Vocabulary > Media > Journalism

Daniel Pearl

1963-2002

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Daniel_pearl_highres.jpg
http://www.danielpearl.org/images/news_and_press/daniel_pearl_highres.jpg

journalism

the outsourcing of journalism

http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1321269,00.html

Gilbert Edward Noble        1932-2012

television journalist who hosted “Like It Is,”
an award-winning Sunday morning public affairs program in New York,
one of the longest-running in the country
dedicated to showcasing black leadership and the African-American experience
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/business/media/gil-noble-host-of-show-on-black-issues-dies-at-80.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/business/media/gil-noble-host-of-show-on-black-issues-dies-at-80.html

war reporter > Anthony Shadid        1968-2012

two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent who (...)
had long been passionately interested in the Middle East,
first because of his Lebanese-American heritage
and later because of what he saw there firsthand.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/anthony_shadid/index.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/world/middleeast/bearing-witness-in-syria-a-war-reporters-last-days.html
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/saying-goodbye-to-anthony-shadid/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/17/world/middleeast/Anthony-Shadid-Remembrance.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/world/middleeast/anthony-shadid-reporter-in-the-middle-east-dies-at-43.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/world/middleeast/anthony-shadid-a-new-york-times-reporter-dies-in-syria.html
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/on-twitter-an-outpouring-of-respect-for-shadid/

Marie Catherine Colvin        1956-2012

fearless but never foolhardy war correspondent
who believed passionately in the need to report on conflicts from the frontline.
In a career spanning 30 years,
she covered wars from around the world for the Sunday Times
and was renowned for her compassionate, clear writing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/feb/22/marie-colvin

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/marie-colvin
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/feb/22/marie-colvin

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/22/marie-colvin-killing-pressure-assad
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/22/n-praise-of-marie-colvin
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/feb/22/sunday-times-editor-marie-colvin
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/22/sunday-times-marie-colvin-killed-syria
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/22/marie-colvin-our-mission-is-to-speak-truth
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/feb/22/sundaytimes-syria
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/feb/22/sunday-times-correspondent-marie-colvin-last-report-syria-video

Richard Threlkeld        USA        1937-2012

in his 33 years as a correspondent for CBS and ABC News,
Richard Threlkeld covered wars, presidential campaigns,
assassinations and the collapse of the Soviet Union

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/business/media/richard-threlkeld-award-winning-journalist-dies-at-74.html

Harold Robinson Bruno Jr.        USA        1928-2011

Hal Bruno helped shape political coverage at ABC News
for nearly two decades and was a frequent analyst
on its radio and television broadcasts

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/business/media/hal-bruno-director-of-election-coverage-at-abc-dies-at-83.html

William Henry Patrick Kunkel        USA        1950-2011

Bill Kunkel helped invent video game journalism
and create the first video game magazine in the United States

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/10/technology/bill-kunkel-early-chronicler-of-video-games-dies-at-61.html

Timothy Alistair Hetherington        1970-2011

photographer and film-maker

Tim Hetherington was killed at the age of 40
while covering the escalating violence in Misrata, Libya.
The canon of work he bequeaths defines a generation of reportage.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/apr/21/tim-hetherington-obituary

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Photojournalist Chris Hondros Chris Hondros        1970-2011

At Work in Misurata, Libya        21 April 2011

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/04/photojournalist_chris_hondros.html
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/20/chris-hondros-at-work-in-libya/
http://visualcultureblog.com/tag/chris-hondros/
http://www.chrishondros.com/

Daniel Pearl        USA        1963-2002

South Asia correspondent of the Wall Street Journal,
murdered in Pakistan at the age of 38

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/p/daniel_pearl/index.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2002/feb/23/guardianobituaries.pakistan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,2763,679229,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,2763,655695,00.html
http://www.danielpearl.org/news_and_press/articles/ricketts.html

Carl Bernstein

As a relatively seasoned reporter for The Washington Post,
Carl Bernstein joined with his neophyte colleague Bob Woodward
to expose the political scandal behind the 1972 Watergate break-in.
Their investigation helped set off a constitutional crisis,
leading to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974.
Two reporters working as one, they became known as Woodstein,
winning The Post the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for public service.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/carl_bernstein/index.html

Bob Woodward

award-winning reporter and writer,
author of more than a dozen books about Washington and politics.
He became famous because of the Watergate scandal
— shorthand for the revealed abuses of power by the Nixon White House,
including illegal wiretapping, burglaries and money laundering.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/bob_woodward/index.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/us/kenneth-h-dahlberg-watergate-figure-and-wwii-ace-dies-at-94.html

journalist

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-2201961,00.html

journalist safety

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/journalist-safety

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/22/marie-colvin-our-mission-is-to-speak-truth
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/30/57-journalists-killed-2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2008/dec/31/iraq-mexico
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2006/nov/29/deadlysixmonthsforjournali

Thomas Grey Wicker        1926-2011

Tom Wicker, one of postwar America’s most distinguished journalists,
wrote 20 books, covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy for The New York Times
and became the paper’s Washington bureau chief and an iconoclastic political columnist for 25 years

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/us/tom-wicker-journalist-and-author-dies-at-85.html

Murray William Sayle        1926-2010

Early in his tenure at The Sunday Times of London,
Murray Sayle reported on the escape of an eagle from the London Zoo
by following the bird around Regent’s Park on a bicycle.
It was a minor story in a major journalistic career,
but it suggested Mr. Sayle’s inventive and audacious approach to his job:
he would go anywhere and get there by any means necessary.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/business/media/27sayle.html

Combat and courtoom artist > Howard Joe Brodie        1915-2010

a noted combat artist during World War II
who went on to sketch some of the most famous courtroom dramas of the postwar era,
including the trials of the Chicago Seven, Charles Manson and Patty Hearst

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/24/arts/design/24brodie.html

James Richard Hughes Bacon        USA        1914-2010

James Bacon spent six decades chronicling Hollywood’s biggest stars
as a reporter, author and syndicated columnist

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/arts/20bacon.html

Edwin Harold Newman        USA        1919-2010

An anchor on the “Today” show in the early 1960s
and a familiar presence on the program for many years afterward,
Mr. Newman also appeared regularly on “Meet the Press.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/business/media/16newman.html 

Daniel Schorr        USA        1916-2010

Over 70 years, Daniel Schorr's aggressive reporting over 70 years
as a respected broadcast and print journalist brought him into conflict
with censors, the Nixon administration and network superiors.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/daniel_schorr/index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/business/media/24schorr.html

Steven Wells        1960-2009

journalist, music critic and author

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/tim-hetherington

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/stevenwells
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2011/apr/21/tim-hetherington-journalist-film-maker-restrepo
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jun/29/obituary-steven-wells
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/jun/25/steven-wells-nme-tribute

Hugh John Montgomery-Massingberd        1946-2007

journalist, editor and author       

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2233624,00.html

David Halberstam        USA        1934-2007

prize-winning author and reporter

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-04-23-halberstam-obit_N.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,,-6582547,00.html

Parliamentary sketchwriter > Simon Hoggart

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/08/prime-ministers-i-have-known

fashion journalist > Isabella Blow    1958-2007

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/fashion/story/0,,2074469,00.html

Time journalist > Pham Xuan An        USA        1927-2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1930524,00.html

war journalist > Sebastian Junger

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2011/sep/17/sebastian-junger-war-film-afghanistan

prison journalist        USA

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/17/national/17rideau.html

investigative journalist

http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1264588,00.html

investigative journalism

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/investigative-journalism

investigative journalism        USA

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/15/business/media/15carr.html

investigation

http://www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,,2058097,00.html

investigative journalism > George Polk Awards        USA

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/nyregion/22polk.html

exposé

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/nyregion/22polk.html

Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1945774,00.html

be missing / be abducted

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1596080,00.html

radical journalist

http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1264588,00.html

Slickergate > The Mirror's City Slickers column > how to manipulate the stock market

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1669696,00.html
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1661197,00.html

muckrackers

http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2003/08/HALIMI/10309

news

ABC news        USA

http://abcnews.go.com/

NBC        USA

http://www.nbc.com/
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-04-18-virginia-tech_N.htm

newswire

a news item

CBS > '60 Minutes'        USA

http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2006-11-09-ed-bradley-obit_x.htm

Andrew Aitken Rooney        1919-2011

his prickly wit was long a mainstay of CBS News
and his homespun commentary on “60 Minutes,”
delivered every week from 1978 until 2011, made him a household name

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/us/andy-rooney-mainstay-on-60-minutes-dead-at-92.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/nov/06/andy-rooney

investigative film

M. e. Cohen

M.e.Cohen/HumorInk.com

23 March 2006

U.S. Secretary of Defense (2001-2006) Donald Rumsfeld

Related
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/r/donald_h_rumsfeld/index.html
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1858691_1858690_1858567,00.html

report

war reporting

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/war-reporting

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/22/marie-colvin-our-mission-is-to-speak-truth

Reporting Bosnia's war: Maggie O'Kane remembers - video        Âpril 5, 2012

Maggie O'Kane looks back at her time working
as a foreign correspondent for the Guardian in Sarajevo
while it was under siege between 1992 and 1996.
She talks about her time reporting war crimes in the town of Visegrad
to her front page story about Manjac concentration camp
where 2,500 Muslims and Croats were held
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/apr/05/bosnia-and-herzegovina

reporter
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/business/media/27sayle.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/world/asia/18hostage.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/world/asia/10munadi.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/world/asia/09rescue.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/12/iraq.iraqandthemedia
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,2058030,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2032385,00.html
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1889798,00.html
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1889272,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1786084,00.html

Reporters Without Borders
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/30/57-journalists-killed-2010

reporter > Luke Harding
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/23/luke-harding-russia

reporter > Steven C. Vincent
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1720268,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/04/international/middleeast/04journalist.html

undercover reporter
http://www.guardian.co.uk/prisons/story/0,,2058097,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/race/story/0,11374,1261588,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/dec/21/thefarright.politics

correspondent
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2006-10-04-apple-obit_x.htm

BBC's longest-serving foreign correspondent        Charles Wheeler        1923-2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/04/bbc.television3
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jul/04/bbc.television1

foreign correspondent
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,2058030,00.html

dispatch
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,2057749,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1720197,00.html

interview
http://www.guardian.co.uk/greatinterviews/0,,2149287,00.html

interviewer > Jeremy Paxman
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/oct/09/jeremy-paxman-felt-myself-outsider

deadline

Orwell prize for political reporting

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/apr/25/guardia-writers-make-orwell-shortlist

investigative journalism > George Polk Awards        USA

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/nyregion/22polk.html

The Pulitzer Prize        USA

http://www.pulitzer.org/

Julian Assange wins Martha Gellhorn journalism prize        June 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/02/julian-assange-martha-gelhorn-prize

report

fake a report

 faking and publishing a front-page confession by
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1379591,00.html

piece of fiction

massage

fabricated quotes
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1319075,00.html

doctored photo

fake photo

file photo

paparazzi photo

photo opportunity

provide impartial and factually accurate news coverage

news gathering
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/opinion/22tue2.html

hoax / hoax
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2200173,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2168496,00.html
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/index.html

editor
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/nyregion/23wieghart.html

editorship

editor-in-chief

deputy editor

subeditor
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/feb/23/subeditors-cost-cutting-newspapers

fashion editor
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/video/2010/oct/30/how-to-dress-leather

picture editor

editors' code of conduct / press watchdogs
http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,1124353,00.html

money news

soundbite

showbiz celebrity gossip

hype

hype up / sex up / pump up
http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1058883,00.html

corrections and clarifications
http://www.guardian.co.uk/corrections/story/0,,1491442,00.html

wrong

quotation

quote

he's been quoted as saying...

be misquoted

deny a story

write

writer

Sports writer > Ian Wooldridge
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uklatest/story/0,,-6457986,00.html

Daily Mail writer > Lynda Lee-Potter
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1331961,00.html
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1332081,00.html
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1331660,00.html
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1331727,00.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/dmstandard/article.html?
in_article_id=322782&in_page_id=1766

column

columnist
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/oct/30/pressandpublishing
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2694149.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/alan_coren/article1923462.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/daniel_finkelstein
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,1780048,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/brooker/0,14946,1280131,00.html

Alan Rhun Watkins        1933-2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/may/09/alan-watkins-obituary

political columnist > William Safire        1929-2009        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/opinion/30dowd.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/28/us/28safire.html

 columnist > Keith Spencer Waterhouse    1929-2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/keith-waterhouse
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2009/sep/06/keith-waterhouse-tribute-roy-hattersley
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2009/sep/04/keith-waterhouse-dailymail
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/sep/04/keith-waterhouse-dies-aged-80
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/sep/04/keith-waterhouse-dies-billy-liar
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/aug/11/50-years-on-billy-liar
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/keith-waterhouse-titan-of-fleet-street-falls-silent-aged-80-1782088.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/geoffrey-wheatcroft-a-great-popular-writer-of-his-age-1782089.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1205077/Keith-Waterhouse-That-b--y-liar-making-me.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1185133/
Scintillating-satirist-Keith-Waterhouse-banged-column-Here-Mail-pays-tribute-genius.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1184010/Waterhouse-word-A-Fleet-Street-legend-signs-off.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1176883/KEITH-WATERHOUSE-Its-English-spoke-innit.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1061314/KEITH-WATERHOUSE-These-old-Unhappidrome.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1054453/KEITH-WATERHOUSE-Apostrophes--AAAA-fights-back.html

New York Post columnist James Brady    1928-2009        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/arts/29brady.html
http://www.nypost.com/seven/01282009/news/regionalnews/
james_brady___death_of_a_post_legend_152345.htm

Times columnist Alan Coren        1938-2007
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2694149.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2695887.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article2696826.ece
http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,,2195561,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article404972.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/alan_coren/article758463.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article545786.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article1041138.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article702055.ece
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article702055.ece

New York Times > Opinion > Columnists / Editorials        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/opinion/index.html

commentator > Charles Rice McDowell Jr.        USA        1926-2010

columnist for The Richmond Times-Dispatch who brought a folksy manner
to a regular stint on the PBS program “Washington Week in Review”
and to a prominent role in Ken Burns’s PBS series “The Civil War”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/us/06mcdowell.html

spoof
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/13/law-elton-john-marina-hyde

Visual editors

Classroom for visual journalism
http://visualeditors.ning.com/

photojournalism > New York Times

One in 8 Million tells the stories of New York characters in sounds and images
Photographs by Todd Heisler
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/nyregion/1-in-8-million/index.html#/rivka_karasik

New York Times > Lens > Photography, Video and Photojournalism        USA
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/

photography > New York Times > Assistant Managing Editor Michele McNally        USA
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/business/media/22askthetimes.html

A Long Exposure: 100 years of Guardian photography

The exhibition includes striking work taken
since the paper appointed its first staff photographer, Walter Doughty, in 1908.
A Long Exposure: 100 Years of Guardian Photography
runs until March 1 2009 at The Lowry in Salford, Greater Manchester
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/interactive/2008/oct/21/theguardian-pressandpublishing

Boston Globe > Big Picture > Photographers in peril        April 18, 2011
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/04/photographers_in_peril.html

Guardian photographer > David Levene
http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/davidlevene
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/27/holocaust-memorial-day-survivors-stories

Guardian photographer > Martin Argles
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/interactive/2008/dec/29/martin-argles-best-2008

war reporting
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/war-reporting

war > embedded
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1961891

embedded reporters > embedded artist > Steve Mumford
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4854668

war photographer > The Diary of a Shooter > The Documentary Photography of Zoriah Miller
http://www.diariesofashooter.com/stories.html
http://zoriah.com/archivemainpage.html

photographer / photojournalist > Dith Pran        USA
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/31/cambodia.pressandpublishing

photographer / photojournalist > Don McPhee    1945-2007
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/obituary/0,,2043731,00.html
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/danchung/2007/03/27/don_mcphee_19452007.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/slideshow/page/0,,2043336,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gall/0,8542,1384820,00.html
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/pictures/0,8542,1385621,00.html
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/gall/0,,803674,00.html
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,,2046393,00.html

The Boston Globe > The Big Picture > News stories in photographs
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/

Behind the Scenes: To Publish or Not?
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/behind-13/

World Press Photo Awards 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2010/feb/12/photography-pressandpublishing

Watergate > journalism legend Ben Bradlee

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/business/media/woodward-responds-to-bradlee-watergate-excerpt.html

Gil Noble,

Host of Pioneering TV Show Focusing on Black Issues,

Dies at 80

April 5, 2012
The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO

Gil Noble, a television journalist who hosted “Like It Is,” an award-winning Sunday morning public affairs program in New York, one of the longest-running in the country dedicated to showcasing black leadership and the African-American experience, died on Thursday in a hospital in Wayne, N.J. He was 80.

The cause was complications of a stroke he had last summer, said Dave Davis, president and general manager of WABC-TV, which had broadcast “Like It Is” since 1968.

Though broadcast only in the New York metropolitan area, “Like It Is” attracted guests of national and international influence. Some were controversial. His interviews with figures like Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam drew complaints of one-sidedness. But for Mr. Noble, that was the point:

“My response to those who complained that I didn’t present the other side of the story was that this show was the other side of the story,” he said in 1982.

His interviews comprised a veritable archive of contemporary black history in America: hundreds of hourlong conversations with political and cultural figures like Lena Horne, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bill Cosby, Sammy Davis Jr., Muhammad Ali, Andrew Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Stokely Carmichael.

Mr. Noble viewed “Like It Is” as a platform for ideas and perspectives — especially those of blacks — that were missing from the mainstream news media. He once called his show “the antidote to the 6 and 11 o’clock news.”

His one-on-one exchanges with African and Caribbean heads of state, including Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, Michael Manley of Jamaica and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, were part of another mission: to report on events affecting people of African descent throughout the world.

“You learned a lot watching Gil,” former Mayor David N. Dinkins of New York said in an interview for this obituary. “You didn’t have to agree with everything he said, but for many of us, he was required watching.”

The deep support Mr. Noble enjoyed among his viewers helped him survive two controversies stemming from interviews with figures considered anti-Semitic, biased against Israel or both. In 1982, the Anti-Defamation League accused Mr. Noble of showing an anti-Israel bias when he broadcast a panel discussion about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon without presenting the Israeli perspective.

Just the rumor of disciplinary action prompted protests outside WABC headquarters, led by the Rev. Calvin O. Butts, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and the Rev. Al Sharpton. No disciplinary action was taken, but Mr. Noble was required to present a program with pro-Israeli guests.

Similar tensions arose in the summer of 1991, when Mr. Noble made plans to broadcast a speech in which a friend, Leonard Jeffries, a City College professor of black studies, was said to have made bigoted remarks. News reports had led to Mr. Jeffries’s removal as chairman of the black studies department.

Mr. Noble argued that only by hearing the speech in full could college officials (and everyone else) decide whether the remarks were cause for discipline or had been taken out of context. (In one remark, Mr. Jeffries said Hollywood movies demeaning to blacks were made by “people called Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani.” In another, he said, “Everyone knows rich Jews financed the slave trade.”)

WABC-TV executives shelved the segment, saying it could aggravate racial unrest in the city. As it happened, long-simmering tensions between blacks and Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn exploded into violence the next week.

Protesters again appeared outside the station’s offices. This time, they included a state senator, later to be governor of New York, David A. Paterson.

“It was a spontaneous protest as I recall,” Mr. Paterson said in an interview. “People just showed up. Because ‘Like It Is’ — it was something special in the African-American community, to be protected.” A segment on the Jeffries affair was eventually shown later.

“Some white Americans are repelled by ‘Like It Is,’ but that’s the nature of the program,” Mr. Noble told The Village Voice later that year. “We are witnessing a quarrel between the races in America, and certain opinions in the black community must be heard even if they are revolting.”

After Mr. Noble’s stroke, WABC-TV began broadcasting “Here and Now,” a public affairs show it described as “continuing the legacy of Gil Noble.”

Gilbert Edward Noble was born in Harlem on Feb. 22, 1932, the son of Rachel Noble, a teacher, and Gilbert R. Noble, who owned an auto repair shop. Both parents were born in Jamaica. He attended City College and was drafted into the Army during the Korean War.

Mr. Noble was hired as a reporter for the radio station WLIB in 1962. In 1967, after nationwide race riots that prompted television stations around the country to recruit some of their first black reporters, he was hired by WABC. He worked as reporter, weekend anchor and sometime correspondent for “Like It Is,” a show begun in 1968, before taking over as its host in 1975. He received seven Emmy Awards.

Mr. Noble’s survivors include his wife, Norma Jean; their four daughters, Lynn, Lisa, Leslie and Jennifer; a son, Chris; and eight grandchildren.

Milton Allimadi, a former publisher of the Harlem-based newspaper Black Star News and an occasional guest on Mr. Noble’s show, described the special regard in which Mr. Noble was held in the community he served.

After Mr. Allimadi appeared as a guest on the show, strangers stopped him on the street to shake his hand, he wrote in an online appreciation last August. “When I enter an M.T.A. bus, drivers refuse to accept my fare,” he wrote, “saying they are happy to drive someone who has been on ‘Like It Is.’ ”

    Gil Noble, Host of Pioneering TV Show Focusing on Black Issues, Dies at 80, NYT, 5.4.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/business/media/gil-noble-host-of-show-on-black-issues-dies-at-80.html

Anthony Shadid, Reporter in the Middle East, Dies at 43

February 16, 2012
The New York Times
By MARGALIT FOX

Anthony Shadid, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent who died on Thursday at 43, had long been passionately interested in the Middle East, first because of his Lebanese-American heritage and later because of what he saw there firsthand.

Mr. Shadid spent most of his professional life covering the region, as a reporter first with The Associated Press; then The Boston Globe; then with The Washington Post, for which he won Pulitzer Prizes in 2004 and 2010; and afterward with The New York Times. At his death, from what appeared to be an asthma attack, he was on assignment for The Times in Syria.

Mr. Shadid’s hiring by The Times at the end of 2009 was widely considered a coup for the newspaper, for he had been esteemed throughout his career as an intrepid reporter, a keen observer, an insightful analyst and a lyrical stylist. Much of his work centered on ordinary people who had been forced to pay an extraordinary price for living in the region — or belonging to the religion, ethnic group or social class — that they did.

He was known most recently to Times readers for his clear-eyed coverage of the Arab Spring. For his reporting on that sea change sweeping the region — which included dispatches from Lebanon and Egypt — The Times nominated him, along with a team of his colleagues, for the 2012 Pulitzer in international reporting. (The awards are announced in April.)

In its citation accompanying the nomination, The Times wrote:

“Steeped in Arab political history but also in its culture, Shadid recognized early on that along with the despots, old habits of fear, passivity and despair were being toppled. He brought a poet’s voice, a deep empathy for the ordinary person and an unmatched authority to his passionate dispatches.”

Mr. Shadid’s work entailed great peril. In 2002, as a correspondent for The Globe, he was shot in the shoulder while reporting in Ramallah, in the West Bank. Last March, Mr. Shadid and three other Times journalists — Lynsey Addario, Stephen Farrell and Tyler Hicks — were kidnapped in Libya by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces. They were held for six days and beaten before being released.

Later that year, as the Syrian authorities denounced him for his coverage and as his family was being stalked by Syrian agents in Lebanon, Mr. Shadid nonetheless stole across the border to interview Syrian protesters who had defied bullets and torture to return to the streets.

“He had such a profound and sophisticated understanding of the region,” Martin Baron, the editor of The Boston Globe, for whom Mr. Shadid worked during his tenure there, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “More than anything, his effort to connect foreign coverage with real people on the ground, and to understand their lives, is what made his work so special. It wasn’t just a matter of diplomacy: it was a matter of people, and how their lives were so dramatically affected by world events.”

Mr. Shadid was born in Oklahoma City on Sept. 26, 1968, the son of Rhonda and Buddy Shadid. The younger Mr. Shadid, who became fluent in Arabic only as an adult, earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and journalism from the University of Wisconsin in 1990. He later joined The Associated Press, reporting from Cairo, before moving to The Globe in 2001. He was with The Washington Post from 2003 until 2009.

Mr. Shadid joined The Times on Dec. 31, 2009, as Baghdad bureau chief, and became the newspaper’s bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon, last year.

His first marriage ended in divorce. Survivors include his second wife, the journalist Nada Bakri; their son, Malik; a daughter, Laila, from his first marriage; his parents; a sister, Shannon, of Denver; and a brother, Damon, of Seattle.

He was the author of three books, “Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats and the New Politics of Islam” (2001); “Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War” (2005); and “House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East,” to be published next month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

In a front-page article for The Times last year, Mr. Shadid, reporting from Tunisia amid the Arab Spring, displayed his singular combination of authority, acumen and style.

“The idealism of the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia, where the power of the street revealed the frailty of authority, revived an Arab world anticipating change,” he wrote. “But Libya’s unfinished revolution, as inspiring as it is unsettling, illustrates how perilous that change has become as it unfolds in this phase of the Arab Spring.

“Though the rebels’ flag has gone up in Tripoli,” he continued, “their leadership is fractured and opaque; the intentions and influence of Islamists in their ranks are uncertain; Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi remains at large in a flight reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s; and foreigners have been involved in the fight in the kind of intervention that has long been toxic to the Arab world.” He added, “Not to mention, of course, that a lot of young men have a lot of guns.”

    Anthony Shadid, Reporter in the Middle East, Dies at 43, NYT, 16.2.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/world/middleeast/anthony-shadid-reporter-in-the-middle-east-dies-at-43.html

Tom Wicker, Times Journalist, Dies at 85

November 25, 2011
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Tom Wicker, one of postwar America’s most distinguished journalists, who wrote 20 books, covered the assassination of President John F. Kennedy for The New York Times and became the paper’s Washington bureau chief and an iconoclastic political columnist for 25 years, died on Friday at his home near Rochester, Vt. He was 85.

The cause was apparently a heart attack, said his wife, Pamela Wicker.

On Nov. 22, 1963, Mr. Wicker, a brilliant but relatively unknown White House correspondent who had worked at four smaller papers, written several novels under a pen name and, at 37, had established himself as a workhorse of The Times’s Washington bureau, was riding in the presidential motorcade as it wound through downtown Dallas, the lone Times reporter on a routine political trip to Texas.

The searing images of that day — the rifleman’s shots cracking across Dealey Plaza, the wounded president lurching forward in the open limousine, the blur of speed to Parkland Memorial Hospital and the nation’s anguish as the doctors gave way to the priests and a new era — were dictated by Mr. Wicker from a phone booth in stark, detailed prose drawn from notes scribbled on a White House itinerary sheet. It filled two front-page columns and the entire second page, and vaulted the writer to journalistic prominence overnight.

Nine months later, Mr. Wicker, the son of a small-town North Carolina railroad conductor, succeeded the legendary James B. Reston as chief of The Times’s 48-member Washington bureau, and two years later he inherited the column — although hardly the mantle — of the retiring Arthur Krock, the dean of Washington pundits, who had covered every president since Calvin Coolidge.

In contrast to the conservative pontificating of Mr. Krock and the genteel journalism of Mr. Reston, Mr. Wicker brought a hard-hitting Southern liberal/civil libertarian’s perspective to his column, “In the Nation,” which appeared on the editorial page and then on the Op-Ed Page two or three times a week from 1966 until his retirement in 1991. It was also syndicated to scores of newspapers.

Riding waves of change as the effects of the divisive war in Vietnam and America’s civil rights struggle swept the country, Mr. Wicker applauded President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but took the president to task for deepening the American involvement in Southeast Asia.

He denounced President Richard M. Nixon for covertly bombing Cambodia, and in the Watergate scandal accused him of creating the “beginnings of a police state.” Nixon put Mr. Wicker on his “enemies list,” but resigned in disgrace over the Watergate cover-up. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew upbraided Mr. Wicker for “irresponsibility and thoughtlessness,” but he, too, resigned after pleading no contest to evading taxes on bribes he had taken while he was governor of Maryland.

The Wicker judgments fell like a hard rain upon all the presidents: Gerald R. Ford, for continuing the war in Vietnam; Jimmy Carter, for “temporizing” in the face of soaring inflation and the Iranian hostage crisis; Ronald Reagan, for dozing through the Iran-contra scandal, and the elder George Bush, for letting the Persian Gulf war outweigh educational and health care needs at home. Mr. Wicker’s targets also included members of Congress, government secrecy, big business, corrupt labor leaders, racial bigots, prison conditions, television and the news media.

In the 1970s, Mr. Wicker, whose status as a columnist put him outside the customary journalistic restrictions on advocacy, became a fixture on current-events television shows and addressed gatherings on college campuses and in other forums. Speaking at a 1971 “teach-in” at Harvard, he urged students to “engage in civil disobedience” in protesting the war in Vietnam. “We got one president out,” he told the cheering crowd, “and perhaps we can do it again.”

 

A Prison Uprising

Mr. Wicker had many detractors. He was attacked by conservatives and liberals, by politicians high and low, by business interests, labor leaders and others, and for a time his activism — crossing the line from observer to participant in news events — put him in disfavor with many mainstream journalists. But his speeches and columns continued unabated.

His most notable involvement took place during the uprising by 1,300 inmates who seized 38 guards and workers at the Attica prison in upstate New York in September 1971. Having written a sympathetic column on the death of the black militant George Jackson at San Quentin, Mr. Wicker was asked by Attica’s rebels to join a group of outsiders to inspect prison conditions and monitor negotiations between inmates and officials. The radical lawyer William M. Kunstler and Bobby Seale, chairman of the Black Panther Party, also went in, and the observers took on the role of mediators.

Mr. Wicker, in a column, described a night in the yard with the rebels: flickering oil-drum fires, bull-necked convicts armed with bats and iron pipes, faceless men in hoods or football helmets huddled on mattresses behind wooden barricades. He wrote: “This is another world — terrifying to the outsider, yet imposing in its strangeness — behind those massive walls, in this murmurous darkness, within the temporary but real power of desperate men.”

Talks broke down over inmate demands for amnesty and the ouster of Russell G. Oswald, the state corrections commissioner. Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller rejected appeals by the observers to go to Attica, and after a four-day standoff, troopers and guards stormed the prison. Ten hostages and 29 inmates were killed by the authorities’ gunfire in what witnesses called a turkey shoot; three inmates were killed by other convicts, who also beat a guard to death. Afterward, many prisoners were beaten and abused in reprisals.

Mr. Wicker wrote a book about the uprising, “A Time to Die” (1975). Most critics hailed it as his best book, although some chided him for sympathizing with the inmates. “Attica,” a television movie starring Morgan Freeman as a jailhouse lawyer and George Grizzard as Mr. Wicker, was made by ABC in 1980.

 

Fiction and Nonfiction

Mr. Wicker produced a shelf of books: 10 novels, ranging from potboilers under the pen name Paul Connolly to murder mysteries and political thrillers, and 10 nonfiction books that re-examined the legacies of ex-presidents, race relations in America, the press and other subjects.

Mr. Wicker’s first nonfiction book was “Kennedy Without Tears: The Man Beneath the Myth” (1964), a 61-page look back that some critics said recapitulated popular notions of an orator of charm and wit but did not penetrate the armor of sentiment growing over the dead president.

“JFK and LBJ: The Influence of Personality Upon Politics,” (1968), was better received. It analyzed the character of the two presidents to explain why Kennedy was unable to push many programs through Congress and why Johnson’s credibility was a casualty of the Vietnam conflict.

Mr. Wicker’s “On Press” (1978) enlarged on complaints he had made for years: the myth of objectivity, reliance on official and anonymous sources. Far from being robust and uninhibited, he wrote, the press was often a toady to government and business.

Published shortly before Mr. Wicker retired, “One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream” (1991) offered a surprising reassessment of the president he had scorned 20 years earlier. Nixon, credited with high marks in foreign policy, mainly for opening doors to China, actually deserved more notice for domestic achievements, Mr. Wicker argued, especially in desegregating Southern schools.

Mr. Wicker later wrote “Tragic Failure: Racial Integration in America,” (1996), arguing that black Americans should abandon the Democratic Party and forge a new liberal movement. And he produced “On the Record: An Insider’s Guide to Journalism” (2001), “Dwight D. Eisenhower” (2002), “George Herbert Walker Bush” (2004) and “Shooting Star: The Brief Arc of Joe McCarthy” (2006).

His political novel “Facing the Lions” (1973) was on The Times best-seller list for 18 weeks. His later novels were “Unto This Hour” (1984), a Civil War story on the best-seller list for 15 weeks; “Donovan’s Wife” (1992), a satire on sleazy politics; and “Easter Lilly” (1998), about a black woman tried for the murder of a white jail guard in the South.

 

A Young Journalist

Mr. Wicker was a hefty man, 6 feet 2 inches tall, with a ruddy face, jowls, petulant lips and a lock of unruly hair that dangled boyishly on a high forehead. He toiled in tweeds in pinstriped Washington, but seemed more suited to a hammock and straw hat on a lazy summer day. The casual gait, the easygoing manner, the down-home drawl set a tone for audiences, but masked a fiery temperament, a ferocious work ethic, a tigerish competitiveness and a stubborn idealism, qualities that made him a perceptive observer of the American scene for more than a half century.

Thomas Grey Wicker was born on June 18, 1926, in Hamlet, N.C., the son of Delancey David, a railroad freight conductor, and Esta Cameron Wicker. He worked on his high school newspaper and decided to make journalism his career.

After Navy service in World War II, he studied journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating in 1948. Over the next decade, he was an editor and reporter at several newspapers in North Carolina, including The Winston-Salem Journal, eventually becoming its Washington correspondent.

Mr. Wicker married the former Neva Jewett McLean in 1949. The couple had two children and were divorced in 1973. In 1974, he married Pamela Hill, a producer of television documentaries. Besides his wife, he is survived by the children of his first marriage, a daughter, Cameron Wicker, and a son, Thomas Grey Wicker Jr.; two stepdaughters, Kayce Freed Jennings and Lisa Freed; and a stepson, Christopher Hill.

 

In Washington

In 1957-58, Mr. Wicker was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and in 1959 became associate editor of The Nashville Tennessean. In 1960, Mr. Reston hired him for The Times’s Washington bureau, one of “Scotty’s boys,” a cadre of protégés that included Max Frankel, Anthony Lewis and Russell Baker.

Mr. Wicker covered Congress and the Kennedy White House, the 1960 political campaigns and presidential trips abroad. His output was prodigious — 700 articles in his first few years, many of them on the front page, others in the form of news analysis in The New York Times Magazine or the Week in Review.

His work was often entertaining as well as informative. “The most familiar voice in Ameriker lahst yeeah warz that of a Boston Irishman with Harvard overtones who sounded vaguely like an old recording of Franklin D. Roosevelt speeded up to 90 r.p.m.’s,” Mr. Wicker wrote for the magazine, summing up 241 Kennedy speeches in his first year in the presidency. “Nor will the Beacon Street ‘a’ and the Bunker Hill ‘r’ fall any less frequently on the American eeah in the coming yeeah.”

Mr. Wicker was named chief of the Washington bureau on Sept. 1, 1964, at the insistence of his mentor, Mr. Reston, who had asked to be relieved. While the job involved managerial duties, Mr. Wicker was an indifferent administrator. He continued to cover Washington and national news, and to write news analyses and magazine articles. In 1966, he took on Mr. Krock’s column, adding to his workload.

In 1968, after complaints by Times editors in New York that Mr. Wicker was devoting too much attention to his writing, The Times announced that James Greenfield, a former Time magazine reporter and State Department official, would replace him as bureau chief.

Mr. Wicker and some colleagues, who saw the move as an effort to rein in the relative independence the bureau had enjoyed under Mr. Reston, vehemently opposed the appointment. The publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, withdrew Mr. Greenfield’s name and named Mr. Frankel as bureau chief. Mr. Wicker became associate editor, a title he retained until his retirement, and after 1972 wrote his column from New York.

Besides columns and books, Mr. Wicker wrote short stories and freelance articles that appeared in The Atlantic, Esquire, Harper’s, Life, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Playboy, Rolling Stone and Vogue. He received many awards and honorary degrees from a dozen universities.

    Tom Wicker, Times Journalist, Dies at 85, NYT, 25.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/us/tom-wicker-journalist-and-author-dies-at-85.html

Andy Rooney, a Cranky Voice of CBS, Dies at 92

November 5, 2011
The New York Times
By RICHARD SEVERO and PETER KEEPNEWS

Andy Rooney, whose prickly wit was long a mainstay of CBS News and whose homespun commentary on “60 Minutes,” delivered every week from 1978 until 2011, made him a household name, died on Friday in New York City.

He was 92 and lived in Manhattan, though he kept a family vacation home in Rensselaerville, N.Y., and the first home he ever bought, in Rowayton, Conn.

CBS News said in a statement that Mr. Rooney died after complications following minor surgery.

In late September, CBS announced that Mr. Rooney would be making his last regular weekly appearance on “60 Minutes” on Oct. 2. After that, said Jeff Fager, the chairman of CBS News and the program’s executive producer, he would “always have the ability to speak his mind on ‘60 Minutes’ when the urge hits him.”

But a little more than three weeks after that appearance, CBS announced that Mr. Rooney had been hospitalized after developing “serious complications” from an unspecified operation.

Mr. Rooney entered television shortly after World War II, writing material for entertainers like Arthur Godfrey, Victor Borge, Herb Shriner, Sam Levenson and Garry Moore. Beginning in 1962, he had a six-year association with the CBS News correspondent Harry Reasoner, who narrated a series of Everyman “essays” written by Mr. Rooney.

But it was “A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney,” his weekly segment on “60 Minutes,” that made him one of the most popular broadcast figures in the country. With his jowls, bushy eyebrows, deeply circled eyes and advancing years, he seemed every inch the homespun philosopher as he addressed mostly mundane subjects with varying degrees of befuddlement, vexation and sometimes pleasure.

He admitted to loving football, Christmas, tennis, woodworking and Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of the few politicians who won his approval because, as an Army general during World War II, he had refused to censor Stars and Stripes, the G.I. newspaper for which Mr. Rooney worked. He also claimed to like shined shoes and properly pressed pants and had machines in his office to take care of those functions, although somehow he always managed to look rumpled.

But he was better known for the things he did not like. He railed against “two-prong plugs in a three-prong society,” the incomprehensibility of road maps, wash-and-wear shirts “that you can wash but not wear,” the uselessness of keys and locks, and outsize cereal boxes that contained very little cereal.

“I don’t like any music I can’t hum,” he grumbled.

He observed that “there are more beauty parlors than there are beauties” and that “if dogs could talk, it would take a lot of the fun out of owning one.”

He made clear that he thought Gen. George S. Patton and Ernest Hemingway, both of whom he had known personally, were gasbags. He disliked New Year’s Eve, waiting in line for any reason and the bursars at whatever colleges his children attended.

He once concluded that “it is possible to be dumb and be a college president,” but he acknowledged that “most college students are not as smart as most college presidents.”

On the subject of higher education, he declared that most college catalogs “rank among the great works of fiction of all time,” and that a student of lackluster intellect who could raise tuition money would find it “almost impossible to flunk out.”

Time magazine once called him “the most felicitous nonfiction writer in television.” But Mr. Rooney was decidedly not everyone’s cup of tea.

The New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen, for example, took strong issue with Mr. Rooney’s dismissive comments after Kurt Cobain of the band Nirvana committed suicide in 1994. It was not surprising, she wrote, that Mr. Rooney “brought to the issue of youthful despair a mixture of sarcasm and contempt,” but it was “worth noting because in 1994 that sort of attitude is as dated and foolish as believing that cancer is contagious.”

Mr. Rooney’s opinions sometimes landed him in trouble. In 1990, CBS News suspended him without pay in response to complaints that he had made remarks offensive to black and gay people.

The trigger was a December 1989 special, “A Year With Andy Rooney,” in which he said: “There was some recognition in 1989 of the fact that many of the ills which kill us are self-induced. Too much alcohol, too much food, drugs, homosexual unions, cigarettes. They’re all known to lead quite often to premature death.” He later apologized for the statement.

But the gay newspaper The Advocate subsequently quoted him as saying in an interview: “I’ve believed all along that most people are born with equal intelligence, but blacks have watered down their genes because the less intelligent ones are the ones that have the most children. They drop out of school early, do drugs and get pregnant.”

Mr. Rooney denied that he had made such a statement, and because the interview had apparently not been taped, the reporter was unable to prove that he had. “It is a know-nothing statement, which I abhor,” Mr. Rooney said.

He said that he had accepted the suspension rather than end his relationship with CBS News. He said that when he was an Army trainee, he had been arrested in the South because he insisted on riding in the back of a bus with some black soldiers who were friends of his.

Many of his colleagues rushed to his defense. “I know he is not a racist,” Walter Cronkite said.

Mr. Rooney was suspended for three months but was brought back after only one. During his absence, the ratings for “60 Minutes” declined by 20 percent and the network received thousands of letters and telephone calls from viewers who missed his commentaries.

Mr. Rooney generated more criticism in 2002, when he said in an interview on a cable sports show that women had “no business” being sideline television reporters at football games because they did not understand football.

He did it again in 2007, with a newspaper column complaining about the current state of baseball. “I know all about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but today’s baseball stars are all guys named Rodriguez to me,” he wrote.

He subsequently acknowledged that he “probably shouldn’t have said it,” but denied that his intent had been to denigrate Latin American players.

Andrew Aitken Rooney was born on Jan. 14, 1919, in Albany, the son of Walter and Ellinor Rooney. His father was in the paper business. After his graduation from Albany Academy, he worked as a copy boy for The Knickerbocker News before attending Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., where he played left guard on the football team (even though he was only 5-foot-9 and 185 pounds) and worked for the weekly newspaper, The Colgate Maroon.

In 1941, three months before Pearl Harbor, he was drafted into the Army and used his powers of persuasion to get himself assigned to Stars and Stripes. He did not know much about reporting, but he learned his craft by working with journalists like Homer Bigart, Ernie Pyle and Mr. Cronkite.

He became a sergeant, flew on some bombing missions, covered the invasion of France in 1944 and won a Bronze Star for reporting under fire during the battle of Saint-Lô in Normandy. A year later, he was among the first Americans to enter the concentration camps at Buchenwald and Thekla, Germany.

In collaboration with Bud Hutton, a Stars and Stripes colleague, Mr. Rooney wrote two books: “Air Gunner” (1944), a collection of sketches of Americans who had been stationed in Britain, and “The Story of the Stars and Stripes” (1946).

After his discharge, Mr. Rooney returned to Albany and worked as a freelance writer.

By 1949, he had persuaded Mr. Godfrey to hire him as a writer. He continued writing for several entertainers, but also became involved in news and public affairs when he was asked to write scripts for “The Twentieth Century,” a documentary series narrated by Mr. Cronkite. That led to his long-term association with Mr. Reasoner, which led to his involvement, initially as a writer, with “60 Minutes.”

In the early 1970s, after briefly working for PBS, Mr. Rooney returned to CBS and began appearing on camera in a series of specials, one of which, “Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington,” won a Peabody Award.

Mr. Rooney was as outspoken about CBS, his longtime employer, as he was about everything else. He made no secret of his dislike for Laurence A. Tisch, the network’s chief executive from 1986 to 1995. Protesting Mr. Tisch’s cost efficiencies and job cuts in 1987, Mr. Rooney said CBS News “has been turned into primarily a business enterprise, and the moral enterprise has been lost,” and he threatened to quit if a writers strike against CBS News was not settled.

Although his commentary was mostly written for CBS News, he also had a syndicated newspaper column for three decades, for which he was given a lifetime achievement award in 2003 by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. (That same year he received a similar award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.) He published a number of books, primarily collections of his commentaries, most recently “Out of My Mind” (2006), “And More by Andy Rooney” (2008) and “Andy Rooney: 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit” (2010).

Mr. Rooney’s wife of 62 years, Marguerite Howard, died in 2004. Mr. Rooney is survived by their four children, Ellen Rooney of London; Martha Fishel of Chevy Chase, Md.; Emily Rooney of Boston; and Brian Rooney of Los Angeles, along with five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Mr. Rooney frequently said he considered himself “one of the least important producers on television” because his specialty was light pieces. “I just wish insignificance had more stature,” he once said.

But he put things in perspective in his 1,097th and last regularly scheduled “60 Minutes” appearance.

“I’ve done a lot of complaining here,” he said then, “but of all the things I’ve complained about, I can’t complain about my life.”

    Andy Rooney, a Cranky Voice of CBS, Dies at 92, NYT, 5.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/us/andy-rooney-mainstay-on-60-minutes-dead-at-92.html

Sean Hoare knew

how destructive the News of the World could be

The courageous whistleblower who claimed Andy Coulson
knew about phone hacking had a powerful motive for speaking out

Monday 18 July 2011
18.46 BST
Guardian.co.uk
Nick Davies
Andy Coulson
This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 18.46 BST on Monday 18 July 2011.
A version appeared on p2 of the Main section section of the Guardian
on Tuesday 19 July 2011. It was last modified at 07.18 BST on Tuesday 19 July 2011.

At a time when the reputation of News of the World journalists is at rock bottom, it needs to be said that the paper's former showbusiness correspondent Sean Hoare, who died on Monday, was a lovely man.

In the saga of the phone-hacking scandal, he distinguished himself by being the first former NoW journalist to come out on the record, telling the New York Times last year that his former friend and editor, Andy Coulson, had actively encouraged him to hack into voicemail.

That took courage. But he had a particularly powerful motive for speaking. He knew how destructive the News of the World could be, not just for the targets of its exposés, but also for the ordinary journalists who worked there, who got caught up in its remorseless drive for headlines.

Explaining why he had spoken out, he told me: "I want to right a wrong, lift the lid on it, the whole culture. I know, we all know, that the hacking and other stuff is endemic. Because there is so much intimidation. In the newsroom, you have people being fired, breaking down in tears, hitting the bottle."

He knew this very well, because he was himself a victim of the News of the World. As a showbusiness reporter, he had lived what he was happy to call a privileged life. But the reality had ruined his physical health: "I was paid to go out and take drugs with rock stars – get drunk with them, take pills with them, take cocaine with them. It was so competitive. You are going to go beyond the call of duty. You are going to do things that no sane man would do. You're in a machine."

While it was happening, he loved it. He came from a working-class background of solid Arsenal supporters, always voted Labour, defined himself specifically as a "clause IV" socialist who still believed in public ownership of the means of production. But, working as a reporter, he suddenly found himself up to his elbows in drugs and delirium.

He rapidly arrived at the Sun's Bizarre column, then run by Coulson. He recalled: "There was a system on the Sun. We broke good stories. I had a good relationship with Andy. He would let me do what I wanted as long as I brought in a story. The brief was, 'I don't give a fuck'."

He was a born reporter. He could always find stories. And, unlike some of his nastier tabloid colleagues, he did not play the bully with his sources. He was naturally a warm, kind man, who could light up a lamp-post with his talk. From Bizarre, he moved to the Sunday People, under Neil Wallis, and then to the News of the World, where Andy Coulson had become deputy editor. And, persistently, he did as he was told and went out on the road with rock stars, befriending them, bingeing with them, pausing only to file his copy.

He made no secret of his massive ingestion of drugs. He told me how he used to start the day with "a rock star's breakfast" – a line of cocaine and a Jack Daniels – usually in the company of a journalist who now occupies a senior position at the Sun. He reckoned he was using three grammes of cocaine a day, spending about £1,000 a week. Plus endless alcohol. Looking back, he could see it had done him enormous damage. But at the time, as he recalled, most of his colleagues were doing it, too.

"Everyone got overconfident. We thought we could do coke, go to Brown's, sit in the Red Room with Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence. Everyone got a bit carried away."

It must have scared the rest of Fleet Street when he started talking – he had bought, sold and snorted cocaine with some of the most powerful names in tabloid journalism. One retains a senior position on the Daily Mirror. "I last saw him in Little Havana," he recalled, "at three in the morning, on his hands and knees. He had lost his cocaine wrap. I said to him, 'This is not really the behaviour we expect of a senior journalist from a great Labour paper.' He said, 'Have you got any fucking drugs?'"

And the voicemail hacking was all part of the great game. The idea that it was a secret, or the work of some "rogue reporter", had him rocking in his chair: "Everyone was doing it. Everybody got a bit carried away with this power that they had. No one came close to catching us." He would hack messages and delete them so the competition could not hear them, or hack messages and swap them with mates on other papers.

In the end, his body would not take it any more. He said he started to have fits, that his liver was in such a terrible state that a doctor told him he must be dead. And, as his health collapsed, he was sacked by the News of the World – by his old friend Coulson.

When he spoke out about the voicemail hacking, some Conservative MPs were quick to smear him, spreading tales of his drug use as though that meant he was dishonest. He was genuinely offended by the lies being told by News International and always willing to help me and other reporters who were trying to expose the truth. He was equally offended when Scotland Yard's former assistant commissioner, John Yates, assigned officers to interview him, not as a witness but as a suspect. They told him anything he said could be used against him, and, to his credit, he refused to have anything to do with them.

His health never recovered. He liked to say that he had stopped drinking, but he would treat himself to some red wine. He liked to say he didn't smoke any more, but he would stop for a cigarette on his way home. For better and worse, he was a Fleet Street man.

    Sean Hoare knew how destructive the News of the World could be, G, 18.7.2011,
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jul/18/sean-hoare-news-of-the-world

One Reporter’s Lonely Beat, Witnessing Executions

October 21, 2009
The New York Times
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

Of all the consequences of shrinking newsrooms, one of the oddest is this: Fewer journalists are available to watch people die. But Michael Graczyk has witnessed more than 300 deaths, and many of those were people he had come to know.

An Associated Press reporter based in Houston, Mr. Graczyk covers death penalty cases in Texas, the state that uses capital punishment far more than any other, and since the 1980s, he has attended nearly every execution the state has carried out — he has lost track of the precise count. Whenever possible, he has also interviewed the condemned killers and their victims’ families.

What makes his record all the more extraordinary is that often, Mr. Graczyk’s has been the only account of the execution given to the world at large. Covering executions was once considered an obligatory — if often ghoulish — part of what a newspaper did, like writing up school board meetings and printing box scores, but one by one, such dutiful traditions have fallen away.

A generation ago, he had plenty of company from other journalists at the prison at Huntsville, about an hour’s drive north of Houston, where executions in Texas are carried out. But then Texas executions went from rare to routine, and shrinking news organizations found it harder to justify the expense of what was, from most parts of the state, a long trip.

“There are times when I’m the only person present who doesn’t have a stake in the outcome,” he said.

Seeing inmates in the death chamber, strapped to a gurney and moments away from lethal injections, he has heard them greet him by name, confess to their crimes for the first time, sing, pray and, once, spit out a concealed handcuff key. He has stood shoulder to shoulder with other witnesses who stared, wept, fainted, turned their backs or, in one case, exchanged high-fives.

No reporter, warden, chaplain or guard has seen nearly as many executions as Mr. Graczyk, 59, Texas prison officials say. In fact, he has probably witnessed more than any other American. It could be emotionally and politically freighted work, but he takes it with a low-key, matter-of-fact lack of sentiment, refusing to hint at his own view of capital punishment.

Given a choice between the death chamber’s two viewing rooms, he usually chooses the one for the victim’s family rather than the side for the inmate’s, partly “because I can get out faster and file the story faster.”

“My job is to tell a story and tell what’s going on, and if I tell you that I get emotional on one side or another, I open myself to criticism,” he said.

The A.P. attends every execution, a policy that newspapers around the state encourage.

“Our staff is half the size it was three years ago, and so it’s just much more difficult to send somebody,” said Jim Witt, executive editor of The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “But we know we can depend on The A.P., so I can send my reporters to something else.”

Newspapers sometimes use The A.P.’s reporting rather than their own — or they do not cover the executions at all. What was once a statewide story has become of strictly local interest.

A few papers, like The Houston Chronicle, still routinely cover executions in cases from their home counties, but not those from other parts of the state. Only one paper regularly covers executions no matter which part of the state the cases come from: The Huntsville Item, a small publication based near the prison.

This year, the state has put to death five inmates in cases from Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth. The Star-Telegram covered one, wrote about two other cases in the days before the executions, and on the remaining two did not publish any articles, either its own or The A.P.’s.

“It depends on whether the crime was particularly newsworthy,” Mr. Witt said.

This year, a case from El Paso County resulted in an execution for that county for the first time in 22 years, but rather than send a reporter to Huntsville, some 650 miles away, The El Paso Times quoted extensively from Mr. Graczyk’s report.

“We actually put in to attend that one, and we were granted a spot, but when the editors explained the case to me, and the local connection was minimal, I said it wasn’t a compelling enough case,” said Chris V. Lopez, editor of The Times.

He said the expense of traveling to Huntsville was not a major consideration, but “it has to be a case that has a lot of local impact,” adding that the paper plans to attend a scheduled execution in a more prominent case.

Mr. Graczyk, who also writes on a wide range of other topics, developed his unusual specialty in the mid-1980s, a few years after Texas resumed executions after a long hiatus. He often covers the crimes, the trials and the appeals, immersed in details so gruesome it is hard to imagine they are real.

At first there were just a handful of executions each year, but the pace of capital punishment in Texas stepped up sharply through the next decade. The state has put 441 inmates to death since 1982, more than the next six states combined. That includes 334 since the start of 1997, a period in which Texas accounted for 41 percent of the national total.

“The act is very clinical, almost anticlimactic,” Mr. Graczyk said. “When we get into the chamber here in Texas, the inmate has already been strapped to the gurney and the needle is already in his arm.”

Witnesses are mostly subdued, he said, and while “some are in tears, outright jubilation or breakdowns are really rare.”

They stand on the other side of a barrier of plexiglass and bars, able to hear the prisoner through speakers. And the only sound regularly heard during the execution itself, is of all things, snoring. A three-drug cocktail puts the inmate to sleep within seconds, while death takes a few minutes. Victims’ family members often remark that the killer’s death seems too peaceful.

But before the drugs flow, the inmate is allowed to make a last statement, giving Mr. Graczyk what even he acknowledges are some lasting, eerie memories.

One inmate “sang ‘Silent Night,’ even though it wasn’t anywhere near Christmas,” Mr. Graczyk said. “I can’t hear that song without thinking about it. That one really stuck with me.”

    One Reporter’s Lonely Beat, Witnessing Executions, NYT, 21.10.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/business/media/21execute.html

James Brady,

Columnist Chronicling the Power Elite,

Dies at 80

January 29, 2009
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GRIMES

James Brady, who helped start the Page Six gossip column at The New York Post, chronicled the doings of the New York power elite in columns for Advertising Age and Crain’s New York Business and wrote a gripping memoir of his combat experience in the Korean War, died on Monday after collapsing at his home in Manhattan. He was 80.

His daughter Fiona Brady said that the cause had not been determined but that he had a stroke several years ago.

For more than 30 years Mr. Brady turned a knowing eye on the literati, fashionistas and tycoons who defined life at the top in Manhattan. He also interviewed Hollywood celebrities for Parade magazine. But nearly any topic that caught his fancy made it into his columns.

In his final “Brady’s Bunch” column in Advertising Age in 2005, he reviewed some of the subjects that he had written about over the years. They included Paris and Coco Chanel, war and peace, “the Hamptons, football, red wine, TV, Scott Fitzgerald, skiing with my grandchildren and Elaine’s restaurant.”

The list went on. And on.

“He was a throwback to the Damon Runyon days of newspapermen,” the gossip columnist Liz Smith, who worked for Mr. Brady at Harper’s Bazaar and The Post, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “He did just about everything, and probably 28 other things I don’t even know about. He worked hard, and he made it seem effortless.”

James Winston Brady grew up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and worked his way through Manhattan College as a copyboy at The Daily News in New York. After being called up from the reserves by the Marine Corps, he went to Korea in 1951 and wound up leading a rifle platoon in some of the heaviest combat of the war.

He later wrote about his Korean experience in an acclaimed memoir, “The Coldest War” (1990), one of his several books about Korea and the Marines, including “The Scariest Place in the World” (2005), “Why Marines Fight” (2007) and the novels “The Marines of Autumn” (2000) and “The Marine” (2003). Just days before he died, he finished editing “Hero of the Pacific: The Life of Legendary Marine John Basilone,” to be published by Wiley in November.

On returning to the United States, he was hired as a business news reporter by Women’s Wear Daily. Its parent company, Fairchild Publications, later sent him to Washington to cover Capitol Hill and to London and Paris to run its bureaus there. In Paris he became a good friend of Coco Chanel, who, for reasons unknown, called him “mon petit indien” (“my little Indian”).

In 1958 he married Florence Kelly, who survives him. In addition to his daughter Fiona, of the Riverdale section of the Bronx, he is also survived by a brother, Msgr. Tom Brady of Brooklyn; another daughter, Susan Konig of Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.; and four grandchildren.

Mr. Brady returned to New York as publisher of Women’s Wear Daily in 1964 and later started its spinoff publication W. In 1971 he took over the editorship of Harper’s Bazaar, but his efforts to inject a more youthful note into the publication earned him a quick exit, although he put his misadventures to good use in the publishing memoir “Superchic” (1974).

He was quickly hired by Clay Felker to develop and write the “Intelligencer” column for New York magazine, and, just as quickly, lured away by the publisher Rupert Murdoch, then extending his reach from Australia and Britain to the United States. Mr. Brady initially edited The National Star (now The Star), the supermarket tabloid, and then moved to The Post after Mr. Murdoch bought it in 1976.

Whether Mr. Brady alone gave birth to Page Six remains in dispute, but he was present at the creation, gave the column its name and was its first editor, briefly, before being called on to edit Mr. Murdoch’s latest acquisition, New York magazine. He returned to Page Six as editor in the early 1980s.

A taste for the high life and an upbeat, gregarious nature made Mr. Brady a marathon chronicler of the upper reaches of Manhattan social life, where he was a curious enthusiast rather than a climber. He began writing a column for Advertising Age in 1977, and when Crain’s New York Business started up in 1984, he simply doubled his output with a column there, too. The social material that did not find its way into his columns fed into a series of novels set in the Hamptons. (He had a summer house in East Hampton, N.Y.)

Beyond New York, he was familiar to millions of readers as the author of “In Step With,” a weekly celebrity profile for Parade magazine, which he began writing in 1986. His last Parade column, on Kevin Bacon, is scheduled to appear on Feb. 15.

    James Brady, Columnist Chronicling the Power Elite, Dies at 80, NYT, 29.1.2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/arts/29brady.html

The Media Equation

A Scandal in Chicago That Justifies Investigative Journalism

December 15, 2008
The New York Times
By DAVID CARR

For the last few years, newspapers have been smacked around for lacking relevance, but the industry has finally found a compelling spokesman: Rod R. Blagojevich, Democratic governor of Illinois.

According to the criminal complaint that the United States attorney filed, Governor Blagojevich, while allegedly trying to set a price for a United States Senate seat, also spent a significant amount of time going after the press, especially The Chicago Tribune, whose editorial page had been calling for his impeachment.

The governor said he would withhold financial assistance from the Tribune Company in its effort to sell Wrigley Field unless the newspaper got rid of the editorial writers. “Our recommendation is fire all those [expletive] people, get ’em the [expletive] out of there and get us some editorial support,” he told his chief of staff, John Harris.

Who says the modern American newspaper doesn’t matter?

There is no evidence that Sam Zell, the chief executive of the Tribune Company, or any of his colleagues followed through on Mr. Blagojevich’s demand for retribution. (Gerould Kern, editor of The Chicago Tribune, told me Sunday, “Since I have been editor, I have not been pressured in any way on our coverage of the governor, our editorial page positions or the staffing of our editorial board.”)

The Tribune Company has acknowledged that that the company received a subpoena, but declined to comment further.

In a city and state where corruption is knit into the political fabric, a solvent daily paper would seem to be a civic necessity. But if another governor goes bad in Illinois — a likely circumstance given the current investigation and the fact that the last governor, George Ryan, is serving six and a half years on corruption charges — what if the local paper were too diminished to do the job?

It is not an academic issue. Last week, it was reported that the two daily newspapers in Detroit, a city whose politicians have been known to get their hands in the till as soon as voters pull the lever, will cease home delivery on most days of the week, printing a pared-down version for newsstands, with cuts in staff to match.

And last Monday, the day before Mr. Blagojevich and Mr. Harris were arrested, the Tribune Company, which has almost $13 billion in debt, filed for bankruptcy protection. It was less than a year after Mr. Zell, a man with a fondness for distressed assets, took control of the Tribune chain — which owned 11 other newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, and 23 television stations — in a deal structured around an employee stock ownership plan that involved $8 billion in new debt.

Things have not gone as planned since then. The worst ad recession since the Depression, combined with that crushing debt, has compelled the company to sell assets — Newsday, a daily newspaper in Long Island, was sold last spring for $650 million — and cut staff. The Chicago Tribune newsroom, which had a staff of 670 in 2005, has gone through several rounds of cutbacks and buyouts that left the newsroom with 480 employees.

Some of the losses have been dear. This summer, Maurice Possley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the paper’s premier criminal justice reporter, left, in part because he didn’t believe the newspaper was still interested in the kind of long-form investigative stories he worked on.

Last month, John Crewdson, another Pulitzer-winning reporter, was laid off from the newspaper’s Washington bureau. Two of the newspaper’s five staff members who covered state government full-time are now gone. Ann Marie Lipinski, the newspaper’s editor and a longtime enabler of The Chicago Tribune’s journalistic aggression, left last summer, and in September, a redesign with fewer articles arrayed over less space was put in place.

Almost since the day Mr. Blagojevich took office, The Tribune has shown readers that the governor’s primary interest was not always the public interest. And the paper’s reporting helped expose the outside clout of Antoin Rezko, the convicted fixer with ties to both Mr. Blagojevich and President-elect Barack Obama.

Although much of the current investigation is being led by the office of the United States attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, the newspaper did its own work, including pointing out that the governor’s wife, Patti, received over $700,000 in real estate commissions, with much of the money coming from people who did business with the state. In the indictment, she too pays tribute to the newspaper’s effectiveness, shouting in the background as her husband talked about Tribune.

“Hold up that [expletive] Cubs [expletive],” she said. “[Expletive] them.”

It is the highest sort of compliment, if rather profane.

This week, Dan Mihalopoulos, Ray Long, John Chase, David Kidwell and others at the paper continued to work every angle on the Blagojevich investigation, and follow some of their own. But some people at the newspaper, and those who have left, wonder whether The Tribune’s commitment to covering corruption is sustainable.

“I couldn’t be prouder of the people that are there and the job that they have done,” said David Jackson, an investigative reporter who worked on the Rezko coverage and is now on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. “But both as a citizen and a journalist, you have to wonder whether the paper will have the resources moving forward to continue to do that work. I am worried that the paper will be so diminished under Zell that it won’t be able to play that role.”

Mr. Crewdson, who had worked in the Washington bureau, was not so concerned.

In an e-mail message, he said the financial condition of his former paper would not “have kept Fitzgerald from finding out what he wanted to know and going wherever he wanted to go.”

Financial problems aside, Mr. Zell has publicly ridiculed the focus on long-term investigative projects, telling a New York investors’ conference, “I haven’t figured out how to cash in a Pulitzer Prize.”

In a speech last month at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, James Warren, a former managing editor of the paper who was asked to leave after a new editor was appointed, denounced the shift away from investigative efforts.

“Journalistically, it is hard, even impossible, to imagine the current Tribune hierarchy, bent on what it sees as more ‘utilitarian’ and locally ‘relevant’ work, championing such a time-consuming, original and inherently catalytic effort,” he said.

Mr. Kern, the current editor, said that this week confirmed that The Tribune had the conviction and muscle to cover its backyard aggressively.

“This was an extraordinary week for The Chicago Tribune,” he said. “On Monday, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, and on Tuesday, this huge story broke. There are two messages there. One, that the business model has to be reinvented and two, the importance of doing public service reporting. In the future, we will be doing fewer things and doing them better, and this kind of reporting will be a pillar of what we continue to do.”

Mr. Possley, who left the newspaper last summer, said he was encouraged that someone, at least the current governor of Illinois, felt that the biggest daily in Chicago was important, however reduced its circumstance.

“What The Tribune was doing with its reporting and on its opinion page was clearly a source of deep concern to Blagojevich and in a sense, you love to see that,” he said. “You have to worry when they start not to care. Then they begin to act as if they are in a vacuum, and that won’t be good for anyone.”

    A Scandal in Chicago That Justifies Investigative Journalism, NYT, 15.12.2008,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/15/business/media/15carr.html
 

Related

media > journalism > newspaper

media > journalism > newspaper > tabloid

media > journalism > magazine

media > journalism > source

media > journalism > illustrations, cartoons

media empires, spin doctors

media > radio

broadcasting > TV

media > TV

media > digital media

media > marketing, advertising

arts > photography > war photographers

www.anglonautes.com   
Le site "Les anglonautes"  forme une base de données protégée par le Code de la propriété intellectuelle (art. L.112-3) - Anglonautes © ®