Journalism

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.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has produced a detailed report on "The State of the News Media 2004." It points to eight major trends, including the following: "Much of the new investment in journalism today - much of the information revolution generally - is in disseminating the news, not in collecting it. Most sectors of the media are cutting back in the newsroom, both in terms of staff and in the time they have to gather and report the news.

The Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland has published a new study on "Media Coverage of Weapons of Mass Destruction," and the picture isn't pretty. "Most media outlets represented WMD as a monolithic menace, failing to adequately distinguish between weapons programs and actual weapons or to address the real differences among chemical, biological, nuclear, and radiological weapons," the report states.

"Found: A Smoking Gun," declared the headline by New York Times columnist William Safire, which claimed that a "clear link" had recently been found between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. But what did Safire base his case-closed pronouncement upon? A New York Times story that had appeared a day earlier. But the original Times story reached the opposite conclusion from Safire, stating that the recent discover not evidence of a link between al Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam.