THURSDAY'S LINKS: Bush's Fury at 'NY Times', 'Paris Match' Journos on Strike, Worst Over for Philly 'Daily News'?

By: E&P Staff In today's edition, a New York Times article examines some of the reasons that the paper's banking records disclosure so upset President Bush, a reporter analyzes the renewed prospects for the Daily News in Philadelphia, and journalists at the Paris Match newspaper stage a one-day walkout today to protest the firing of their editor.


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Could the Worst Be Behind Philadelphia 'Daily News'?
New owner Brian Tierney himself has professed to be a fan of the Daily News. "I like that paper for a lot of reasons," Tierney told PW shortly after the acquisition. "The Daily News knows what it is. In comparison, the Inquirer is like that friend who keeps showing up with a different haircut every time you see them." Reporter Gar Joseph says "for 25 years the Daily News has been undervalued. Ninety percent of our sales are from newsstands. There's been no effort to increase home delivery. There's always this fear that promoting us might cut into the business the Inquirer does."


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Bush Seeks to Use Media Leaks to His Advantage
Washington Post: Senior administration officials say the president was outraged by articles in the New York Times and other newspapers about a surveillance program in which the U.S. government has tapped international banking records for information about terrorist financing. But his comments at a Republican fundraiser in a St. Louis suburb yesterday, combined with new moves by GOP congressional leaders, showed how both are working to fan public anger and reap gains from the controversy during a midterm election year in which polls show they are running against stiff headwinds.


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Behind Bush's Fury at NYT, a Vow Made in 2001
New York Times: Ever since President Bush vowed days after the Sept. 11 attacks to "follow the money as a trail to the terrorists," the government has made no secret of its efforts to hunt down the bank accounts of Al Qaeda and its allies. But that fact has not muted the fury of Mr. Bush, his top aides and many members of Congress at the decision last week by The New York Times and other newspapers to disclose a centerpiece of that hunt: the Treasury Department's search for clues in a vast database of financial transactions maintained by a Belgium-based banking consortium known as Swift.


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Google Aims to Speed the Online Checkout Line
New York Times: in its quest to "organize the world's information," Google now wants to keep track of your credit card number and where you live. The company is introducing Google Checkout today, a service that will allow users to make purchases from online stores using payment and shipping information they keep on file with Google. The company's aim, said Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive, is to make it easier and faster for people to buy products advertised on Google ? thus attracting more advertisers.


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In Copyright Suit, a Test of Web Video Services
Wall Street Journal: Adult entertainment company Io Group Inc. last Friday filed a lawsuit against Veoh Networks Inc., an online video-sharing service, in a potential important legal test of Web video companies' liability for copyright infringement claims. The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for California's Northern District, alleges that Veoh, San Diego, was responsible for copyright infringement by allowing videos owned by Io Group to be accessed through Veoh's online service without permission. In the complaint, Io Group, a San Francisco company doing business by the name Titan Media, alleges that consumers viewed its copyrighted works over 40,000 times through Veoh's site between June 1 and June 22.


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Paris Match Journos on Strike After Editor's Firing
New York Post: Journalists at Paris Match, the influential French newsweekly, have voted to stage a one-day strike today in a protest over the ouster of the editor-in-chief by the parent company, Hachette Filipacchi Medias. Alain Genestar, who had been at the helm of the influential weekly since 1999, last year published an explosive photo of the estranged wife of Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, a rising political star in France, taken in New York City with a man identified as her new male companion.


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Sulzberger Comments on Bank Records Flap at Party
Beet TV: "Under today's rules [unintelligible] we could have put all of the papers on the web in one moment. There would be no reason for the government to ask for prior consent. Treason, yes, if that?s the way you want to take it, but prior constraint, no. Your ability to get all of your data out immediately does give us all a benefit. Now it's not always a benefit -- we published that story that you just mentioned, we put it out on the web, I'm gonna say roughly around 9, 9pm a couple nights ago. The Wall Street Journal matched us at 10, the Los Angeles Times matched us at 11. So, you know, a scoop is a scoop for about a nanosecond now -- but it's a scoop."


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Journo Still Believes Korean War 'Dirty Secrets'
San Francisco Bay Guardian: The government tried to put journalist John Powell in prison half a century ago for reporting that the US Army used germ warfare in Korea. But he's still convinced it's true. Powell's was one of the most extraordinary criminal cases in San Francisco in the last century -- and it laid the foundation for later investigations that revealed one of the greatest secrets of World War II, a secret the U.S. government wanted to keep hidden forever.