Washington Post

In an era when news of complex and important issues is all too often reported in 15-second television news stories and articles offering little nuance and even less analysis, the work of serious journalists - both their formidable triumphs like Watergate and their distressing disasters - reinforce for us all why the First Amendment so forcefully spells out our rights of free speech and a free press.At the core of the First Amendment is the belief that discussion, debate and dissection of public affairs should be - in the words of Supreme Court Justice William Brennan - "uninhibited, robust and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials."

A story on the front page of yesterday's New York Times was startling: The Bush administration ignored urgent warnings from the military in 2003 that thousands of additional troops were needed in Iraq, and the article also described the White House as riven by disagreement over the conduct of the war. The problem with the story was that it should have appeared first in The Washington Post. The scoop in the Times - and a similar story in the New York Daily News - was based on a new book, State of Denial, by Bob Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Post and famous as half of the duo that unraveled the Watergate scandal.

Ignoring the age-old advice about picking fights with somebody who buys ink by the barrel, Orioles owner Peter Angelos took out a full-page advertisement in yesterday's Washington Post to correct what the ad called "misinformation and innuendo about our position - driven, in large part by news accounts and editorials in this newspaper." Angelos, reached at home yesterday afternoon, stressed that he bought the ad to set the record straight on the Orioles' position regarding sharing the market with the Washington Nationals.

Katharine Graham doesn't think she'll be able to tell a gathering of psychiatrists, psychotherapists and other mental health experts much about clinical depression, or at least much more than they already know.But she may be wrong. She might tell them some of the ways it can change people -- not the afflicted, but those close to them; and now and again even positively.She has no speech prepared for her presentation Thursday to the Depression and Related Affective Disorders Association at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, but she will answer questions that relate to her particular knowledge of this insidious disease.

One colleague described Ben Bradlee as a man who could put his cigarette out on a coffee saucer -- "fine bone china, even" -- and escape being called a boor for it.That's how confident he is of his own legitimacy and personal authority. That's how blinding is the blaze of his charisma.This, of course, is exaggeration. But, then, so is Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, paragon executive editor of the Washington Post, illuminator of the Pentagon Papers, director of the Post's Watergate coverage, St. George to Richard Nixon's dragon.

WASHINGTON - Herbert Block may have been a legend, a political cartoonist at The Washington Post for the better part of the 20th century. But to his friends, he looked and lived the role of the typical ink-stained wretch - a slightly rumpled, wryly funny character far more interested in the latest news than in how much money was in his pocket. Then the cartoonist known as Herblock died, and his friends learned something they never suspected: Block, the most modest of men, was filthy rich.

HOLLYWOOD -- Aubrey Rike is a former funeral parlor worker, the man who, in November 1963, put President Kennedy's slain body into the casket at Parkland Hospital. Today, he is a Dallas policeman who was recently hired as a consultant on Oliver Stone's latest project "JFK" -- a dramatic exploration of the assassination, which the director calls "the seminal event of our generation."At one point, Rike recalls, he pointed out a couple of minor factual errors in the way Stone was setting up a scene: Mrs. Kennedy had not been in the emergency room at a given time; her clothes were less blood-stained.

Washington's news-radio giant WTOP initiated a move exclusively to the FM dial yesterday, with plans to yield its signals at 1500 AM and 107.7 FM to a new station featuring content from The Washington Post in March. The move announced by Bonneville International Corp., WTOP's parent company, is part of a major shift in its news and music programming in the Washington area. Additionally, Bonneville canceled its modern-music FM station Z104 (104.1 and 103.9 in Frederick) and began broadcasting classical station WGMS-FM at those signals.

On July 13, 2008, GEORGE E. SINGER, at home, Silver Spring, MD remembered by Thelma (nee Henry) Singer, his wife of 64 years, daughters Linda, Justina, son-in-law Joe. He was the grandfather of Stephanie and Chad. Also survived by granddaughter-in- law Meridith, great-grandchildren, Ryan, Hadley, Greyson and a large loving family. Attended Maryland School for the Deaf and Galludet, 38 year career with the Washington Post. 64 Year member of Columbia Typographical Union. Member of Washington Post E-Streeters, National and Maryland Association for the Deaf, Frederick School Alumni, National Deaf Fraternity, Masons Lodge and Lions Club.

The N.Y. Times, having failed to put Mrs. Clinton behind bars, condemns her to the Senate. The Washington Post has gone to great lengths to endorse the devil it knows. The two unanswered questions from the campaign are how George W. Bush got through Yale and how Al Gore got elected to anything. Constellation says it all: power company to the stars. BGE stays home, ghost of its former self.