'Hard News': Troubled Times
Date: 26 December 2004
By Timothy Noah
Timothy Noah
Timothy Noah reviews book Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media by Seth Mnookin; photo (M)
Replay Sonntag, 26. Dezember 2004
Der 26. Dezember 2004 war ein Sonntag unter dem Sternzeichen ♑. Es war der 360. Tag des Jahres. Präsident der Vereinigten Staaten war George W. Bush.
Wenn Sie an diesem Tag geboren wurden, sind Sie 21 Jahre alt. Ihr letzter Geburtstag war am Freitag, 26. Dezember 2025, vor 173 Tagen. Ihr nächster Geburtstag ist am Samstag, 26. Dezember 2026 in 191 Tagen. Sie haben 7.843 Tage gelebt oder ungefähr 188.249 Stunden oder ungefähr 11.294.949 Minuten oder ungefähr 677.696.940 Sekunden.
Einige Personen, die an diesem Tag Geburtstag haben:
26th of December 2004 News
Nachrichten, wie sie auf der Titelseite der New York Times am 26. Dezember 2004 erschienen
Extra! Reading All About It, Online and Off
Date: 27 December 2004
By Mark Glassman
Mark Glassman
Forrester Research reports seven of top 10 media companies whose customers are most likely to visit their Web sites are news distributors; finds New York Times was best able to lure its customers online, with 76 percent of its readers who have Internet access visiting its Web site; says television channels are most successful at pulling their customers online when they appeal to particular audience; graph of companies most successful at drawing customers online (S)
Back to Russia, With Love
Date: 26 December 2004
By Peter Landesman
Peter Landesman
Paul Klebnikov was different from other foreign journalists in Russia not because of his brooding determination or his courage -- both of which he possessed in ample supply -- but because he thought of the country as a calling more than as a reporting post. Since the early 90's, he had been exposing in the pages of Forbes magazine the nexus of business, politics and gangsterism in the former Soviet Union with an almost missionary zeal. He knew that such work could be lethal: 10 Russian journalists had been murdered in contract killings since Putin came to power. But Klebnikov believed in Russian redemption. In an editorial in the first issue of Forbes Russia -- which began publishing in April, with Klebnikov as editor -- he declared that Russia had entered a more civilized stage of development. He started telling his friends and colleagues that he was sure the lawless days were over. He was even considering moving his wife and three children from New York to Moscow. But his hopefulness proved ill founded. On the night of July 9, Klebnikov, 41, was assassinated, shot four times from the window of a speeding Lada outside his Moscow office. Those who were closest to Klebnikov understand that his doggedness in the face of grave risk was part of a lifelong quest to explain his personal attachment to Russia. Klebnikov spoke Russian fluently and grew up in New York, a scion of the White Russian diaspora, the czarist aristocracy and intelligentsia who fled the country ahead of the 1917 Revolution. He was raised to remember his revolutionary Decembrist ancestors, exiled in 1826 after being abandoned by their leaders. His great-grandfather, an admiral in the Imperial Navy, was murdered by mutineers during the Revolution.
Spitzer Says He Won't Drop Any Inquiries Begun by State
Date: 26 December 2004
Attorney General Eliot Spitzer of New York said yesterday that he did not intend to cede to the federal government any of his existing or previous investigations into business practices. Criticizing a front-page article in The New York Times yesterday about his plans, Mr. Spitzer issued a statement saying that increased regulatory activity by the federal government, particularly the Securities and Exchange Commission, made it more likely that Washington would take the lead or act alone in new investigations. But he said that his office would not withdraw from cases in which it is now actively involved, calling the notion ''absurd.''
A Web Offer Too Good to Be True? Read the Fine Print
Date: 26 December 2004
By Barbara Whitaker
Barbara Whitaker
THE e-mail messages are tantalizing: ''Join now and receive a free I.B.M. laptop.'' ''Your complimentary iPod with free shipping is waiting.'' These offers and similar ones on the Internet promise gifts for buying products or services. Are they for real? At best, yes, but they can also be riddled with problems. Participants may have to spend a lot to qualify or may not get the reward if they fail to follow what can be complicated rules. Ultimately, they may end up with nothing more than a big increase in spam as their e-mail address and other information is passed along or sold.
A Star Columnist
Date: 26 December 2004
By Maureen Dowd
Maureen Dowd
I first realized that writing a column could be a good gig when I saw all the cute guys clustered around Mary McGrory's desk in the back of The Washington Star newsroom, hard-boiled political reporters acting as adoring as Las Vegas chorus boys. But while my status changed over the decades, as I slowly clambered up from Star clerk to Times columnist, Mary's status never changed. Maria Gloria, as she signed her handwritten notes in her beloved Italian -- she was the last person who loved the U.S. Mail -- was always the same bella figura: She Who Must Be Obeyed. I tried to learn from her. Not about cooking. Her Jell-O Surprise was frightening and her meatloaf worse. And it was impossible to write as she did. It was a truth universally acknowledged, as her idol Jane Austen wrote, that nobody could write with the sense and sensibility, the luminous prose and legendary reporting, of Mary McGrory. But I emulated her other talents: Her uncanny ability, even in remote parts of New Hampshire or Ireland, to find some sucker to carry her bags or drive her car. The way she nobly resisted the passing fad called technology, often writing in longhand when her laptop -- or ''fiendish little gadget,'' as she called it -- gave her fits. The way she acted helpless like a barracuda. From Joe McCarthy to Henry Kissinger to Robert McNamara to Linda Tripp, every public figure learned to beware when Mary started asking confused and innocent-sounding questions, like some Capitol Hill Columbo. Mary became a star at The Star with her courageous coverage of the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. It was my dad, Mike Dowd, a D.C. police inspector who was in charge of Senate security for 20 years, who helped Mary get her big break by giving her a front-row seat for the spectacle. ''He wanted to help out a nice Irish girl,'' my brother, a Senate page at the time, remembered. Mary always got her way -- one way or another. When her editor at The Washington Post -- where she moved after The Star folded -- told her he did not have an extra pass for her to get into the Clarence Thomas hearings, Mary was displeased. Shortly thereafter, the editor was watching the hearings on TV and suddenly saw Mary being escorted to a front-row seat by the committee chairman, Joe Biden. Mary loved The Star and Rome and rogues and children and losers and underdogs and Jack Kennedy. ''He walked like a panther,'' she told me. She did not love, as her nephew Brian McGrory, the Boston Globe columnist, said, pomposity or self-involvement or bullies or Richard Nixon. She was very proud of being on his enemies' list. She hated blowhards. Once she wanted to get away from John Volpe, who had been in the Nixon cabinet, when he was droning on at her during a party at the Shoreham Hotel. ''Hey,'' she interrupted him finally, ''you were the secretary of transportation. Where are the elevators?'' And away she went. Mary treated the powerful and the powerless the same, with what her Post editor Bill Hamilton called an exasperated ''Good help is hard to get'' manner. When I was a cub reporter at The Star, she invited me to one of her A-list Sunday brunches. Only 25, I thought, sashaying up to her apartment in my best outfit, and I have already entered the sanctum sanctorum of Washington politics. When Mary pointed me toward the blender and told me to make a daiquiri for Teddy Kennedy, I realized I was not there as a guest. At least I was in good company. George Stephanopoulos, a Dick Gephardt staff member, was passing canapés. Mary's servants had an excellent record of upward mobility. She also shanghaied me to come swim with the kids from St. Ann's Infant and Maternity Home in Ethel Kennedy's pool at Hickory Hill in McLean, Va., on Wednesday afternoons. At the time, I was working in a different suburb in a different state, Rockville, Md., and I didn't know how to swim. But Mary didn't let me weasel out of it. Mangling, intentionally perhaps, my editor's name, she instructed him to give me Wednesday afternoons off. ''Yes, Mary,'' he replied, humbly, gratefully. Over the years, she would continue to call me with other offers I couldn't refuse. She wanted me to come to Ireland in May 1998. We would cover the peace referendum and have a fun girls' bonding trip, she said. There was no chance to bond, of course. On the train from Dublin to Belfast, after staying up all night on the plane, Mary interviewed everyone at the station, everyone on the train, including the lame woman whom she got to carry her bags, the cabdriver on the way to the hotel, the waitress at the hotel coffee shop, the room-service waiter carrying our tea and the priest at Sunday Mass. Another time, in the Clinton years, she telephoned and said in a chirpy voice, ''Let's go see Yasir Arafat at the White House and then go shopping!'' Mary continued to call me after she had a stroke in March 2003. You could understand a bit here or there -- ''casserole'' or ''Cheney.'' It broke my heart to hear the words coming out so jumbled, from lips that never uttered a less than perfect sentence. Once, in a private diary of The Star's final days in 1981, Mary had written, ''I do not want anyone to think I have collapsed under calamity.'' She never did. She approached life and sickness and death with the same Yankee pluck she developed at Girls' Latin School in Boston. I will continue to emulate Mary and follow the invaluable advice she once gave her nephew Brian at a stuffy Washington party: ''Always approach the shrimp bowl like you own it.''
Metro Briefing | New York: Manhattan: Israeli Firm Buys Chase Building
Date: 27 December 2004
By Bloomberg News
Bloomberg News
Africa Israel Investments and Shaya Boymelgreen, American real estate developer, buy former Manhattan headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank for $170 million; apartments planned (S)
Roche Gene Test Approved
Date: 27 December 2004
By Bloomberg News
Bloomberg News
Roche Holding wins Food and Drug Administration approval to market first laboratory gene test that can help doctors cut risk of side effects for certain drugs; product finds variations in gene that influences how body processes drugs used to treat various diseases; product, developed with Affymetrix, detects genetic abnormalities in certain liver enzymes; Roche also seeks approval to use test on second gene (S)
ECI Acquires Bounty Ltd.
Date: 27 December 2004
By Bloomberg News
Bloomberg News
British buyout firm ECI Partners finances management buyout of marketing company Bounty Ltd from Havas for 20 million pounds ($38 million); names Peter Chappelow Bounty chairman; Simon Williamson will remain managing director (S)
The Gifts Pile Up For Players In Bowls
Date: 26 December 2004
By Bloomberg News
Bloomberg News
Forget deciding whom to invite to play in a bowl game. Organizers of the 28 postseason matchups say a tougher decision may be what to get the players.