Media

"It is designed to circumvent the campaign-finance restrictions, which would bar us from communicating to our members before elections," explained a National Rifle Association spokesperson about the pro-gun lobby group's recently launched news service.

University of Texas professor Sheldon Landsberger has admitted that a pro-nuclear column he submitted under his own name to the Austin American-Statesman was actually written by the Potomac Communications Group, a Washington PR firm that works for the nuclear power industry. "For at least 25 years," reports William Adler, an employee of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee named Theodore M. Besmann (who moonlights for Potomac Communications) "has had published nuclear love songs in newspapers across the country, under his own or others' names."

Alex Irvine reports: "The Portland Press Herald, after several years of getting its nerve up, has fired reporter Ted Cohen, who in July 2000 unearthed the story of George W. Bush's 1976 DWI arrest in Kennebunkport. Cohen's editor promptly spiked the story, with the result that it didn't get out into the national media until just before the 2000 election. The discovery that the Press Herald sat on the story embarrassed executive editor Jeannine Guttman and made the paper an object of ridicule among journalists.

Dave Lindorff calls it "a moment that spoke volumes last week about the spinelessness of American journalism." At Colin Powell's March 19 Baghdad press conference, "all of the Iraqi and other Arab journalists... got up and walked out, along with many reporters and camera crews from European and other countries," to protest the killing of two reporters for the Dubai-based Al-Arabiyya TV channel.