RELEASE: BLACK INK DAY

Today, dozens of editorial cartoonists will band together for “Black Ink Monday,” unleashing their biting commentary on the current state of affairs in the newspaper business, with a specific emphasis on corporate downsizing.

“These cartoons will be posted on editorialcartoonists.com (home of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists) and — hopefully — in various papers across the country. The AAEC intends to use the protest to draw attention to, not just the loss of individual jobs, but the wholesale weakening of the daily newspaper.

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CNN CARRIES REPORT ON THE GREAT WIKI CONTROVERSY

”NASHVILLE, Tennessee (AP) — A man who posted false information on an online encyclopedia linking a prominent journalist to the Kennedy assassinations says he was playing a trick on a co-worker.

“Brian Chase, 38, ended up resigning from his job and apologizing to John Seigenthaler Sr., the former publisher of the Tennessean newspaper and founding editorial director of USA Today.

“I knew from the news that Mr. Seigenthaler was looking for who did it, and I did it, so I needed to let him know in particular that it wasn’t anyone out to get him, that it was done as a joke that went horribly, horribly wrong.”

WOODWARD: A LONE OPERATIVE
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The Observer reports that Bob Woodward’s editors at the Washington Post were no more in control of his activities than Judy Miller’s editors at the New York Times were of hers.

“I don’t think I’ve kept in touch with Bob over the years,” said Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr.

Mr. Downie, on the phone from Washington, D.C., on Dec. 5, was discussing last month’s startling discovery that Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward had become involved in the Valerie Plame Wilson affair more than two years before, without telling his own paper about it.

The dustup over that news has apparently not shaken Mr. Woodward’s habit of keeping information to himself. “I have no clue what he’s working on,” said Jim VandeHei, The Post’s current White House reporter….

“Mr. Woodward is America’s pre-eminent celebrity investigative reporter. But what is he investigating? Three decades ago, he symbolized the power of day-by-day news reporting. The Watergate scandal broke under a steady battering of incremental news updates by Mr. Woodward and Carl Bernstein—two metro reporters banging into print each tidbit they could learn.”

http://editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001615506&imw=Y

FOR MORE ON MILLER: SEE THE NEW VANITY FAIR

Editor & Publisher previews it: “ In a lengthy feature piece on this autumn’s Judith Miller saga forthcoming in the January issue of Vanity Fair (on sale Dec. 13), writer Seth Mnookin covers much familiar ground but also reveals new details and complaints from the reporter’s colleagues at The New York Times. Publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. also gets a good working-over from unnamed in-house critics.

“One of the fresh scoops in the piece, which is titled, “Unreliable Sources,” concerns Sulzberger barring Times reporters from talking to Russell Lewis, the former president and CEO of The New York Times Co., when they were working on their extensive report on Miller going to jail and then testifying before the Plame grand jury.

“pressed Sulzberger on why he did that, he replied with a laugh and a quip: “Because I don’t know what the f—he’s going to tell you.” (Earlier this year Lewis co-authored with Sulzberger a Times Op-Ed piece championing Miller’s cause.)

GARY WEBB—PRESENTE

Robert Parry of Consortium News writes on the anniversary of the suicide of journalist Gary Webb::

”One year ago, reporter Gary Webb – his life in ruins – killed himself with a handgun. The tragedy made him the final victim of a long-running cover-up protecting the Reagan-Bush administration’s tolerance of drug trafficking by its client army, the Nicaraguan contras.

“But Webb’s death also could be blamed on the fecklessness of modern American journalism. The nation’s leading newspapers had driven the 49-year-old father of three to his desperate act rather than admit that they had bungled one of the biggest stories of the Reagan-Bush era – the contra-cocaine scandal.

“Webb might be alive today if the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times had shown the decency to explain the importance of what the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general acknowledged in a two-volume report in 1998….”

www.consortiumnews.com/2005/120905.html

THE FUTURE?

AP reports Happy News Is Here Again

”DALLAS — Carrie Rodgers is so engrossed by cable- television news shows that her husband calls her a news addict, but lately she has found another source to balance the onslaught of stories about war, crime and natural disasters.

Two or three times a day, the 28-year-old insurance agent in Columbia, S.C., turns to a Web site called HappyNews.com.

She often clicks first to a section called ‘’Heroes,'’ which recently featured stories about U.S. troops rescuing two cheetah cubs in Ethiopia and the induction of 12 people into the Hall of Fame for Caring Americans…”

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