridder bought The Staats-Zeitung, the leading German-language newspaper in the United States. The Knight empire began in 1903, when Charles Landon Knight bought The Akron Beacon Journal.

The company now owns 32 dailies in 29 markets, with a daily circulation of 3.3 million. They have won 84 Pulitzer Prizes, including 14 for public service.

The McClatchy chain was started in 1857 with The Bee in Sacramento by James McClatchy, who had fled Ireland during the potato famine.

Today, four fifth-generation McClatchys sit on the company's 14-member board. The company's 12 dailies and 17 community newspapers have a combined average circulation of 1.4 million daily and 1.9 million Sunday. The papers have won 13 Pulitzer Prizes, including five for public service.

    Newspaper Chain Agrees to a Sale for $4.5 Billion, NYT, 13.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/business/media/13knight.html?_r=1&hp&ex=1142226000&en=b23d4ab09c28a5c1&ei=5094&partner=homepage&oref=slogin

US launches drive to plug leaks: Washington Post

Sat Mar 4, 2006 11:26 PM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration has launched several investigations to discourage government employees from leaking classified information to news reporters, The Washington Post reported in its Sunday edition.

FBI agents have interviewed dozens of employees at the CIA, the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies in recent weeks as they investigate possible leaks that led to reports about the NSA's domestic spying program and secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, the Post said.

Employees at the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department and other agencies have also received Justice Department letters prohibiting them from discussing the NSA program, the Post said, citing anonymous sources.

Republican lawmakers like Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts are considering legislation that would stiffen penalties for leaking.

FBI agents have contacted reporters at the Sacramento Bee about their coverage of a terrorism case that was based on classified documents, the Post said.

CIA Director Porter Goss has warned employees at the agency against speaking to reporters, and called for prosecutors to call reporters before a grand jury to force them to reveal who is leaking information, the Post said.

Several reporters have already been forced to reveal anonymous sources to a U.S. prosecutor investigating the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity after her husband accused the Bush administration of twisting intelligence to justify its invasion of Iraq.

Editors and lawyers told the Post the incidents amount to the most extensive anti-leak campaign since the Nixon administration.

A White House spokesman told the Post that the government needs to protect classified information as it fights terrorism.

    US launches drive to plug leaks: Washington Post, R, 4.3.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyid=2006-03-05T042641Z_01_N04168491_RTRUKOC_0_US-BUSH-LEAK.xml

Former 'L.A. Times' publisher Otis Chandler dies at 78

Posted 2/27/2006 9:18 AM Updated 2/27/2006 5:02 PM
USA Today

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Otis Chandler, who transformed his family's Los Angeles Times from a provincial, conservative paper into a respected national media voice, died Monday. He was 78.

Chandler died at his home in Ojai, said Tom Johnson, who had succeeded Chandler as publisher. He said Chandler had been suffering from a neurological disorder known as Lewy body disease.

Chandler was the scion of a family that wielded financial and political power in the Los Angeles area for decades.

With his blond hair, weightlifter physique and love of surfing, he was a quintessential Californian of his generation. As a publisher, he spent most of his career chafing against what he sensed was an East Coast bias against Los Angeles and fighting to elevate the Los Angeles Times.

"No publisher in America improved a paper so quickly on so grand a scale, took a paper that was marginal in qualities and brought it to excellence as Otis Chandler did," wrote David Halberstam in his 1979 book The Powers that Be .

Chandler continued to cast a large shadow over the Times long after he resigned as the paper's publisher in 1980 after 20 years at the helm.

He left as chairman in 1985 but returned as a newsroom hero in 2000, publicly chiding the paper's management, which he blamed for an embarrassing scandal and severe cost-cutting that damaged its reputation. Soon after, the Chandler Family Trust sold newspaper parent company Times Mirror to the Tribune.

"I was building up a hell of a head of steam," he said in an interview in The New York Times in 2000. "The Times is not as dear to me as my own family, but it's close."

Chandler was groomed from an early age to take control of his family's newspaper. He worked as a printer's apprentice, reporter and in the advertising and circulation departments. In 1960, he succeeded his father as publisher at age 33.

The paper was considered parochial and partisan, a mouthpiece for conservative political causes.

Almost immediately, Chandler initiated changes designed to fulfill his goal of making the paper one of the country's best. He moved the paper toward the political center and angered conservative allies — and family members — by publishing a series of stories on the right-wing John Birch Society.

He hired more reporters, raised salaries, opened overseas bureaus and beefed up the paper's coverage of Washington, D.C. His efforts resulted in the Times winning seven Pulitzer prizes during his tenure.

Johnson said Chandler's wife, Bettina, was with him when he died.

    Former 'L.A. Times' publisher Otis Chandler dies at 78, NYT, 27.2.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2006-02-27-chandler-bio_x.htm

NYT sues Pentagon over domestic spying

Mon Feb 27, 2006 6:18 PM ET
Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Times sued the U.S. Defense Department on Monday demanding that it hand over documents about the National Security Agency's domestic spying program.

The Times wants a list of documents including all internal memos and e-mails about the program of monitoring phone calls without court approval. It also seeks the names of the people or groups identified by it.

The Times in December broke the story that the NSA had begun intercepting domestic communications believed linked to al Qaeda following the September 11 attacks. That provoked renewed criticism of the way U.S. President George W. Bush is handling his declared war on terrorism.

Bush called the disclosure of the program to the Times a "shameful act" and the U.S. Justice Department has launched an investigation into who leaked it.

The Times had requested the documents in December under the Freedom of Information Act but sued upon being unsatisfied with the Pentagon's response that the request was "being processed as quickly as possible," according to the six-page suit filed at federal court in New York.

David McCraw, a lawyer for the Times, acknowledged that the list of documents sought was lengthy but that the Pentagon failed to assert there were "unusual circumstances," a provision of the law that would grant the Pentagon extra time to respond.

The Defense Department, which was sued as the parent agency of the NSA, did not immediately respond to the suit.

McCraw said there was "no connection" between the Justice Department probe and the Times' lawsuit.

"This is an important story that our reporters are continuing to pursue and of the ways to do that is through the Freedom of Information Act," McCraw said.

The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires the federal government to obtain warrants from a secret federal court for surveillance operations inside the United States.

But the Bush administration says the president as commander in chief of the armed forces has the authority to carry out the intercepts and that Congress also gave him the authority upon approving the use of force in response to the September 11 attacks.

    NYT sues Pentagon over domestic spying, R, 27.2.2006, http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-02-27T231805Z_01_N27412298_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-NSA-NYTIMES.xml

Another White House Briefing, Another Day of Mutual Mistrust

February 27, 2006
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Mike McCurry, who was President Bill Clinton's press secretary a decade ago, is kicking himself to this day for ever allowing the White House briefings to be televised live.

"It was a huge error on my part," Mr. McCurry recalled the other day after watching a relentless White House press corps badger Scott McClellan, the current White House press secretary, about a hunting accident in which Vice President Dick Cheney shot a friend, Harry M. Whittington, and delayed telling the news media about it. "It has turned into a theater of the absurd."

The live briefings, held almost daily, do serve a purpose for both sides. They give the White House an everyday entree into the news cycle and let officials speak directly to the public. And they give reporters the chance to hold officials accountable and on the record (and help reporters get time on camera).

By its nature, the relationship between the White House and the press has historically held an inherent tension. And many say it has been eroding since the Vietnam War and Watergate, when reporters had reason to distrust everything the White House said and made a scandalous "gate" out of every murky act.

But today, those on both sides say, the relationship has deteriorated further, exacerbated by the live briefings.

"It's constantly getting worse," said Ari Fleischer, who preceded Mr. McClellan as Mr. Bush's spokesman. Perhaps surprisingly for a Bush defender, he attributed the soured relationship in part to what he said was a secretiveness within the White House.

"It's accented and compounded now because this administration is more secretive," he said.

He also said that the cameras altered the atmosphere, and that many reporters had constructive relationships with administration officials when off camera.

"Reporters can be perfectly civil and launch good, hard-hitting questions" in private, he said, then in the briefing room two minutes later, "they turn into barbarians."

That image of reporters yelling at a press secretary and demanding answers to repeated questions works against them, said Donald A. Ritchie, author of "Reporting From Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps." They reinforce the public's negative view of them, he said, which in turn plays into the hands of the administration because now reporters, not the original subject that had them agitated, become the news.

Reporters say they are sometimes driven to aggressive behavior because the White House is so tightfisted with information. But there is a larger context to their frustration.

Two caricatures of the White House press corps have emerged as the nation has watched the sausage-making in the briefing room and then seen it analyzed in the blogosphere. Commentators on the left say that the press is manipulated, and that it failed to challenge the administration enough after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the ramp-up to the Iraq war in March 2003. The right says the press is petty, irrelevant and politically biased against President Bush.

"We're damned if we do and damned if we don't," said Ken Herman, White House correspondent for Cox Newspapers.

"I don't like them seeing me do my job; I want them to see the end result," he said of the public's looking over his shoulder in the briefing room. "It's perfectly possible to be obnoxious and contentious in there and produce an objective print story, but the image is so overwhelmingly negative, and some of our TV brethren are very good at the in-your-face product."

Many reporters said they are mindful they are up against a White House that holds them in low regard. They point to a revealing article in The New Yorker from Jan. 19, 2004, in which Karl Rove, the president's closest adviser, told Ken Auletta, the author, that Mr. Bush saw the press as "elitist."

Mr. Auletta concluded that "perhaps for the first time," the White House had come to view reporters as special pleaders, as if they were just another interest group and one that was "not nearly as powerful as it once was."

"Because of this history," Mr. Herman said, the Cheney incident "reached a boiling point quicker than it seemed like it should have."

Renana Brooks, a clinical psychologist practicing in Washington who said she had counseled several White House correspondents, said the last few years had given rise to "White House reporter syndrome," in which competitive high achievers feel restricted and controlled and become emotionally isolated from others who are not steeped in the same experience.

She said the syndrome was evident in the Cheney case, which she described as an inconsequential event that produced an outsize feeding frenzy. She said some reporters used the occasion to compensate for not having pressed harder before the Iraq war.

"It's like any post-traumatic stress," she said, "like when someone dies and you think you could have saved them."

John Dickerson, who covered the Bush White House for Time magazine and is now chief political correspondent for Slate.com, said that while some reporters may feel such pressure, "the role of the press is to bang its fist on the table, and if the answer is reasonable and makes us look foolish, fine."

Did the press "do it sufficiently about grievous matters like the war in Iraq, and is it doing it now because it's easy?" he asked. "That's up for lots of debate."

Whether these situations are actually linked, they do unfold on live television like a mini-series wherein the press, criticized one day for being too aggressive, retreats the next, then is slow to pick up on the next big thing — in this case, the complex controversy over whether a Dubai-owned company could take over significant operations at six American ports.

The executive branch has been holding televised briefings since the 1970's, when the State Department held them during the Iranian hostage crisis. But such briefings over the years were almost always delayed for broadcast.

Then in 1998, Monica-mania struck.

"I told CNN there was no reason to take this briefing live," Mr. McCurry recalled. "But they said, 'We get 100,000 more households when you're on the air.' "

Ever since, the White House briefings have played out in real time against the daytime dramas, giving the world a glimpse into the daily push-me, pull-you in a democracy of making news (or not) and trying to report it. Now, with cable channels, reality television, talk-back live and blogging on the spot, with viewers and readers hip to stagecraft and expecting to be taken behind the scenes, there seems no turning back.

Mr. McClellan, for one, said he wouldn't dream of trying to unplug the briefings.

"We have no intention of not broadcasting them," he said. "They serve a purpose for both the White House and reporters."

And when those purposes collide, a tight-lipped administration, adept at image management, can simply let the cameras do their work for them.

"We're one of the most reviled subsets of one of the most reviled professions," Dana Milbank, a Washington Post reporter who covered the White House during Mr. Bush's first term, said. "We're going to lose the battle every time."

Mr. Fleischer recalled a virulent period with the media (and Democrats) in May 2002 after a New York Post headline proclaimed that "Bush Knew" in advance about the Sept. 11 attacks.

"That was a vicious explosion that lasted a week," he said. "But the president calculated the press would go too far, and they went so far in their accusations that the country was far more inclined to believe the president than the press." Several polls at the time showed President Bush maintaining his high approval ratings of 75 percent throughout the episode.

"The public perceives the press not as watchdogs but as attack dogs," Mr. Fleischer said.

Mr. McCurry saw the same dynamic.

"The public hates the people in that room," he said. "My standing up there and getting pelted with rotten tomatoes during Monica probably helped Bill Clinton because people say, 'What is wrong with the people in this room?' "

Mr. McClellan declined to discuss any podium strategy, saying simply, "I have great trust in the ability of the American people to see through these things and make the right judgments." Referring to the Cheney episode, he added: "The American people probably looked at this and felt like the press corps went a little over the top. It reached a point where people said, 'Enough already.' "

White House reporters say they know the public hates them because they regularly receive abusive e-mail messages and read blogs that tell them so.

"This is the punching-bag beat of American journalism," said David E. Sanger, who has covered the Bush administration since its inception for The New York Times. "And the White House itself has been skillful at diverting tough questions by changing the subject to its battles with the media."

This happened in the Cheney case. While the eruption from the White House press finally forced the vice president to discuss his accident on national television, he deftly portrayed the hubbub as a result of jealousy that a small paper in Texas was given the news first; reporters said they were upset because their questions were not being answered.

The message many perceived in Mr. Cheney's response was that the national media were no longer relevant, a point made and reinforced almost daily in certain blogs.

David Gregory, the NBC correspondent who has been among the most ardent questioners in the briefing room, apologized for yelling at Mr. McClellan over the Cheney incident but said the situation had become particularly frustrating.

"There is a desire by some, particularly on the right, to morph these situations into a different kind of debate — it's the vice president against an angry, left-wing, cynical, hate-filled press corps that wants to expose him as a liar," he said. "This is a false debate, stoked by a president and vice president who have made no bones about the fact that they don't have much respect for the press corps as an institution."

Martha Joynt Kumar, a political science professor at Towson University who studies relations between the president and the press, said the institutional relationship was "pretty tattered." She said the tensions were hardly new, but that the press was becoming more defensive in part because of the constant scrutiny under the lights.

"All of this really takes a toll," she said. "Reporters do grow sick of being at the White House. They want to be where they can determine more of what they do and how they do it. At the White House, it's decided for them."

    Another White House Briefing, Another Day of Mutual Mistrust, NYT, 27.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/27/business/media/27press.html

New video shows Carroll asking for prisoners' release

Posted 1/30/2006 3:53 PM Updated 1/30/2006 10:57 PM
USA Today

CAIRO (AP) — U.S. journalist Jill Carroll, weeping and veiled, appeared on a new videotape aired Monday by Al-Jazeera, and the Arab television station said she appealed for the release of all Iraqi women prisoners.

Carroll, 28, was crying and wore a conservative Islamic veil as she spoke to the camera, sitting in front of a yellow and black tapestry. The Al-Jazeera newscaster said she appealed for U.S. and Iraqi authorities to free all women prisoners to help "in winning her release." (Related coverage: On Deadline blog)

At one point, Carroll's cracking voice can be heard from behind the newsreader's voice. All that can be heard is Carroll saying, " ... hope for the families ..."

The U.S. military released five Iraqi women last Thursday and was believed be holding about six more. It was unclear how many women were held by Iraqi authorities.

Carroll, a freelance reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, was seized Jan. 7 by the previously unknown Revenge Brigades, which threatened to kill her unless all women prisoners were released. Al-Jazeera did not report any deadline or threat to kill her Monday.

The video the broadcaster showed was dated Saturday.

Al-Jazeera editor Yasser Thabit said the station received the tape Monday and that it was between two to three minutes long, but only a fraction of the footage was telecast.

U.S. troops clashed throughout the day with insurgents west of Baghdad. Iraqi police launched a new raid in a Sunni Arab-dominated part of the capital, despite Sunni calls to halt such operations during talks to form a new government.

The clashes west of Baghdad occurred in Ramadi, capital of the insurgent-ridden Anbar province, and began when gunmen fired at least five rocket-propelled grenade rounds and rifles at U.S. Army soldiers, a military spokesman said.

"The soldiers returned fire and called in a jet nearby to attack the insurgents' position with their main gun," Marine Capt. Jeffrey Pool said. Two insurgents were killed, but there were no U.S. casualties, he added.

U.S. troops later called in an airstrike against insurgents holed up at the Ramadi sports stadium, raising a column of spoke, residents said. Two civilians were injured when mortar shells exploded near the provincial office building, and one woman was killed by small arms fire, they added.

In Baghdad, Iraqi Interior Ministry commandoes searched the notorious Dora neighborhood, a largely Sunni Arab district and scene of frequent bombings and killings. More than 80 suspects were arrested, including eight Sudanese, four Egyptians, a Tunisian and Lebanese, according to Maj. Faleh al-Mohammedawi.

The raid occurred despite calls by Sunni Arab politicians for a halt to such operations as the country's Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish politicians are discussing formation of a new national unity government, which U.S. officials hope can win the trust of the Sunni Arab community — the backbone of the insurgency.

Sunni Arabs have accused the Shiite-led Interior Ministry forces of abuses against Sunnis. Ministry officials insist the raids are necessary to combat insurgents.

Iraqi police and soldiers, most of them Shiites, are frequent targets of Sunni insurgents.

In the latest attacks, a suicide car bomber slammed into a commando headquarters where police were training in Nasiriyah, about 200 miles southeast of Baghdad, killing one policeman and wounding more than 30, police reported. A roadside blast in western Baghdad killed an Iraqi policeman and wounded another, police said.

In the Kurdish-run city of Sulaimaniyah, the country's health minister Abdel Mutalib Mohammed announced the first confirmed case of bird flu in the Middle East. World Health Organization officials said tests showed that a 15-year-old girl who died this month in northern Iraq suffered from the deadly H5N1 strain of the bird flu virus.

Tests were underway to determine if the girl's 50-year-old uncle, who lived in the same house, also died of the virus, officials said. The uncle died last Friday after suffering symptoms similar to bird flu, Iraqi health officials said.

ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt, who were seriously injured in a roadside bombing Sunday, were being treated by a trauma team at a U.S. military hospital in Germany.

"They're both very seriously injured, but stable," said Col. Bryan Gamble, commander of the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in western Germany.

ABC officials said they suffered head injuries and that Woodruff also had broken bones. Gamble said the men's body armor may have saved them from worse injuries.

The Italian soldier was slightly injured when an Italian convoy came under attack near Nasiriyah as it was headed to a village to help install electrical power infrastructure, a military statement said. Italy has a 2,600-member military contingent based in Nasiriyah.

A British soldier died of wounds suffered after his patrol came under fire in Maysan province, a British Defense Ministry spokeswoman said. Since the 2003 invasion, 99 British troops have died, about two-thirds of them in combat and insurgent attacks.

Later, a roadside bomb exploded near a British patrol in Maysan's provincial capital Amarah, injuring one civilian, Iraqi police said.

Elsewhere in southern Iraq, a roadside bomb exploded Monday near a joint Danish-Iraqi patrol north of Basra, wounding one Iraqi policeman, military officials said. Danish forces said the bomb targeted the Iraqi police.

The attack was the first involving Danish troops since protests flared recently against a Danish newspaper for publishing widely criticized caricatures of Islam's prophet. The images sparked wide protest across Iraq and throughout the Islamic world. Islamic tradition bars any depiction of the prophet, even respectful ones.

    New video shows Carroll asking for prisoners' release, UT, 30.1.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-01-30-carroll-video_x.htm

The TV Watch

A Bomb Detonates,
and an Anchorman Tells a Story of the War by Becoming the Story

January 30, 2006
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
The New York Times

Bob Woodruff was in Baghdad for ABC reporting the good news that the Bush administration complains is ignored by the news media, and he ended up as a glaring illustration of the bad news.

Mr. Woodruff, the newly named co-anchor of "World News Tonight," spent Friday chatting with friendly Iraqis on the street and slurped ice cream at a popular Baghdad shop to show how some in Iraq are seeking a semblance of normalcy.

Yesterday he and an ABC cameraman, Doug Vogt, were badly injured while traveling in a routine convoy with Iraqi military forces who are being trained to impose that normalcy and allow American troops to go home.

What happened to Mr. Woodruff and Mr. Vogt was one of those chilling television moments that mark a milestone. This conflict has shown all too clearly that soldiers, civilians, aid workers and journalists are all targets.

Soldiers, American and Iraqi, are wounded and killed by roadside bombs and ambushes every day in tragedies so common they float to the back pages. But until now, at least, network anchors always seemed to sail through hot spots with an inalienable aura of invulnerability, like senators or movie stars.

Mr. Woodruff's plight underscored at a whole new level that Americans there feel like sitting ducks, picked off by a faceless enemy.

The attack, which led all the network evening newscasts, was obviously a blow for ABC, which only last month appointed Mr. Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas as a team to replace the late Peter Jennings, packaging the duo as pioneers of a new, more light-footed style of evening news show. Last night, Ms. Vargas did the anchor duties alone in a dark pinstriped jacket, gravely interviewing other ABC correspondents about the escalating danger of roadside bombs.

One reason networks, and ABC in particular, have been loath to appoint a single female anchor is that many news executives believe that in an emergency, viewers prefer a comforting fatherly presence. In this case, ABC's chosen authority figure was hurt in a crisis, and the distressing news was delivered by a female anchor chosen more for her on-air grace than her experience or gravitas.

As the world awaits word of the fate of the young American freelance journalist Jill Carroll, who was kidnapped in Baghdad on Jan. 7, other foreigners keep getting kidnapped. Most recently, two German engineers were taken hostage by gunmen dressed in Iraqi military uniforms.

The White House issued a statement offering assistance and prayers for Mr. Woodruff and Mr. Vogt. Throughout the occupation, the administration has sought to cushion public reaction to the war's human costs, cloaking scenes of soldiers' coffins as they arrive at military bases and glossing over the number of Iraqi civilian casualties. That is harder to do when a glamorous network anchor is hurt while under the protection of American and Iraqi forces.

Ms. Vargas ended the broadcast by saying that she and her colleagues "are reminded once again, in a very personal way, of what so many families of American servicemen and women endure so often when they receive news of their loved one being hurt."

Other networks also led with the incident. "CNN Presents" scrapped a planned 20th anniversary retrospective on the Challenger space shuttle disaster yesterday evening, replacing it with a special report on the dangers faced by soldiers and journalists in Iraq.

The attack was not a Cronkite moment, of course. Nobody in this era of what Ted Koppel, the former "Nightline" host, describes dismissively as "boutique journalism" has the kind of mass audience and unconditional trust Walter Cronkite held when he shook the nation by declaring the Vietnam War unwinnable. Mr. Woodruff, an experienced, talented newcomer, had neither the fame nor the stature to report anything truly groundbreaking about the Iraq conflict.

But, sadly, he did not need to. What happened to him on his third day back in the country said plenty.

    A Bomb Detonates, and an Anchorman Tells a Story of the War by Becoming the Story, NYT, 30.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/arts/television/30watch.html

Lawyers in C.I.A. Leak Case Seek to Subpoena Journalists

January 21, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 20 - Lawyers for Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff told a federal judge on Friday that they would seek to subpoena reporters and news organizations to obtain additional documents that could assist in his defense in the C.I.A. leak case.

In legal papers filed in federal court, the lawyers for Mr. Cheney's former aide, I. Lewis Libby Jr., did not identify the reporters or news organizations that they intended to subpoena nor did the lawyers identify what kind of information might be sought.

But the lawyers told the federal district judge, Reggie B. Walton, in the filing that Mr. Libby's trial could be delayed by the effort to gather more information from journalists who could be expected to resist the subpoenas. No trial date has been set.

The filing on Friday was a joint submission by the defense and the prosecution, made at the request of the judge in advance of a Feb. 3 hearing on the status of the case. The legal paper, a road map to unresolved issues in the case, suggested there could be bruising legal fights ahead.

The combative tone of the statements by Mr. Libby's defense team seemed to underscore the assertions of his lawyers that they intended to conduct an aggressive legal strategy. Mr. Libby has pleaded not guilty.

It was not clear whether Judge Walton would approve additional subpoenas, or if granted, whether they would survive a legal challenge. Several reporters have already provided testimony and documents in the case to the grand jury - some after waging lengthy battles in court.

On other matters, defense lawyers said that "significant disagreements exist" about the "nature and scope" of the government's obligations to turn over material in its possession to Mr. Libby's lawyers, a legal process known as discovery that is a crucial early phase of almost every criminal proceeding.

Defense lawyers said the disagreements centered on issues like whether prosecutors were obliged to turn over to the defense information from the government about how much reporters knew of the employment of Valerie Wilson, the C.I.A. officer at the heart of the case, from sources other than Mr. Libby.

Other disagreements cited by defense lawyers focused on whether the prosecution had to turn over to Mr. Libby's lawyers information about Ms. Wilson's status as a covert employee at the C.I.A.

Another dispute, the defense lawyers said, involves whether prosecutors must relinquish documents in the government's possession about classified briefings and meetings that Mr. Libby attended from May 2003 to March 2004.

In their part of the submission, prosecutors told the judge that they had already turned over more than 10,150 pages of documents to defense lawyers and were preparing to hand over more, including a declassified transcript of Mr. Libby's two grand jury appearances in 2004.

The filing suggested there might be other skirmishes to come. Mr. Libby's lawyers said they had yet to present their request for permission to use other classified documents in his defense, a potentially significant issue if prosecutors challenge the relevancy of the material.

Mr. Libby was indicted in October on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, accused of lying to F.B.I. investigators and to the grand jury about his dealings with reporters in the leak case. Mr. Libby, who had been one of the most influential figures in the White House, immediately resigned.

    Lawyers in C.I.A. Leak Case Seek to Subpoena Journalists, NYT, 21.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/21/national/21libby.html