Dart to the Ottawa Citizen for a little Canadian logrolling. When the Canwest media conglomerate launched a proprietary wire service and relocated the anchor of Global National, its nightly news program, to Canada’s capital city, the Citizen flooded the zone. On its front page, the paper ran a serious-faced color photo of the newscaster graced by a ray of light, under the words “Ottawa becomes news capital of Canada.” Of the lead article’s 768 words, more than four hundred were puffy quotes and glosses from Canwest corporate honchos—the CEO and president and the chairman of the board, among others. Inside, the paper recounted the anchor’s premiere day with a “great man”-style tick tock: drinking coffee, doing a publicity interview, buying long underwear. Another article tallied the boldface names that dropped by the premiere party. Online, the articles were paired with extensive photo galleries. And a video interview. Easy to miss in all this glowing coverage was any editorial disclosure—save one slight, circuitous mention tucked at the bottom of a throwaway fact box—that the Citizen, too, is owned by Canwest. Graham Green, the Citizen’s executive editor, declined to comment on the coverage but offered this: “I think the Columbia Journalism Review has lots of things you could be looking at.”

Laurel to the Detroit Free Press for picking up where the courts left off. Last fall, the city of Detroit abruptly reversed course and agreed to settle a whistleblower lawsuit brought by former police officers who claimed they were fired because of their involvement in an investigation into personal misconduct by Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. That ended one round of the mayor’s legal jeopardy, but the Free Press kept digging, and in late January, obtained cringe-inducing text messages between Kilpatrick and his former chief of staff Christine Beatty—“….did you miss me sexually?”...

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