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Metro columnist Jim DeFede said he taped a phone conversation with Art Teele hours before the politician shot himself. Executives said they fired DeFede because taping is illegal without consent. The Herald fired columnist Jim DeFede Wednesday because he tape-recorded a phone conversation with Arthur E. Teele Jr. without his knowledge. Teele had killed himself in The Herald's lobby earlier in the day without ever knowing that the columnist recorded their conversation. Both Publisher Jesús Díaz Jr. and Executive Editor Tom Fiedler said they fired the popular Metro writer because it is illegal for anyone to tape a conversation with...

The McClatchy Co. reported Thursday that it incurred a $1.43 billion after-tax loss on the fourth quarter of 2007 -- after taking yet another huge goodwill impairment charge. McClatchy said its loss from continuing operations of $17.42 per share -- which compares to a $3.40 per-share loss in the same period in 2006 -- includes a non-cash after-tax impairment charge related to goodwill and flagging newspaper mastheads of $1.47 billion. The impairment charge on goodwill and other non-tangible assets -- reflecting a loss in the fair market value of the nation's third-largest newspaper chain -- follows a goodwill write-down of...

WHEN P. Anthony Ridder met with Wall Street analysts in June last year for a routine financial review, he was the chief executive of the nation’s second-largest newspaper company. And he could not have sounded more upbeat about the prospects for his corporate namesake, Knight Ridder. snip Today, many people in the newspaper industry are still scratching their heads over how and why a company with relatively high profit margins and a trophy case of 85 Pulitzer Prizes allowed itself to be wiped off the media landscape. snip Whether the former Knight Ridder papers will be better off, financially and...

NEW YORK Knight Ridder executives are busy packing up their offices today after shareholders officially approved the McClatchy acquisition during an emotional annual meeting on Monday. By about 4 p.m. Pacific Standard Time, the company will no longer exist, confirmed Polk Laffoon, Knight Ridder’s vice president of corporate relations. Employees at Knight Ridder headquarters will get their final paycheck today as they move out of the building located in downtown San Jose. “Everybody has to clear out,” Laffoon said. Only Tony Ridder, chairman and CEO of Knight Ridder, and an administrative assistant will maintain an office in the building for...

Allentown, Pa. -- The smallest city in United States with two independent, paid daily newspapers will stay that way, at least for now. McClatchy Co. said Monday it has found a buyer for the last of the Knight Ridder Inc. papers it planned to divest, agreeing to sell the Times Leader of Wilkes-Barre, Pa. to a consortium of private investors. Richard L. Connor, who was editor and publisher of the Times Leader during a crippling newspaper strike almost three decades ago, plans to purchase the newspaper in conjunction with a group of local investors and HM Capital Partners LLC, a...

Snip........ Knight Ridder's demise may foreshadow more sobering times ahead for newspapers if advertising continues its shift to the Internet, intensifying pressure on publishers to cut costs to satisfy investors who continue to demand higher profits despite the industry's eroding revenue and readership. Those tensions buried San Jose-based Knight Ridder, which spent much of the past decade fruitlessly trying to please Wall Street. Knight Ridder's papers have a combined daily circulation of 8.1 million, down from 8.5 million five years ago. The relentless pursuit of more profit became an uphill battle as the company tried to offset its diminishing revenue...

Chandler family may actively pursue change in management (Crain’s) — Chandler Trusts, the second-largest holder of Tribune Co. stock, is calling for an independent management review after questioning the leadership abilities of the media conglomerate’s executive team. In a letter filed Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Chandler family strongly recommended that the Tribune’s board of directors appoint an independent committee to evaluate management and to “promptly execute alternatives to restore and enhance stockholder value.” The Chandler family is also calling for the media company to spinoff its broadcasting properties, among other actions. Related story: Chandler family calls...

AKRON, Ohio Jun 7, 2006 (AP)— McClatchy Co. said Wednesday that it has reached agreements to sell five of the six remaining Knight Ridder newspapers it plans to divest for about $450 million. The newspapers are the Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio; the Duluth News Tribune in Minnesota; Grand Forks Herald in North Dakota; The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel in Indiana and the American News in Aberdeen, S.D. That leaves the Times Leader of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., remaining to be sold. McClatchy has already announced the sale of six other larger newspapers owned by Knight Ridder Inc., including The Philadelphia Inquirer. McClatchy...

Yucaipa is headed by supermarket magnate Ron Burkle, a close friend of former President Clinton. He was recruited by the Guild because of his reputation as a union-friendly boss. Bidding continues for papers McClatchy chain plans to sell... Representatives of the Yucaipa Cos. could visit the Times Leader next week as the deadline looms to submit final bids for six so-called orphan Knight Ridder newspapers. Yucaipa, a California private equity firm, has joined with The Newspaper Guild, a journalists’ union, in an attempt to execute a “worker-friendly” purchase of the papers, including the Times Leader. The McClatchy Co., which is...

Newspaper circulation fell 2.6 percent in the six-month period ending in March, according to data released Monday, as the industry continued to struggle with competition from other media outlets and the Internet. The decline in average paid weekday circulation was about the same as the previous time newspapers reported six-month circulation figures for the period ending last September, according to the Newspaper Association of America, a trade group. The NAA reported that average paid circulation at Sunday newspapers fell 3.1 percent versus the same period a year ago, also a comparable decline with the last time circulation figures were reported....

Facing shareholder dissent and getting flak for bloated executive pay deals, The New York Times is frantically searching for crisis p.r. experts as the company gears up for a public battle over the future of the newspaper giant. Chairman Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr. and other top management have been criticized for putting off the concerns of Morgan Stanley portfolio manager Hassan Elmasry and for a share price that's plummeted 50 percent since 2002. Soon after Morgan's attack last week on The Times, the publisher's spokeswoman, Catherine Mathis, was phoning Knight Ridder spokesman Polk Laffoon seeking advice, sources familiar with the...

The McClatchy Co. announced an agreement to sell the Times and three other newspapers for $1 billion to MediaNews Group Inc. and Hearst Corp. Denver-based MediaNews, publisher of the Oakland Tribune and other East Bay papers, will purchase the Times and San Jose Mercury News. New York City-based Hearst, owner of the San Francisco Chronicle, will buy the Monterey Herald and St. Paul Pioneer Press in St. Paul, Minn. Hearst has agreed to "contribute" the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Monterey Herald to MediaNews in return for an equity investment in MediaNews assets outside of the Bay Area. If the...

S&P plans to rate McClatchy's assumed debt "BBB" Mon Apr 24, 2006 1:15 PM ET NEW YORK, April 24 (Reuters) - A rating on the senior unsecured debt assumed by McClatchy Co. through the acquisition of Knight Ridder Inc. will be lowered by Standard and Poor's following the close of the buyout, the rating agency said on Monday. S&P said it will rate the senior unsecured debt "BBB," the second-lowest investment grade rating. "This announcement follows a clarification to the terms of McClatchy's planned $3.75 billion senior credit facilities, which will be used to help fund the acquisition of Knight...

NEW YORK, April 20 (Reuters) - Moody's Investors Service on Thursday cut both Knight Ridder Inc. (KRI.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and McClatchy Co. (MNI.N: Quote, Profile, Research) to junk status, citing McClatchy's acquisition of its bigger rival newspaper publisher. In mid-March, No. 9 U.S. newspaper publisher McClatchy said it would buy Knight-Ridder Inc. for $4.5 billion to become the second-largest U.S. newspaper chain. Downgrades, particularly to junk, tend to raise a company's borrowing costs. Moody's cut both Knight Ridder and McClatchy's bond ratings to the top junk level of "Ba1" from the bottom investment-grade rating of "Baa3." The new combined...

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) -- Newspaper companies will be in focus as earnings season begins next week -- including McClatchy Co., which last month reached an agreement to acquire Knight Ridder Inc. for $6.5 billion -- as analysts will again look for indications that the industry's long slump is abating. Newspapers face a number of serious challenges. One is an uneven advertising environment, which, of course, plagues the wider media sector. For newspapers, there has been ongoing weakness in classified automotive ads and in many national categories, including technology, movies, wireless and transportation. A shift toward online news consumption has hurt circulation...

NEW YORK A union representing newspaper workers complained Friday that it was not receiving full access to financial information from The McClatchy Co. that it needs to make a bid on 12 newspapers that McClatchy wants to sell. McClatchy said earlier this month that it intended to sell the papers, which include The Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Jose Mercury News, as part of its deal to acquire Knight Ridder Inc., the nation's second-largest newspaper company. McClatchy intends to keep the other 20 papers owned by Knight Ridder. The Newspaper Guild-CWA said it was told by McClatchy that the union...

The Newspaper Guild said Friday that its private equity partner, Yucaipa Companies, hasn't been given financial information it wants in order to refine a bid for 12 Knight Ridder newspapers being sold by McClatchy. The Guild said competitors who earlier entered the bidding for all of Knight Ridder have seen information that others interested in just the 12 papers have not. Knight Ridder agreed to be purchased by McClatchy in a $4.5 billion deal announced March 13. McClatchy then said it was selling 12 of Knight Ridder's 32 daily newspapers, including the Mercury News. Yucaipa said it will submit a...

Faces In The News: Billionaire Burkle To Rescue McClatchy Papers? Greg Levine, 03.24.06, 12:17 PM ET New York - "Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety." That line from Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I probably parallels the emotions running through Tony Ridder over this fortnight. On March 13, we reported that the chief executive of Knight Ridder was putting his newspaper company on the block, after shareholder pressure. No sooner did the news break that the firm would be bought by McClatchy, than a new and sobering development was made public. The publisher's half-eponymous CEO--and scion of...

Now that the Dubai Ports deal is apparently down the drain because of irate protests from the public and Congress, the United Arab Emirates company is taking a new tack. The San Francisco Examiner recently carried a column by P.J. Corkery that told how the UAE ,through its government-controlled Dubai Investment Group, is trying to buy the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain after failing to acquire the Albertson’s grocery chain. Corkery outlined who is the front man in this deal, and who is doing the lobbying and buying for Dubai. This is what he wrote: “The Yank partner of the Dubai Investment...

A once-great newspaper chain reaches the end of the line. By Rem Rieder Rem Rieder (rrieder@ajr.umd.edu) is AJR's editor and senior vice president. You could feel the heat. And it had nothing to do with the tropical weather. The intensity in the newsroom of the Miami Herald, circa 1982, was simply astonishing. The Herald had all the elements. A stunning collection of talent. A venue where you had the sense that anything could happen, and it did. And a determination to put out a kick-ass, elbow-above-the-rim newspaper that seemed to be embedded in the very walls of the building. I...

ONLY a handful of days have passed since he announced the deal to sell Knight Ridder, but P. Anthony Ridder, the company's chairman and chief executive, already has ghosts to contend with. The biggest, of course, is the pending disappearance of the company his great-grandfather, Herman, founded in 1892 — Ridder Publications, which merged in 1974 with Knight Newspapers to create what has for much of recent memory been the nation's second-largest newspaper group, with 32 dailies. But he also has to wrestle with the fact — apparently unknown to him until the deal was sealed — that the buyer,...

NEW YORK Knight Ridder Senior Vice Presidents Arthur Brisbane and Hilary Schneider will lose their jobs as a result of the McClatchy acquisition of Knight Ridder. Knight Ridder CEO Tony Ridder told his corporate staff on Monday that they would not have jobs with McClatchy, according to The Kansas City Star’s Mark Davis. The senior vice presidents along with other executives are committed to stay with the company until the deal closes. If they leave before the close, they will walk away from a payment equal to three times their current salary and bonus. In an interview with Davis, Brisbane...

Q: Professor News, should those of us who care about newspapers be worried about the sale of Knight Ridder Inc. to the McClatchy Co., or should we be encouraged? A: Both. We should be worried because there was no competing bidder for Knight Ridder, the country's second-biggest newspaper company, which says something about the problems of the newspaper industry. But we should be encouraged by the acquisition, characterized as "a dolphin swallowing a whale." It shows that McClatchy has enough confidence in the future of print, be it on paper or on a screen, to pony up $4.4 billion in...

Published: March 16, 2006 11:45 AM ET WASHINGTON, D.C. After 41 years on the military beat, covering stories from Fort Riley, Kan. to Vietnam and Iraq, Joe Galloway says he is taking a permanent leave. Come June 1, the 64-year-old scribe will give up his desk at Knight Ridder’s D.C. bureau and settle permanently in the bayfront cottage he owns just north of Corpus Christi, Tex. “I consider myself the luckiest guy in the world to have survived against the odds, to have had the experiences, the stories, the people that this profession has given me,” Galloway said this week...

NEW YORK McClatchy's shares continued to slide Wednesday, closing at $50.72, down 4.7 percent from their value before Monday, when thye company announced that it will buy Knight Ridder. The decline of McClatchy's stock price "says some people don't like the deal," Wall Street analyst Ed Atorino of Benchmark Co., a New York investment firm, told the St. Paul Pioneer Press. There is great "uncertainty" about what McClatchy can get for the 12 KR papers it now plans to sell. But he added that McClatchy Chairman Gary Pruitt "is a smart guy" who has managed big mergers in the past....

Newspapers discover creative destruction. McClatchy Co.'s offer to buy Knight Ridder Inc., the second-largest newspaper chain in the U.S., has elicited another round of soul-searching about the newspaper business, not to mention a good deal of Schadenfreude on both the Internet-based right and left. The fact that there was only one bidder is said to be yet more evidence that newspapers are dying--oh, no!--or it means that Drudge shall inherit the earth, yippee!

Knight Ridder-McClatchy Newspaper Deal Reveals Ties To Clinton-Gore Financier Yucaipa March 13, 2006 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLinenews.org - The long anticipated sale of troubled newspaper publisher Knight Ridder was announced Sunday, with California based McClatchy Co agreeing to a deal valued at $6.5 billion. McClatchy immediately announced it will sell off 12 of KR's low-growth potential products which include the San Jose Mercury and the [much maligned here] Contra Costa Times. The surprise McClatchy offer breaks down to $67.25 a share, of which the San Jose Mercury reports, "$40 of that in cash and the rest in McClatchy...

No deal is hatched without a wider meaning to be gleaned on Wall Street and in the media, and that's all the more true for the ever-reinventing media industries themselves. The latest, the sale of Knight Ridder to McClatchy, presents a Rorschach-like finale that reconfirms both hopes and fears for the newspaper business. Knight Ridder, the nation's second-largest newspaper company agreed to be purchased by McClatchy, ending a corporate drama that began almost five months ago with a revolt of major Knight Ridder shareholders, according to Knight Ridder's own San Jose Mercury News and other media. A source tells the...

Knight Ridder, the nation's second-largest newspaper company by circulation, agreed last night to sell itself for about $4.5 billion in cash and stock to the McClatchy Company, a publisher half its size, according to people involved in the negotiations. (snip) Still, McClatchy, which is based in Sacramento and publishes the Sacramento Bee and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, among others, was the only major newspaper company to submit a final bid for Knight Ridder, publisher of such venerable newspapers as the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Jose Mercury News. (snip) Under the terms of the deal, McClatchy agreed...

McClatchy Co. appeared yesterday in the pole position to purchase the Knight Ridder Inc. newspaper chain, people familiar with the matter said, offering a combination of cash and stock valued at more than $65 a share, or more than $4.35 billion. Bids for Knight Ridder were due yesterday at 5 p.m. EST, and, as in any auction, the situation was fluid and subject to change, even past the stated deadline. But a consensus was building that McClatchy was the favorite, as it appeared MediaNews Group Inc. was fading from the scene and a large private-equity group including Texas Pacific Group...

NEW YORK The Newspaper Guild's "worker friendly" plan to buy nine Knight Ridder papers is still in the works even as the deadline for bids looms. However, don't expect the Newspaper Guild to be named tomorrow as a possible buyer, said Linda Foley, the Guild's president, in a prepared statement released this afternoon. "While we have had substantial discussions with each of the potential bidders, we have not, nor did we expect to, reach an agreement with any of the bidders prior to March 9th." The Newspaper Guild is positioning itself as a sidecar to those other players making bids...

Published: March 08, 2006 11:05 AM ET NEW YORK McClatchy is the likely front-runner in the Knight Ridder bid, according to a report released by Merrill Lynch this morning. Final bids for the company are due tomorrow. But a lengthy analysis in the Minneapolis Stat-Tribune today, based on interviews with investors, pegs the more likely winner as the Gannett/MediaNews pairing. "Based on trade speculation on Tuesday, we believe a successful McClatchy bid is slightly more probable but is far from a slam dunk," wrote Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Rich Fine. For several years there has been speculation among industry watchers...

Thursday could be a pivotal day in the history of the U.S. newspaper industry. That's the deadline for bidding on Knight Ridder Inc., the storied chain with 32 daily newspapers that bring the news to readers' doorsteps from Philadelphia to San Jose, Calif. And the size of the bids will be the best temperature taken on the health of this stately old business in some time. If the bids are high -- above $70 a share or so, for a total of about $4.7 billion -- it would signal that Wall Street hasn't given up on the newspaper industry and...

Published: February 06, 2006 10:00 AM ET NEW YORK Gannett Co. appears to have dropped out as an independent bidder for all of Knight Ridder Inc. and may instead try to join a group seeking to buy the San Jose-based newspaper company, Reuters has reported, citing sources close to the sale process. They say that Gannett skipped a meeting with Knight Ridder this week to go over the company's financial data, a sign it will not bid independently. Instead, Reuters reported, Gannett may try to forge an agreement with Denver-based publisher MediaNews Group Inc. and its partners. MediaNews has been...

All Things Considered, December 29, 2005 · Unhappy investors have forced the Knight Ridder newspaper company to put itself up for sale. Profits are healthy, but level. Now, the Newspaper Guild of America is exploring whether it can put together deals to purchase as many as nine of the company's newspapers.

The Akron Beacon Journal, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning paper now operating as a 'zine for the geriatric set, is getting squeezed to comedic proportions by San Jose's Knight Ridder, its parent company. Knight Ridder is under a dual assault by investors, who are demanding 30 percent profit margins, and the company's own leadership, namely CEO Tony Ridder, the heir-in-charge who's proved strikingly adept at running Knight Ridder into the ground. Executives recently asked employees to share pens and notepads with other departments, since no more office supplies will be purchased this year. The problem is that some departments have already...

According to sources with ties to third-party groups opposing the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Samuel Alito, the Knight Ridder newspaper analysis of Judge Alito's judicial record -- which ran in many of the papers operated by KR -- mirrors analysis that was pulled together by staff of People for the American Way, Alliance for Justice, and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, all groups that are coordinating their anti-Alito efforts. "The analysis and cases are similar to what we pulled together in the first week of the nomination. Some, but not all of the same cases, that kind of...

COMPANY TESTING BREADTH OF INTEREST AND POSSIBLE PRICE Knight Ridder, under pressure from three major shareholders to sell the San Jose company, has begun soliciting preliminary bids from potential purchasers in an attempt to determine who might be interested in buying it, and how much they'd be willing to pay, according to sources familiar with the process. The move does not mean the nation's second-largest newspaper group and owner of the Mercury News has committed to selling itself. Instead, the request for bidders to submit what is commonly called an ``expression of interest'' is the next step in a process...

Troubles abound for the print business, but smart leadership can steer through the roughest seas Good news about the newspaper business is hard to find these days. Already this month, daily circulation losses ... At the demand of disgruntled institutional shareholders, once-proud Knight Ridder - the nation's second-largest publicly traded chain - is considering putting itself up for sale, whole or in pieces. This comes on the heels of deep news staff cuts at many of the nation's most respected regional papers, Newsday included... Important trends are downward and reinforcing... Profit margins, down from their peak, but still at 20...

On Nov. 1, Private Capital Management LP, a large shareholder in numerous newspaper companies, wrote to the management of Knight Ridder asking that the nation's second largest newspaper chain "aggressively pursue the competitive sale of the company." Two days later, two other large shareholders seconded the motion. Shortly thereafter, Knight Ridder announced that it had decided to "explore" alternatives, "including a possible sale of the company." It is axiomatic on Wall Street that bear markets beget consolidation. The bear market in the newspaper industry should foretell a spate of mergers and acquisitions. But what if there are no buyers? This...

"There are difficulties inherent in some of KRI's markets (changing ethnicities in Miami, a world gone electronic in San Jose, manufacturing blight in Philadelphia, etc.)," she wrote in a research note to clients. "We believe investors should tread lightly, if at all, as no deal could hurt the sector's valuations."

Knight-Ridder, the embattled US newspaper publisher, gave in to shareholder pressure and announced it was exploring a sale of itself and “strategic alternatives for enhancing shareholder value”. The second-largest US newspaper publisher said it had retained Goldman Sachs to help it pursue these options but added it would not make public the progress of its efforts “unless and until the board of directors has approved a specific transaction”. Knight-Ridder’s largest shareholder, Private Capital, has urged the company to put itself up for sale in the wake of a 12 per cent decline in their investment in the last year.

Knight Ridder's Scandalous Coverage of the Iraqi Elections October 18, 2005 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - On a day [Sunday October 16, 2005] when the success of the Bush Administration's establishment of not one, but two democracies in the Mid East, should have been the story, a San Francisco Bay Area newspaper - the Contra Costa Times - [a Knight Ridder product, edited by Chris Lopez and based in Walnut Creek, CA] chose to devote the majority of its Iraq coverage to largely invented and negative news. True, the story "Turnout Signals Progress" [the only semi-positive Iraq...

Last month, one column shook the media world. It was just one column by one editor in one daily paper, no more than 800 words total, but it had the journalism world afire, shooting out letters to Poynter (a media trade newsite) with the “Indignant Lock” key on faster than the next day’s news copy. The subject of the column was not as controversial as you would imagine. You’ve probably heard it all before. Mark Yost, an editor at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, wrote a column questioning the quality of mainstream media reporting on the War in Iraq. Yost,...

Mark Yost, editorial page associate editor at the Knight-Ridder newspaper the St. Paul Pioneer Press, wrote the unthinkable - he criticized media coverage of the Iraq war and made himself the target of outraged colleagues for writing that the mainstream media are playing up the bad news about Iraq while ignoring the good news. "With your column, you have spat on the copy of the brave men and women who are doing their best in terrible conditions," Pioneer Press reporter Chuck Laszewski wrote an open letter. "You have insulted them and demeaned them. I am embarrassed to call you my...

One of the most remarkable stories of the Iraq war appears today at the online magazine Salon, written by its longtime foreign correspondent Phillip Robertson. Amazingly, he managed this month to track down the American sniper who apparently shot and killed Knight Ridder correspondent Yasser Salihee, 33, on June 24. The article, "The Victim and the Killer," chronicles this search, and lengthy exchanges between Robertson and the sniper, described only as "Joe." E&P has covered the Salihee incident from the start, first with a news report, then a moving tribute to him written by Knight Ridder's Baghdad chief Hannah Allam,...

Two items: [1] From Laurie Mylroie's "Iraq News" Newsletter - Tue, 17 May 2005 20:03:39 -0400 Subject: Michael Rubin, Prior Isikoff Use of Faulty Source From the list of Michael Rubin, previously at DoD and now at AEI (May 17, 2005): This was not the first time Michael Isikoff has used faulty or fabricated sources. In reporting the myth that Doug Feith’s office created its own intelligence unit, he relied on Karen Kwiatkowski, who associated with the Lyndon LaRouche movement. Kwiatkowski said on tape that she was Isikoff’s chief source. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Report on the U.S....

NEW YORK For much of the week, much of the U.S. press paid little attention to the highly classified British memo, leaked to a British newspaper, which seems to reveal that President Bush decided by summer 2002 to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and was determined to ensure that U.S. intelligence data supported his policy. That changed on Friday, when Knight Ridder circulated a lengthy report on the memo by Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott. The memo was first disclosed earlier this week by the Sunday Times of London. It has not been disavowed by the British government. A...

'Here it is. The smoking gun. The memo that has "IMPEACH HIM" written all over it. 'The top-level government memo marked "SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL," dated eight months before Bush sent us into Iraq, following a closed meeting with the President, reads, "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." 'Read that again: "The intelligence and facts were being fixed . . . ."

About every 20 minutes somebody at DU posts the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau report that says Bush/Blair prepped for a 2003 war with Iraq. The Washington Bureau report was based on a memo that has now been debunked as a FRAUD. Will Wolcotte and Strobel, the two guys that continually print misinformation at this Washington Bureau of Knight Ridder, be punished? I doubt it. They never are.