Every now and again I like to play “name that party.” This is the fun parlor game where you read a story about a politician that has either been indicted, arrested, or imprisoned and try to guess by the story from which party he hails. If you read the story and no political party affiliation is mentioned, 99 out of 100 times you can be sure that the troubled pol is a Democrat. However, if it is a Republican that is going to jail or to court his party usually makes the first paragraph if not the headline itself.

Well, today we have yet another edition of “name that party” going on in the Old Line State where Prince George’s County Executive Jack B. Johnson and his wife Leslie have been arrested and charged with tampering with a witness in connection with a criminal offense and destruction of evidence in a federal investigation. Johnson is a Democrat, not that the news helps you learn that little factoid.

As this is breaking news, the story has popped up on the AP, the Washington Post, Reuters, and several other sources. The stories are filled with all sorts of details about the case, what the charges are, the particulars of the crime, the names and offices of those accused, their ages, where they live… all these things fill the various stories that announce the arrest. But one tiny little detail seems to have escaped many of the news stories: the fact that Johnson is a Democrat. It seems like they just plum forgot to mention his political party.

You are shocked, I am sure.

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JournoList scandal is back and prepare for it to be a driving force in the news for quite some time. The Daily Caller published an article tonight indicating they’ve obtained emails from the JournoList and the initial details are as damning as we expected when the list-serv, founded by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein in 2007, surfaced with the Dave Weigel kerfuffle last month.

Snippets from the article below, but make sure to read the whole thing at the Daily Caller and return to Big Journalism early and often as we unpack the details that emerge and track the fallout from this seminal event in the history of left-wing media bias.  It’s unclear exactly what the Daily Caller has, but there’s certainly no indication from this article they’ve already laid all their cards out on the table.

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” (more…)

As the heyday of the daily newspaper passes into history, expect to see more sites like this one, which is devoted to laid-off staffers from the once-great Baltimore Sun telling their personal stories.  As a veteran of a now-defunct daily newspaper myself — the afternoon San Francisco Examiner during the Reg Murphy era (Murphy went on to become the editor of the Sun) — I’m especially sympathetic to such tales, but the time has come for all of us who are living through the end of the Newspaper Era to face up to the fact that’s it’s gone and it’s not coming back.

In the spring of 2009, The Baltimore Sun laid off about 60 people, including about a third of the newsroom staff.

This Web site records the bittersweet memories of many of those people. Some recall the pain of being fired; others the challenges, joys and spirit of newspaper work.

Baltimore Sun building, c. 1939

The Web site grows from a fellowship project conceived and funded by the Writers Guild of America, East Foundation, which has a mission of perpetuating the art and craft of storytelling. Like other WGAE Foundation projects, this one gave the laid-off Sun employees an opportunity to process a difficult experience through creative work.

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