As announced Monday, reporters Dana Priest and Anne Hull of the Washington Post, working with photographer Michel du Cille, have won a Pulitzer Prize for their series reporting on the poor treatment of patients, many of them maimed Iraq War veterans, at Walter Reed Hospital.  The series ran in February 2007.  
           A brief interview with the two reporters is online today at the Poynter Institute.  It provides some of the back story of how they were tipped off to the situation at Walter Reed, how they gained access, and how they blended their two very different reporting and writing styles.  (A bit more about this follows under the fold.)  

    Look for more on this from Folkbum or MAL Contends or ben masel or other Wisconsin folk who diary here at Daily Kos, but in the meantime here are a few lines about what happened last night in the land of the cheesheads.  (OK, Madison Guy has now written about this, blaming the lack of progressive voter turnout; fair enough, but the sleaze must be mentioned too.)
   
    In the traditionally low-turnout spring election --  mostly local races such as county boards, village trustees, and school boards.....oh, and a supreme court race -- a distinquished sitting justice, the Honorable Louis Butler lost his bid for reelection to a light-weight, hand-picked, bought-and-paid for Republican "empty suit."  
   
    Meet the buyer of this supreme court seat after the jump.

    You won't want to miss this!  The STATE OF THE MEDIA 2008, a report on the health of the American news industry, has recently been released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.  Nearly 100 pages of original research and aggregated statistical data are available online here

    The PEJ began this series of annual reports in 2004, recognizing that "journalism is in the midst of an epochal transformation, as momentous probably as the invention of the telegraph or television."  By 2007 the reports’ authors would upgrade this judgment, suggesting that we are witnessing a transformation that rivals the printing press itself in its magnitude.  
   
    There’s more, of course......so if you’re among the concerned public left wondering what has happened to the Fourth Estate, please follow!

          "The fault I find with most American newspapers is not the absence of dissent.  It is the absence of news," wrote I. F. Stone in 1963 --  a cryptic assessment of the newspaper business 45 years ago.  Even then, Stone said, there were only a handful of papers worth reading.  His remarks were part of an essay in which he reflected on a successful decade of publishing his own diminutive, but highly regarded newspaper, The I.F. Stone Weekly.  
     
       So, 'Happy Memories' to all who will pause a moment and observe the 100th anniversary of the birth of Isidor Feinstein Stone, and good wishes to those who work in his footsteps!  His work is sure
to resonate with all who read and write in the blogosphere.  Those in NYC can participate in an actual birthday celebration at NYU tomorrow, should they choose.  
In spite of the harsh words cited, Stone was no crank of a newspaper critic.  You can read all about it at  ifstone.org (linked to above) or just follow below to learn a bit more about the man behind the words.  

      One of the things progressives must do as we keep our eyes on the prize of ’08, is catalog and communicate the extensive list of failures that have been caused by years of conservative governance.  How can a governing ideology that says the best government is no government (or as little as possible) successfully meet the needs of our great nation?  It can’t, of course, and The Big Con, a new blog offered at The Campaign for America’s Future, is a great source for exposing "the big lie" of conservatism.        
      In the spirit of these words from Yellow Canary (12/12/05 diary):  "....one of the uses of dKos....to simultaneously refine and amplify the political will," I would like to recommend The Big Con to all Kossacks as worth a visit.     It will amplify our knowledge and understanding of the many ways conservatism has failed.     ..http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/...    And there's more: