"Message discipline" seems to be breaking down within the Bush administration, notes David Sanger: "For months now, the same administration whose members once prided themselves on never contradicting one another in public has been riven by conflicting pronouncements. Senior officials keep missing opportunities to keep their signals straight, prompting cases of vicious backbiting that one senior member of Mr. Bush's national security staff said with disgust the other day 'make us sound like Democrats.' Reporters who spent the first two-thirds of Mr.

The New York Times, which published a mea culpa on May 26 for its flawed reporting that helped promote war fever against Iraq, has now published a second, harder-hitting self-criticism by Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent. "The failure was not individual, but institutional," Okrent writes. "War requires an extra standard of care, not a lesser one.

The Publicity Club of Chicago, a PR industry trade association, has given its "Platinum Trumpet" award to Sarah Sarosi of the Burson-Marsteller PR firm, which worked on behalf of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association in the U.S. and "responded immediately when a Canadian case of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (or 'Mad Cow' disease) was diagnosed."