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<p>An article on Sunday about attacks on the American military in Iraq over the previous two days, attributed to military officials, included an erroneous account that quoted Pfc. Jose Belen of the First Armored Division. Private Belen, who is not a spokesman for the division, said that a homemade bomb exploded under a convoy on Saturday morning on the outskirts of Baghdad and killed two American soldiers and their interpreter. The American military's central command, which releases information on all American casualties in Iraq, said before the article was published that it could not confirm Private Belen's account. Later it said that no such attack had taken place and that no American soldiers were killed on Saturday.</p>

No Basis for Washington Post Story PRESS RELEASE FROM STATE: Regarding the story in today's Washington Post about Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Deputy Secretary Richard L. Armitage, there was no conversation between the Deputy Secretary and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice concerning any plans for "stepping down." There is no basis for the story. As Secretary Powell has always said, he and Deputy Secretary Armitage serve at the pleasure of the President, and will continue to do so. ### "This is gossip and rumor," said State Department spokesman Philip Reeker when asked about The Washington Post story....

BW2085 JUL 31,2003 8:06 PACIFIC 11:06 EASTERN ( BW)(NY-THE-NEW-YORK-TIMES)(NYT) Jill Abramson and John M. Geddes Named Managing Editors of The New York Times     Business Editors     NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 31, 2003
--Jill Abramson and John M. Geddes were named managing editors of The New York Times today, effective September 2. Ms. Abramson has been the newspaper's Washington bureau chief since 2000 and Mr. Geddes has been the newspaper's deputy managing editor since 1997. The appointments were announced by Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times.     Ms. Abramson, 49, and Mr. Geddes, 51, succeed Gerald Boyd who resigned earlier this year. A replacement...

A new report examining problems at the New York Times rips the newspaper for a lack of communication but downplays the push for racial diversity as a leading factor in its Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal. The 94-page report says it's "simplistic" to believe promotion of minority reporters like Blair was the essential cause of the calamity. Jayson Blair (N.Y. Times photo) "The fraud Jayson Blair committed on us and our readers was not a consequence of our diversity program, which has been designed to apply the same rigorous standards of performance we demand of all our staff," Bill Keller wrote...

THERE was something wonderfully strained about how various media organisations dealt last week with the news of the deaths of Qusay and Uday Hussein. From the BBC to Reuters, there was palpable – if sternly repressed – dismay. One of the first headlines that the Ba'athist Broadcasting Corporation put out on the news was: "US celebrates 'good' Iraq news." The quotation marks around "good" did not refer to any quote or source in the text. They were pure editorialising on behalf of the BBC, whose campaign to undermine the liberation of Iraq is now in full swing. It was not...

NEW YORK, Jul 30, 2003 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- The New York Times, acting on the recommendations of a committee assembled following the Jayson Blair scandal, said Wednesday it would create three new positions, including an ombudsman to examine coverage and review reader complaints. Along with the ombudsman, to be known at the Times as "public editor," the newspaper will create two masthead-level jobs for a standards editor and an editor to oversee hiring and career development, new Executive Editor Bill Keller said in a staff memo. All three jobs should be "refined and filled within the coming...

<p>Say what you want about the New York Times, but it still makes more news than any other paper in the U.S. By this, I don't mean in the sense of printing the news, as other papers do, but rather in the sense of news about the Times itself. Consider these recent items that made national news.</p>

NEW YORK (AP) - After an 11-week internal investigation of the Jayson Blair scandal, The New York Times said Wednesday it will create the first ombudsman's position in its 152-year history and re-examine the newspaper's policies on datelines, bylines and anonymous sources. The ombudsman, to be known at the Times as "public editor," will examine coverage, review reader complaints and write a periodic column in the newspaper, Executive Editor Bill Keller said Wednesday, his first day on the job. In addition, the paper will create two masthead-level jobs for a "standards editor" and an editor to oversee hiring and career...

EUPHEMISMS FOR EUPHEMISMS AT THE TIMESNew executive editor Bill Keller is at the helm of the New York Times now. Already there's progress, but it's progress West 43rd Street style -- all designed to preserve the dignity of the Gray Lady. Today the Times announced Keller will appoint a "public editor" to "serve as a representative for readers." They've often said they'd never never appoint an "ombudsman" like the Washington Post. And, indeed, they have not appointed an ombudsman. They've appointed a "public editor." And today's report of the Times' "Siegal Committee" -- appointed to look into the causes and...

A new poll found that less than half of Americans believe the New York Times, still considered the so-called "newspaper of record" by many establishment media organizations, is a reliable purveyor of truth. According to pollster Scott Rasmussen of Rasmussen Reports, just 46 percent of Americans feel the Times is "very reliable" or "somewhat reliable." At the same time, nearly three-fourths of Americans (72 percent) believe Fox News Channel to be a credible media source. (Click on the link above for the entire article)

The man, according to BBC Journalist Andrew Gilligan, to have told him that some parts of the so-called 'dodgy dossier' has gone missing, according to Sky News.

UPDATE 1-N.Y. Times sees profit drop, vows cost controlsTue July 15, 2003 08:43 PM ET(Adds closing share price)By Michele Gershberg NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Times Co. said Tuesday second-quarter net profit fell 8 percent as advertising slumped at its newspapers during the Iraq war, but the company pledged more stringent cost controls. The results followed the appointment on Monday of Bill Keller as executive editor at The New York Times newspaper, whose reputation was rocked by a plagiarism scandal. Company executives have said that the affair, though a blow to the Times's prestige, would not hurt its...

TELEVISION / HOWARD ROSENBERG In TV news, taking credit is called business as usual By HOWARD ROSENBERG June 2 2003 A reporter taking credit for a colleague's work? For shame! Yet.... Many television newsrooms are surely puzzled by what happened to Rick Bragg at the New York Times. Either that or they're having a big laugh about it. Bragg, who has a Pulitzer Prize, quit the Times last week after the paper suspended him over a story that carried his byline. Trouble was, it was reported largely by a freelancer who received no credit as either a co-writer or contributor....

Bush: CIA OK'd Iraq Speech  (Photo: CBS/AP) "If the CIA — the director of central intelligence — had said 'Take this out of the speech,' it would have been gone."Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser President Bush delivering State of the Union address in January. (Photo: CBS) WASHINGTON, July 11, 2003 What CIA analysts said and when they said it were matters of dispute Friday as the Bush administration denied that it made an allegation against Iraq against the intelligence agency's advice. Senior administration officials told CBS News that the president's State of the Union speech claimed that Iraq had tried to...

June 6, 2003 Times's 2 Top Editors Resign After Furor on Writer's FraudBy JACQUES STEINBERG owell Raines and Gerald M. Boyd, the top-ranking editors of The New York Times, resigned yesterday morning, five weeks after the resignation of a reporter set off a chain of events that exposed fissures in the management and morale of the newsroom. Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesHowell Raines, left, announced his resignation in the newsroom yesterday, with Arthur Sulzberger Jr., center, and Gerald M. Boyd, right, in suit. In a hastily arranged gathering in the newsroom on the third floor, the newspaper's publisher, Arthur...

Corrections and clarificationsThursday June 5, 2003A report which was posted on our website on June 4 under the heading "Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil" misconstrued remarks made by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, making it appear that he had said that oil was the main reason for going to war in Iraq. He did not say that. He said, according to the Department of Defence website, "The ... difference between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of...

Corrections and clarifications Thursday June 5, 2003In our front page lead on May 31 headlined "Straw, Powell had serious doubts over their Iraqi weapons claims," we said that the foreign secretary Jack Straw and his US counterpart Colin Powell had met at the Waldorf Hotel in New York shortly before Mr Powell addressed the United Nations on February 5. Mr Straw has now made it clear that no such meeting took place. The Guardian accepts that and apologises for suggesting it did.

Just reported by Bloomberg News

Jayson Blair was the Great Black Hope. The white publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and Sulzberger's white executive editor, Howell Raines, were intent on creating the Great African-American Reporter, and Blair was their guy. No matter, that Sulzberger and Raines were 80 years late. The Great Negro Reporter had already come and gone. George S. Schuyler (1895-1977), whose career was ended by the civil rights movement whose most trenchant critic he was, was a self-made man, who needed no white philanthropist/image-makers to invent him. But that's a story for another day. In William McGowan's excellent book,...

When the New York Times's Jayson Blair was busted for plagiarism and fabrications — and then its star writer Rick Bragg was suspended and quit after claiming an intern's reporting as his own — the media lit up like the switchboard of a gossipy small town. Reporters investigated reporters. The Times newsroom erupted in finger pointing. Journalism professors raised themselves up on their suede elbow patches to tsk-tsk. Newspapers worriedly reviewed their policies. Collectively, we agonized: Will the public ever trust us again? Don't sweat it! the public replied. We didn't trust you in the first place! That's the message,...