Good Week For the Times

All in all, another stellar week for the NY Times:

1.) New York Times Loses Libel Case

A federal jury ruled today that the New York Times and one of its reporters libeled an Ohio Supreme Court justice in an article about a lawsuit filed by the son of Sam Sheppard. But the jury said it was done without malicious intent and refused to award damages.

2.) N.Y. Times Suspends Reporter – Pulitzer Winner Failed To Give Freelancer Credit

The fallout over the Jayson Blair debacle at the New York Times has hit a far more prominent Times reporter, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg.

In an editor’s note yesterday, the paper said that Bragg had only briefly visited the Florida town of Apalachicola, from which he filed a story last June, and that most of the reporting had been done by a stringer. That freelance reporter, J. Wes Yoder, should have shared a byline with Bragg, the paper said.

3.) Dowd spawns Bush media myth

An outrageous new falsehood is circulating about President Bush. Last week, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd misrepresented a Bush statement to imply that he said the Al Qaeda terrorist network is “not a problem anymore,” and the distorted quotation has since been repeated by MSNBC “Buchanan and Press” co-host Bill Press, CNN’s Miles O’Brien and others, including numerous foreign press outlets. At a time when the New York Times is under fire for its conduct in the Jayson Blair scandal, Dowd’s creation of an exploding media myth is cause for serious concern.

Impressive. Under Raines the NY Times has gone from the ‘paper of record’ to ‘a paper with a record.’