Jewish & World News

Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum cursed at New York Times reporter Jeff Zeleny on Sunday while campaigning in Wisconsin, saying, “Quit distorting my words. It’s bulls---.” Monday morning, the presidential candidate explained that he was just acting the way a Republican should.

U.S. newspaper circulation dropped 8.7 percent in the six months through March, led by declines at USA Today, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. The Audit Bureau of Circulations today released daily average circulation figures for 602 newspapers. The latest decrease slowed from an 11 percent fall in the period through September, compared with a year earlier. Daily circulation at Gannett Co.’s USA Today fell 14 percent to 1.83 million and the New York Times dropped 8.5 percent to 951,063, ABC said. News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal, the largest U.S. publication by circulation, gained 0.5 percent to 2.09 million, according to ABC data. Tribune Co.’s Los Angeles Times saw its daily circulation decline 15 percent to 616,606, according to ABC. BusinessWeek

Wall Street is bracing for the New York Times to get bloodied in an ad war with The Wall Street Journal, which is spoiling for a fight after launching its local metro section today.

In a radio town hall appearance this morning in New York City, Gov. David A. Paterson claimed that he was the one who first told the news media that he had talked to a woman involved in a domestic violence complaint against one of his top aides. “The individual who first made it clear that there had been a conversation was myself,” the governor told John Gambling, a host on WOR (710 AM). His statement, however, is not accurate. The New York Times first reported that the governor had talked to the woman, Sherr-una Booker, in an article that appeared on its Web site on the evening of Feb. 24. The article also revealed that the State Police had intervened in the episode, even though it fell outside their jurisdiction. Five senior administration officials have resigned in the wake of the article, and Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo has named an independent counsel, Judith S. Kaye, the state’s former chief judge, to lead a criminal investigation. In the course of reporting, The ...

Can a foreign correspondent cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict if his son is an IDF soldier? The New York Times, in an opinion column on Saturday, answered “Yes” to that question when its executive editor Bill Keller defended the paper’s Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner, whose son is in the Israeli army. Bronner, an American Jew, has been posted here for the Times since March 2008, after serving as the paper’s deputy foreign editor for four years. The possibility of a conflict of interest regarding his reporting was first raised a few weeks ago by a pro-Palestinian Web site, The Electronic Intifadah. But many reporters and media critics were unaware of the controversy when contacted by The Jerusalem Post, although some did know that Bronner had a son in the IDF. The issue is a sensitive one for English-language reporters in Israel, many of whom have ties to the country that they fear to highlight, lest they find their objectivity questioned, as Bronner’s has been. “...