TUESDAY'S LINKS: 'LAT' Editor Defends Bank Story, China Tightens Clamps on Press, 'NYP' Suspends Plagiarist

By: E&P Staff In today's edition, Dean Baquet explains why the Los Angeles Times published the controversial bank records story last week, the Chinese government says it may clamp down further on news media by fining companies that report on "sudden events," and the New york Post has suspended a writer who copied large portions of an article from the New York Times.


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China May Fine News Media to Limit Coverage
New York Times: Chinese media outlets will be fined if they report on "sudden events" without prior authorization from government officials, under a draft law being considered by the Communist Party-controlled legislature. The law would give government officials a powerful new tool to restrict coverage of mass outbreaks of disease, riots, strikes, accidents and other events that the authorities prefer to keep secret. Officials in charge of propaganda already exercise considerable sway over the Chinese news media, but their power tends to be informal, not codified in law.


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Screwing up MySpace: A News Corp. How-to Guide
Advertising Age: "Next month, Rupert Murdoch's top dogs are descending on the legendary greens of California's Pebble Beach Resort," notes Simon Dumenco. "It's the News Corp. annual executive retreat, and while there are plenty of things for Rupert's boys to discuss, perhaps the biggest question at hand is: What the hell do we do with MySpace?"


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Baquet: Why We Ran the Bank Story
Los Angeles Times: "This was a tough call for me, as I'm sure it was for the editors of other papers that chose to publish articles on the subject," writes editor Dean Baquet. "But history tells us over and over that the nation's founders were right in pushing the press into this role. President Kennedy persuaded the press not to report the Bay of Pigs planning. He later said he regretted this, that he might have called it off had someone exposed it."


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'New York Post' Writer Suspended for Plagiarism
New York Daily News: The New York Post told reporter Andy Geller not to come to work for a month after the newspaper discovered he copied massive sections of an article from The New York Times, sources at the Post confirmed yesterday. Geller was suspended last week when the Post discovered the plagiarism in an article he wrote about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's shadowy path toward terror, published following his death this month.


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'NY Times' Writer MacFarquhar to Cover New Islam Beat From SF
SF Chronicle: "It's a new beat for the Times: an immigration story, with a lot of immigrants from Muslim countries," says MacFarquhar. "A ... story about the difficulties they have integrating in the U.S.; a civil rights story, with a lot them facing difficulties in the wake of 9/11; and a cultural story, with Muslim artists coming from around the world. It's a nice mix. It's not designed to be a terrorism or theological beat. It's more about people. (Although I'm not Muslim), the editor of the Times felt I had been immersed in the topic for five years in the Middle East, so I had a pretty good understanding of it, and knew how to explain it to Americans."


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Does MSM Envy 'NY Post'?
Advertising Age: "Like the teen who writes nasty things about a girl in his MySpace profile because he can't admit he likes her, many mainstream-media journalists and pundits sneer at the Post because they can't admit how frustrated they are by their inability to achieve the paper's lively, confident, insider's tone," writes Scott Donaton. "The Post tells a story the way most people do when talking to a friend or co-worker; it knows the real interest is in the story behind the story, and it doesn't shy away from the humor (absurdity) of most situations."


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Investors Still Wary of Newspaper Publishers
Marketwatch: Newspaper stocks are likely to fall further in the short term as publishers struggle to convince investors that online advertising can provide significant growth any time soon, analysts said in the aftermath of a key industry conference. The financial community is skeptical of the industry's prospects because it is unclear how quickly online advertising will grow, what level of growth will boost profitability and whether Internet business can open new areas of business to publishers, according to analysts.



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Rupert Murdoch Weighs in on the Future of Mass Media
I Want Media: Newspapers can make money online, [says Murdoch]. But, "can they make enough to replace what's going out? At the moment, with the Internet so competitive, so new, and so cheap, the answer is no. But don't look at it as a newspaper -- look at it as a journalistic enterprise. If you've got authority and trust, if you can make the news interesting, you'll survive."