Bad News Travels Fast

How do you get your news in a hospice? Just like everybody else. Some days are good days, and some are bad. Last week was full of good news.

Rep. Tom DeLay announced he wasn't going to run for reelection. In one story he said he was doing God's will. Another said he could be in trouble for raising money by doing favors.

I was not joyous when I heard the news. DeLay is one of the few targets in Congress who is known by everyone. When I mention his name, I don't even have to say "The Hammer." I don't know whether people enjoy reading about him because he was once an exterminator, or because as the majority leader of the House he took favors from lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

What will the media do without Tom DeLay? We'll find somebody almost as good, although we'll have to wait for the next election.

The next story the country enjoyed had to do with President Bush giving Dick Cheney a leak, which he passed on to I. Lewis Libby. The attorney general said the president had a right to leak secret stuff to the public if it's in our interest. I agreed because Bush is my president, and I trust someone who is not afraid to leak top-secret information.

The fall guy is Libby, the vice president's former aide, who passed on the information to newspaper people that former ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. No one knows how the president broke the story to Cheney. I think he said, "Dick, I'm going to tell you a CIA secret. Don't tell anybody except Bob Novak, Judy Miller and anybody else who likes to print CIA secrets."

Since Libby hasn't been tried yet, the story has legs and will be on the front page at least until next week.

The third good story of the week came from, of all places, the New York Post. The newspaper has a Page Six feature that publishes all the gossip that's fit and unfit to print. One of the Page Six reporters was caught allegedly extorting money from a billionaire. He promised not to write anything bad about the victim for the sum of $100,000, plus $10,000 a month. Ron Burkle, an investor in supermarkets and all sorts of businesses, told the FBI, and they conducted a sting operation, with photographs, tapes and other evidence against the gossip.

What made it such a good story is that the New York Times and the Daily News both printed it on their front pages. This was payback time against Rupert Murdoch, who owns the New York Post, and whose favorite feature, people say, was Page Six. What makes it an even stranger story is that the New York Post didn't print anything about it at all.

In any case, I liked the story because it had nothing to do with leaks from the White House.

My favorite story of the week was about the discovery of an ancient scroll, the Gospel of Judas. In the text, Judas was a good guy and his blowing the whistle on Jesus turns out to have been Jesus's idea.

It has changed a lot of people's thinking about Judas's role at the Last Supper. It now also affects people's Passover plans.

2006Tribune Media Services