He's Not Just Ferocious, But Also Precocious

An item in today's p6 column manages to kill two birds with one stone, shilling for its corporate cousins at HarperCollins by mentioning the pub party for Tom Fenton's Bad News while breathlessly reporting Fenton's criticisms of CBS News. But the effect is somewhat marred when the anonymous reporter claims Mike Wallace "badgered... Fenton to identify the network execs who killed his overseas stories, including a possible first interview with Osama bin Laden, back in 1966." Apparently he must have had quite a racket stealing milk money from his elementary school classmates, to attract that kind of media attention.

I note this in part because it's obviously not hard for the rest of the Post to get the issue of full disclosure right, as evidenced in the reporting on Jonathan Burnham's move from Miramax Books to HarperCollins, "owned by News Corp. which also owns the Post." Why, then, do Richard Johnson and his team get a free ride? One possible reason: full disclosure would lay bare just how much they rely on "insider tips" from publicists at Harper and Fox...