WEDNESDAY'S LINKS: Christgau's Influence, Media Miss Point on C.I.A. Leak Story, 'Boston Herald' Cuts Pages

By: E&P Staff In today's edition, Joe Conason says the media is missing the point on the Valerie Plame CIA leak case, the media descend on a story about an abducted Austrian teen, and a piece about the influence of former Village Voice music critic Robert Christgau.

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Media Frenzy as Abducted Teen Prepares to Talk About Her Ordeal
Guardian (U.K.): Natascha Kampusch, who survived an eight-year kidnap ordeal after being seized at the age of 10, is to give her first interview tonight to Austrian TV as part of a series of highly lucrative media deals likely to make her a millionaire. Kampusch is expected to talk in detail for the first time about her ordeal at the hands of Wolfgang Priklopil, who snatched her on her way to school and kept her in a basement in his Vienna home.


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'Village Voice' Fires a Famous Music Critic
Jody Rosen in Slate: [Robert] Christgau's project at the [Village] Voice was to create a venue for popular-music writing that assumed a certain readership?one equipped not just with broad cultural knowledge but with a fluency in music history, the pop canon, and all the little meta-narratives of individual artists and their discographies. The goal, in other words, was to talk about pop music in the way literary critics talked about books. Christgau succeeded in making the Voice the indispensable source for serious music writing?in the '70s and '80s, it was a local alternative weekly read by music nuts from coast to coast. The critical ideal of serious music writing was best exemplified in his own pieces, packed tight with erudition and insight.


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Media Misses the Point On C.I.A. Leak Story
Joe Conason in the New York Observer: To observe the Washington press corps is to wonder why so many people who don?t remember what happened yesterday and can?t master basic logic are expected to analyze politics and policy. The latest developments in the Valerie Plame Wilson case -- as revealed in Hubris, a new book by Michael Isikoff and David Corn -- proved once more that the simplest analysis of facts is beyond the grasp of many of America?s most celebrated journalists.


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'Boston Herald' Cuts Pages to Shave Costs
Boston Business Journal: The Boston Herald has cut roughly six pages from its daily paper -- including space in its news, business and sports sections -- as a cost-saving measure amid an increasingly dismal advertising climate within the newspaper industry. Editorial director Kenneth Chandler said Tuesday that the move was triggered by "the realities of the business and competition from the Internet," a nod to the somewhat confusing battle for advertising dollars between old-line media and Web-based publications.


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'Washington Post' Kingmaker Picks a Mayor
Harry Jaffe in the Washingtonian: For all intents and purposes, when the Post anointed insurgent councilmember Adrian Fenty Tuesday morning with a full-throated endorsement, his ten-point lead in the polls over DC Council chair Linda Cropp became all but insurmountable. And though the endorsement process is collaborative, everyone -- even Graham -- bows to Colby King. He may be one of the last kingmakers in big-city daily journalism. Colby King is the avenging angel of Washington metro columnists, though the targets of his stinging columns might describe him as an assassin with a pen.