News Media

Mayor Maureen O'Connor showed up Thursday at a press conference called to announce the San Diego Police Department's suspicion that one of its own was guilty of a brutal attack. She did so, she said, to express her faith in the department and to make an extremely unusual request. Calling on her long relationship with local reporters, the mayor implored the media not to use the names of the victims. She said the families had requested that she ask reporters to respect their privacy.

The U.S. government and five news organizations, including the Los Angeles Times, agreed Friday to pay $1.65 million to former nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee to end a lawsuit claiming his privacy was violated by leaks that portrayed him as a spy. Lee sued the government, not the media. But he subpoenaed five reporters and demanded that they name the federal officials who spoke to them.

Apparently tired of merely ducking reporters, some high-profile candidates have started lashing out at them. But if recent verbal and physical assaults on journalists are disturbing, the behavior appears to be representative of an even more disturbing political strategy. When the editor of an online news site approached Alaska Republican senatorial candidate Joe Miller on Sunday to ask questions during a town hall meeting, he was handcuffed, detained and accused of trespassing by Miller's private security detail.

Over the last seven years, the lunatic fringe in control of the Republican Party -- the people who believe in torture but don't believe in evolution -- have hijacked our democracy, aided and abetted by the news media. The heart of the problem is not the bias of Fox News or the blowhards on AM talk radio but a mainstream media that has completely internalized how the right frames all political debate. The right-wing message has become a part of the news media's DNA.

Medical news now flies so quickly from the laboratory to our laptops and newspapers that one prestigious medical journal has decided it's time to apply the brakes. In an editorial published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. (JAMA), the journal warned authors who submit papers not to talk to reporters about their work in any detail before it's published. The editorial, co-authored by Dr.

When Kaiser Permanente Chairman David M. Lawrence wrote a letter to union boss John J. Sweeney last month, he prevailed upon the AFL-CIO president to get labor to stop trashing the giant health plan. Although the Feb. 16 letter discussed ways Oakland-based Kaiser and its unions could work more closely and with less confrontation, Lawrence made it clear he wanted something in return.

News organizations Wednesday vowed to appeal a gag order muzzling all participants in the O.J. Simpson civil trial--even as many of their customers insisted that silence on the Simpson matter would be sweet relief indeed. No more lawyers spinning the news in front of television cameras, no more witnesses peddling testimony to tabloids, no more tearful relatives proclaiming guilt or innocence--the gag order sounded mighty good to truck operator Norman Cooke.

Given his recklessly eccentric and peripatetic personal life, Michael Jackson's premature death seems almost foreordained -- one of those deaths Yeats had in mind when he wrote of a friend's lost son: "What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?" Still, the global outpouring of grief and the frenzy of public attention focused since Thursday on Jackson's death is an acknowledgment not only of his popularity but of the reach and influence of America's most successful export: popular culture.

A bare majority of Americans in a poll says the news media usually "get the facts right" and substantial numbers say journalists are arrogant and cynical. Majorities also expressed support for curbing journalists. They said news people should be licensed like doctors or lawyers and should be subjected to fines when their reporting is inaccurate or biased. The poll of 3,004 adults, made public earlier this month, was conducted by Louis Harris & Associates between Nov. 8 and Nov. 30.

It's obvious now (though was there really any doubt?) that before the trial of Orenthal James Simpson is over (and what century will that be?), we will have seen everything. Absolutely everything. To this end, the Los Angeles County supervisors on Tuesday did their part to put the trial and everything surrounding it into Ripley's Believe It or Not. They actually voted to ask Judge Lance A. Ito to charge the news media for costs of the trial, including, amazingly, jury sequestration.