Journalism

In a recent public speech, Senator Edward Kennedy "laid out what was arguably the most comprehensive case yet offered to the public questioning the Bush administration's policy and timing on Iraq," writes Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler. "The next day, The Post devoted one sentence to the speech. ... Ironically, Kennedy made ample use in his remarks of the public testimony in Senate Armed Services Committee hearings a week earlier by retired four-star Army and Marine Corps generals who cautioned about attacking Iraq at this time -- hearings that The Post also did not cover.

"The Lebanese government is prosecuting the news director of a major television station," reports MSNBC, "setting the stage for a broader crackdown on press freedoms in a country once admired as the only bastion of free press remaining in the Arab world. ... Rumors are the true currency of political discussion on the streets and in the cafes of the Arab world, where media outlets are either owned by the government or privately owned by political leaders and under the constant threat of sanction and closure."

American journalists have totally fallen down on the job when it comes to reporting from Baghdad, writes Nina Burleigh, who was one of the first American journalists to enter Iraq after the Gulf War. That allows the White House to make increasingly

MSNBC reports that weblogs -- "blogs" for short -- are "helping the Internet make good on some of its heady promises of personal empowerment." Since 1999, the number of weblogs has grown from a few dozen to nearly half a million, offering everything from film criticism to personal diaries and news commentaries, and redefining journalism in the process. According to Steven Levy, blogging "lends itself to a new kind of reporting: on-the-spot recording of events, instantly beamed to the Net. ...