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Associated Press Story - Former New York Times executive Gerald Boyd, who resigned last June in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, is writing his memoirs. Currently untitled, the book will be published in 2005 by Amistad, an imprint of News Corp.'s HarperCollins that specializes in publications by black authors. "The Jayson Blair scandal will be covered, but it will be just a small part of the story," Boyd's representative, Robert Barnett, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney, said Wednesday. Financial terms were not disclosed. Blair resigned from the Times last spring after editors learned he had embellished and plagiarized parts...

Top editors at the NEW YORK TIMES panicked and ordered a story killed after London-based reporter Sarah Lyall filed a dispatch alleging rumors of Prince Charles and a sexual affair with one of his closest advisers! The story appeared on the TIMES's internet website for 20 minutes -- before top editors ordered it immediately removed, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

So did Mississippi voters support the Republicans, even though they get very little direct benefit from Bush-style tax cuts, because they — unlike New Jersey's voters — understand the magic of supply-side economics? If you believe that, I've got an overpass on the Garden State Parkway you may be interested in buying. Now maybe New Jersey voted Democratic because of irrational Bush hatred. But I think it's a lot more likely that white Mississippi voters, unlike their counterparts up north, are still responding to Republican flag-waving — and it's not just the American flag that's being waved.

November 04, 2003 NY Times Full Disclosure? Today's NY Times includes an op/ed written by Mark Medish, "a lawyer, [who] was deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury from 1997 to 2000." In it, Mr. Medish argues that the Iraq debts accumulated by Saddam over the course of his reign must not be cancelled. As he sees it, "A country like Iraq, with the world's second-largest proven oil reserves, should be expected to be able to pay its obligations. Furthermore, the moral charge that the debts are odious is simply too sweeping. Acting on it would be bad for Iraq and...

Schadenfreude — that's that word for taking pleasure in the other guy's failure. But what's the word for that feeling you get when you've been hoping for the other guy to fail, but he ends up succeeding . . . spectacularly? A schadenfreudian slip? How about Krugmanfreude? The latter was the suggestion of ex officio Krugman Truth Squad member John Davidson. It's the perfect word for what America's most dangerous liberal pundit, Paul Krugman — and the whole Democratic party, for that matter — must be feeling right now as they face the reality of last Thursday's announcement that gross...

Circulation of the Nation's 20 Biggest Newspapers The Associated Press Published: Nov 3, 2003 Average weekday circulation of the nation's 20 biggest newspapers for the six months ended Sept. 30, as reported Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The percentage changes are from the comparable year-ago period. 1. USA Today, 2,246,996, up 0.7 percent 2. The Wall Street Journal, 2,091,062, up 16.1 percent (a) 3. The New York Times, 1,118,565, up 0.5 percent 4. Los Angeles Times, 955,211, down 1.1 percent (b) 5. The Washington Post, 732,872, down 1.9 percent 6. New York Daily News, 729,124, up 2.1 percent...

<p>ED Koch says New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman is "lamebrained." The former mayor is irked by Krugman's Oct. 21 column explaining why Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad attacked Jews before a Muslim leadership conference, when he said, "The Jews rule the world by proxy: They get others to fight and die for them." Krugman wrote, "So what's with the anti-Semitism? Almost surely it's part of Mr. Mahathir's domestic balancing act." Koch told us: "There is a French expression, 'To understand everything is to forgive everything.' Using Krugman's logic, we should understand Hitler's needs and forgive him as well. He needed to blame Germany's defeat in World War I on the Jews. Krugman's defenses are lame and his column is lame-brained."</p>

Paul Krugman's Malaysia connections are frightening “Anti-Semitism with a purpose." Sounds like a sick play on a Madison Avenue advertising slogan. But it's no joke. It was a subhead attached to Paul Krugman's Tuesday column for the New York Times. In it he rationalized the violently anti-Semitic remarks by Malaysia's prime minister Mahathir Mohamad as being symptoms of the failure of the Bush administration's foreign policy. The column has already generated a storm of protest on the letters page of the Times, on the website of the Anti-Defamation League, and on the websites of Krugman Truth Squad members, new and...

As we’ve said before, Paul Krugman is the country’s most embarrassing columnist. His hatred for President Bush has so blinded him that he is no longer a rational person. Today’s column in the New York Times is one of his most over-the-top. Krugman takes up the subject of Mahathir Mohamad’s “Jews rule the world” speech at the Islamic summit meeting last week. He begins, of course, with a denunciation of Mahathir’s anti-Semitism—“Indeed, those remarks were inexcusable”—and continues, inevitably, with a fatal “But.” The point of Krugman’s column is that Mahathir’s anti-Semitism is President Bush’s fault: “[T]o understand why he made...

October 21, 2003 A Face Lift for The Times, Typographically, That IsBy THE NEW YORK TIMES tarting today, the front page and main news sections of The New York Times are receiving a gentle typographical face-lift. In place of a miscellany of headline typefaces that have accumulated in its columns over the last century, the newspaper is settling on a single family, Cheltenham, in roman and italic versions and various light and bold weights. A narrow variation will be used for The Times's signature one-column headline, which often appears at the top right of Page A1 on the main article...

It's beginning to look as if the New York Times can't help being naughty – it's somehow become part of its nature to commit outrageous offenses against fairness, decency and balance. This time it's a shameful conflict of interest caught by the New York Post: A book review trashing Nigel Hamilton's "Bill Clinton, An American Journey; Great Expectations" written by one Todd S. Purdom, whom the Times doesn't bother to tell its readers is the husband of Bill Clinton's onetime adoring press secretary Dee Dee Myers. The Post's must-read Page Six quotes one observer as noting: "It is the equivalent...

My teacher, Joel Feinberg, once wrote that, "Every philosophical paper must begin with an unproved assumption." Argument, in other words, must start somewhere, preferably with a proposition that is widely accepted. The unproved assumption of this column is that hatred is bad. The Oxford English Dictionary (2d ed.) defines "hatred" as "The condition or state of relations in which one person hates another, the emotion or feeling of hate; active dislike, detestation, enmity, ill-will, malevolence." To hate is "To hold in very strong dislike; to detest; to bear malice to. The opposite of to love." Each of us knows firsthand whether,...

<p>We'd have said no, but then we read - today's column.</p> <p>Krugman weighs in on last week's anti-Jewish tirade by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, and the results boggle the mind.</p> <p>Most of it is criticism directed at other Muslims, clerics in particular. Mr. Mahathir castigates "interpreters of Islam who taught that acquisition of knowledge by Muslims meant only the study of Islamic theology." Thanks to these interpreters, "the study of science, medicine, etc. was discouraged. Intellectually the Muslims began to regress." A lot of the speech sounds as if it had been written by Bernard Lewis, author of "What Went Wrong," the best-selling book about the Islamic decline.</p>

Premier New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman attacked the Fox News Channel on Thursday, comparing the top-rated cable news network to the pro-terrorist Al Jazeera broadcasting company. Using a recent speech by Vice President Dick Cheney to argue that the Bush administration is too narrow-minded in its handling of postwar Iraq, Friedman complained, "Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein issue messages from their caves through Al Jazeera, and Mr. Cheney issues messages from his bunker through Fox." "Out of fairness, my newspaper feels obligated [to cover the Cheney speech]," the top Times columnist wrote. "But I wish we would have...

<p>I could only laugh last April when I first heard about a study claiming that a smoking ban in Helena, Mont., cut the city’s heart attack rate by 58 percent in six months.</p> <p>A prominent op-ed in this week’s Oct. 15 New York Times hailed the Miracle of Helena (search) and urged readers to give it more credit than it deserves.</p>

Remember Jayson Blair? Now, another name will go down in infamy at the New York Times. Lynette Holloway, another affirmative- action promotion at the New York Times, has resigned in the wake of the paper running its second-longest correction in history. That 2,175-word correction ran back on July 14. Holloway’s by-line has not appeared since. Now she’s gone. The Times didn’t want to draw any more attention to this scandal, and her resignation was disclosed by a competitor, Keith J. Kelly of the New York Post. He reported that Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said they had reached "an amicable settlement."

AN IMMINENT THREAT (TO DEMOCRATS, THAT IS)A threat to the nation is vastly exaggerated. It is claimed that the President must take draconian countermeasures against the deadly enemy immediately -- an enemy that a powerful ideological faction has had in its crosshairs for years. To build public support for action, intelligence reports are "sexed-up" to make the enemy seem stronger. Yes, there are seeming disclaimers that the threat is not "imminent" -- yet the message is crystal clear: the republic is in grave danger, and we must act before it becomes too late to act. Am I talking about Paul...

Paul Krugman, an economist who teaches at Princeton University, is a crank. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be particularly significant: Academia, notably at the elite institutions, is littered with Mr. Krugman’s ilk. Isolated from the real world and worshipped by impressionable young men and women, professors collectively form a base of the Democratic Party that’s as potent, in rhetoric if not fundraising, as the country’s unions, trial lawyers, and the vast majority of Hollywood celebrities. But Mr. Krugman is one of the most influential left-wing critics of the Bush administration. Thanks to Howell Raines, he has a twice-weekly op-ed column in the...

(CNSNews.com) - A portion of funding intended to revitalize the part of New York City struck by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, might be used to construct new corporate headquarters miles away from "Ground Zero." In the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress passed an economic stimulus package to rebuild and revitalize the area that became known as Ground Zero. That revitalization effort included the creation of New York Liberty Bonds, an $8 billion initiative to provide low-cost, tax-exempt financing for major projects to revitalize lower Manhattan and ensure the city's long-term economic health. According to a press release...

The big Congressional stories this year have been big-ticket legislation, like Medicare prescription drugs and the pork-layered energy bill. But barely under the political radar, a long-sought, hard-right G.O.P. agenda has been quietly progressing. Proposals dear to the Republican leadership that would undermine gun controls, women's reproductive freedom, a citizen's right to seek court redress, and a vital array of other constitutional bulwarks are moving slowly toward what in some cases seems like almost certain passage. In past years of split-party control of the Capitol, such a wish list represented the dark side of political grandstanding, scraps of meat for...

<p>LOOKS like the Gray Lady is up to her old tricks again - distorting the picture in Iraq by burying good news and playing up bad.</p> <p>Just take a look at yesterday's New York Times.</p> <p>Some of the most important news to come out of Iraq in weeks - a story the Times had a day before anyone else - reported the findings of a Gallup poll of Baghdad residents.</p>

NEW YORK, Sep 17, 2003 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- The New York Times Co. reported lower advertising revenues for August and said Wednesday that its third-quarter earnings would be well below Wall Street expectations. The Times said it expected to earn between 30 and 32 cents per share in the third quarter, compared with 38 cents in the same period last year. Analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call had been expecting the company to earn 39 cents per share. Advertising revenues in the company's newspaper group fell 1.4 percent in August compared with the same month last year. "The...

conservative columnist says the liberal bias of The New York Times extends far beyond the environs of New York and should be a matter of concern to every American. As a native New Yorker, Bob Kohn grew up reading the Times. But now the columnist for WorldNetDaily has written a book about the newspaper called Journalistic Fraud: How The New York Times Distorts the News and Why it Can No Longer Be Trusted (WND Books, 2003). Kohn says every other liberal news agency follows the Times, even broadcast news organizations. "The old joke applies -- Peter Jennings is not a...

The ombudsman is here because the doctrine against it collapsed. But pride says the Times cannot copy the Post. What's Bill Keller to do?The argument for why an ombudsman would never be needed at the New York Times went like this. Every editor should represent the interests of the reader. That’s what good editors do. No ombudsman. Before you start poking at the logic, appreciate how long it stood and how well it served the authority of the Times. First ombudsman is 1967, Louisville Courier Journal. Thirty six years later, the New York Times agrees: maybe it’s a good...

NEW YORK, Sep 10, 2003 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- The New York Times has appointed assistant managing editor Allan M. Siegal as its first standards editor, the newspaper reported. Siegal, who will retain his current title, will oversee the creation of new guidelines for the use of anonymous sources, bylines and datelines, according to a story in Wednesday's edition of the Times. In an e-mail to staff announcing the appointment Tuesday, Executive Editor Bill Keller said Siegal would be "the main internal sounding board for staff members who have doubts or complaints about the paper's content, whether already published...

The New York Times is trying to beef up its television-news profile in time to become a network player in the 2004 Presidential election campaign. Last spring, the paper of record first announced a partnership to co-own and run the Discovery Civilization Channel; by December 2002, The Times had renamed it the Discovery Times channel and refitted the station with a very 43rd Street logo.Now, sources tell The Observer, The Times is in negotiations with ABC News to coordinate coverage of the Presidential race with its cable-channel property.Sources familiar with the negotiations said that the proposal is still in its...

Should The New York Times have to pay damages to readers who were duped by its decision to publish the fraudulent work of Jayson Blair? So say Clay Calvert and Robert D. Richards, two lawyers who teach in the College of Communications at Pennsylvania State University, in an article that will appear in the fall 2003 edition of the Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal. The article introduces the novel legal theory of "journalistic malpractice" whereby, in the Times' case, "the continued publication of Blair's stories, despite the serious doubt about his work entertained and expressed by his...

Leftists never learn not to tangle with Fox News star Bill O'Reilly. When his Irish temper is aroused he can be tough, something the New York Times got a taste of last night. The Times, which cozies up with the likes of O'Reilly foe Al Franken, recently exposed as having lied to Attorney General John Ashcroft, carried a column by Judith Maslin that says the alleged satirist "makes a bull's-eye out of Mr. O'Reilly" for having told whoppers. In his Talking Points memo last night, O'Reilly fired back at the newspaper, which "is leading the charge to turn America...

<p>In a front-page story Tuesday on the President and his compassionate conservative agenda, the New York Times said that, "some religious supporters of Mr. Bush say they feel betrayed by promises he made as a candidate and now, they maintain, he has broken as president." The story relies heavily on quotes from one Reverend Jim Wallis, whom the Times describes as an, "early supporter" of the President. Wallis tells the Times Mr. Bush has, "failed the test." He is the only person in the whole story identified as a Bush supporter. But Wallis is, in fact, an ardent Democrat, who did not vote for Mr. Bush, and who edits a liberal religious magazine called Sojourners, which has consistently criticized the President and his administration. None of this is mentioned in the Times story.</p>

August 23, 2003 3 - Run HR xhl(Aaron Guiel's Thre Off Joe Mays in Fifth IftsBy THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 9:51 p.m. ETGutered the game wo hits in his last 18 at-bats, went 2-fos City atayed withif theicago Whx in the AL Central race.Luis Rivas homered for Minnesota, which fell 2 1/2 games back.After Jeremy Affelclosed Friday's win withect innity's bullpen again refused to budge.D.J. Carrco (5attered three hits over four innings after starter Jose Lima was removedke MacDougached thetting Rivas to ground into a double play for his 26th save in 33 chances.The Royals improved to 11-7...

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<p>The biggest job facing Bill Keller, newly appointed New York Times executive editor, is how to restore a missing, indefinable, intangible attribute that once shone like a halo above the paper's masthead.</p> <p>That attribute was the Times' mystique, something beyond newsprint, stories, editorials, headlines and circulation figures. It was not that one believed everything the Times reported or that one even agreed with its editorials.</p>

On July 14, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger named a new executive editor, Bill Keller; made a point of insulting Keller’s predecessor, Howell Raines, whom Sulzberger had rewarded for his loyal service, by pushing out the door; and found himself mired in yet another affirmative action scandal. Don’t it just break your heart?! In introducing Times veteran Keller in his new capacity, Sulzberger went out of his way to take a potshot at Raines, who had been on the Charlie Rose Show only three days earlier, where he’d spoken of the Times suffering from a “lethargic culture of complacency.”...

On Thursday, August 7 at the end of a column of miscellaneous corrections, the New York Times published this small bombshell: Editors' Note An article on Sunday about attacks on the American military in Iraq over the previous two days, attributed to military officials, included an erroneous account that quoted Pfc. Jose Belen of the First Armored Division. Private Belen, who is not a spokesman for the division, said that a homemade bomb exploded under a convoy on Saturday morning on the outskirts of Baghdad and killed two American soldiers and their interpreter. The American military's central command, which releases...

Dick Morris The Political Life Bias-mongers on rocks as viewers taste straight newsI am sure we were all surprised to learn in the Aug. 11 issue of The New York Times that people are " burned out on serious news." How else could the bastion of establishment journalism account for the falloff in network news viewership and, unnoted in the article, the newspaper's own decreasing circulation?Yet the evidence is all there. People don't care anymore. That must be why The Times' circulation has fallen 5 percent and 1.1 million fewer households are watching network television news compared to last...

<p>An article on Sunday about attacks on the American military in Iraq over the previous two days, attributed to military officials, included an erroneous account that quoted Pfc. Jose Belen of the First Armored Division. Private Belen, who is not a spokesman for the division, said that a homemade bomb exploded under a convoy on Saturday morning on the outskirts of Baghdad and killed two American soldiers and their interpreter. The American military's central command, which releases information on all American casualties in Iraq, said before the article was published that it could not confirm Private Belen's account. Later it said that no such attack had taken place and that no American soldiers were killed on Saturday.</p>

washingtonpost.com The Villager, Imitated but No Longer Flattered By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, August 4, 2003; Page C01 Some journalistic sins are crystal clear, like Jayson Blair plagiarizing out-of-town stories without leaving New York. And some situations are much murkier. John Sutter, publisher of the Villager, says the New York Times has been stealing story ideas from his small Greenwich Village paper. There's no hint of plagiarism here; in each case, Times staffers did their own reporting and filed stories that read very differently. And it's hardly unusual for big-city papers, including The Washington Post, to follow...

Disdain for Bush Simmers in Democratic Strongholds By ROBIN TONER ES MOINES, July 31 — While Democratic leaders in Washington debate strategy and demographics for the 2004 election — the wisdom of campaigning from the left, right or center — something far more visceral is at work in the first caucus state, and in other Democratic redoubts. There is a powerful disdain for the Bush administration, stoked by the aftermath of the war in Iraq and the continuing lag in the economy. There is also a conviction that President Bush is eminently beatable, and a hunger to hear their party's...

NYT MONDAY: BUSH HATE /// Disdain of core Dems toward W. Bush runs very deep -- far deeper, some analysts say, than existed toward his father or Ronald Reagan... Developing...

NEW YORK -- In an experiment to boost circulation in the competitive New York market, New York Times Co. (NYSE:NYT - News) is offering its flagship newspaper for half- price late in the afternoons in about two dozen high-traffic areas in Manhattan. "It's a very narrow, late-summer test for a finite period of time," said New York Times spokesman Toby Usnik. He noted the newspaper began offering the cheaper, 50-cent newsstand price in mid-July for a trial period which may run through the summer. "It's one of several initiatives we've experimented with," added Mr. Usnik. " As a matter of...

BW2085 JUL 31,2003 8:06 PACIFIC 11:06 EASTERN ( BW)(NY-THE-NEW-YORK-TIMES)(NYT) Jill Abramson and John M. Geddes Named Managing Editors of The New York Times     Business Editors     NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 31, 2003
--Jill Abramson and John M. Geddes were named managing editors of The New York Times today, effective September 2. Ms. Abramson has been the newspaper's Washington bureau chief since 2000 and Mr. Geddes has been the newspaper's deputy managing editor since 1997. The appointments were announced by Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times.     Ms. Abramson, 49, and Mr. Geddes, 51, succeed Gerald Boyd who resigned earlier this year. A replacement...

A new report examining problems at the New York Times rips the newspaper for a lack of communication but downplays the push for racial diversity as a leading factor in its Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal. The 94-page report says it's "simplistic" to believe promotion of minority reporters like Blair was the essential cause of the calamity. Jayson Blair (N.Y. Times photo) "The fraud Jayson Blair committed on us and our readers was not a consequence of our diversity program, which has been designed to apply the same rigorous standards of performance we demand of all our staff," Bill Keller wrote...

THERE was something wonderfully strained about how various media organisations dealt last week with the news of the deaths of Qusay and Uday Hussein. From the BBC to Reuters, there was palpable – if sternly repressed – dismay. One of the first headlines that the Ba'athist Broadcasting Corporation put out on the news was: "US celebrates 'good' Iraq news." The quotation marks around "good" did not refer to any quote or source in the text. They were pure editorialising on behalf of the BBC, whose campaign to undermine the liberation of Iraq is now in full swing. It was not...

NEW YORK, Jul 30, 2003 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- The New York Times, acting on the recommendations of a committee assembled following the Jayson Blair scandal, said Wednesday it would create three new positions, including an ombudsman to examine coverage and review reader complaints. Along with the ombudsman, to be known at the Times as "public editor," the newspaper will create two masthead-level jobs for a standards editor and an editor to oversee hiring and career development, new Executive Editor Bill Keller said in a staff memo. All three jobs should be "refined and filled within the coming...

<p>Say what you want about the New York Times, but it still makes more news than any other paper in the U.S. By this, I don't mean in the sense of printing the news, as other papers do, but rather in the sense of news about the Times itself. Consider these recent items that made national news.</p>

NEW YORK (AP) - After an 11-week internal investigation of the Jayson Blair scandal, The New York Times said Wednesday it will create the first ombudsman's position in its 152-year history and re-examine the newspaper's policies on datelines, bylines and anonymous sources. The ombudsman, to be known at the Times as "public editor," will examine coverage, review reader complaints and write a periodic column in the newspaper, Executive Editor Bill Keller said Wednesday, his first day on the job. In addition, the paper will create two masthead-level jobs for a "standards editor" and an editor to oversee hiring and career...

EUPHEMISMS FOR EUPHEMISMS AT THE TIMESNew executive editor Bill Keller is at the helm of the New York Times now. Already there's progress, but it's progress West 43rd Street style -- all designed to preserve the dignity of the Gray Lady. Today the Times announced Keller will appoint a "public editor" to "serve as a representative for readers." They've often said they'd never never appoint an "ombudsman" like the Washington Post. And, indeed, they have not appointed an ombudsman. They've appointed a "public editor." And today's report of the Times' "Siegal Committee" -- appointed to look into the causes and...

A new poll found that less than half of Americans believe the New York Times, still considered the so-called "newspaper of record" by many establishment media organizations, is a reliable purveyor of truth. According to pollster Scott Rasmussen of Rasmussen Reports, just 46 percent of Americans feel the Times is "very reliable" or "somewhat reliable." At the same time, nearly three-fourths of Americans (72 percent) believe Fox News Channel to be a credible media source. (Click on the link above for the entire article)

It wasn't in prime time, and the ratings weren't even on the charts. But in the 24/7 broadcasting arena of political talk, where liberals are on the losing side at least 22/7, they must take whatever scraps they can get. For them, it was a rare red-letter day when Al Franken, appearing on Book TV on C-Span 2, landed a rhetorical uppercut to the jaw of Liberal Nemesis No. 1, Bill O'Reilly, and left him even more senseless than usual. The setting was a panel at the annual booksellers' convention in Los Angeles last month. Mr. Franken was on hand...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.Here's another sentence in George Bush's State of the Union address that wasn't true: "We will not deny, we will not ignore, we will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents and other generations." Mr. Bush's officials profess to see nothing wrong with the explosion of the national debt on their watch, even though they now project an astonishing $455 billion budget deficit this year and $475 billion next year. But even the usual apologists (well, some of them) are starting to acknowledge the administration's irresponsibility. Will they...