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August 1st - 5:16 p.m.

Since May, Los Angeles has had its own Web site dedicated to savaging Sam Zell and the crew that now runs the Tribune Company. According to this observer in LA, tellzell is maintained anonymously by an LA Times reporter fighting the despairing notion that "nothing that we can do can stop Zell, or job cuts, or the dumbing down of the Los Angeles Times."

A friend asked if we have anything like it in Chicago. Nothing so focused and relentless, but I don't hold that against Chicago. Zell's one of our own. Out in LA he's seen not merely as a Hun but as an invading Hun. At the Tribune they hope against hope that the Zell team knows what it's doing. In LA they pray he sells the paper to somebody local.





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Harold, Daily by Harold Henderson

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Branzburg v. Hayes, the split U.S. Supreme Court decision (1972) generally construed by journalists and judges alike as affirming some sort of reporter's privilege in federal courts.

U.S. Appellate Judge Richard Posner's influential opinion in McKevitt v. Pallasch (2003) telling those journalists and judges they were wrong -- there is no such privilege.

John Milton's Areopagitica (1643), one of the earliest and most eloquent arguments for a free press. Said Milton: "As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye."

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