Ethics

The Los Angeles Times is facing a firestorm of criticism from supporters of Arnold Schwarzenegger who have accused the newspaper of showing bias against their candidate by publishing women's complaints that Schwarzenegger sexually harassed them. "Regrets? Not one," responds Times editor John Carroll. "Personally, I knew the stories were solid as Gibraltar. ... Among those employees whose misfortune it is to answer the phones at The Times, there is a consensus that our angriest critics haven't actually read the stories.

The White House official who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame did more than attack a political enemy, writes Shaun Waterman. Plame worked for the CIA "on the very issue the Bush administration says was at the heart of its decision to go to war with Iraq: weapons of mass destruction. ... Plame's outing, whomever did it, has damaged the very effort the White House said it was pursuing in going to war in the first place. A very important line has been crossed here. The integrity of the policy goals - non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction - is now seen by at least some in the White House as less important than the integrity of the message - we didn't exaggerate the case against Iraq. ... The message seems to have trumped everything, even the need to get it right in the war on terror." And as Walter Shapiro notes in USA Today, the Plame flap is only one of several scandalous recent developments related to the war in Iraq. "In the past week, three major Iraq-related developments should have, in theory, caused lasting embarrassment to the Bush administration," Shapiro writes. "But because none of these flaps touched on illegality, they have been treated as one-day stories."

"On Sept. 29, a remarkable story appeared on the front page of The New York Times," William E. Jackson, Jr. writes in Editor & Publisher. Far down in the story there is a mea culpa for reporting by the Times' Judith Miller on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction. Miller's stories relied heavily on information and defectors provided by the Iraqi National Congress's Ahmad Chalabi. "Miller is not a neutral, nor an objective journalist," Jackson writes.

While the Food and Drug Administration is hearing testimonies on direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription drugs, one pharmaceutical giant is hoping to gets its spin on drug marketing in the news. The FDA is reviewing DTC guidelines that cover the $2.7 billion that the pharmaceutical industry now spends annually on television, radio and print advertising.