Loneliness, Lies & Videotape

The promise and the peril of online communications extend to the blogosphere. It was a blogger, Harvey Levin of TMZ.com, who broke the story of Mel Gibson's drunken, anti-Semitic rant after the actor was arrested in Malibu. But some mainstream journalists are still learning the ropes. Writers for the Los Angeles Times and the New Republic were suspended recently when they engaged online in "sock puppetry" -- posting comments under pseudonyms that either assail their critics or heap praise on themselves.

What YouTube and social networking sites like MySpace.com and Facebook have in common is that they eliminate the media middleman. Musicians, comedians and other artists (not to mention the date-deprived) can sell themselves to other people without having to convince a journalist that they are worthy of ink or airtime. Unfortunately, the old media establishment too often paints this world as dark and dangerous -- "What Parents Need to Know About MySpace," says a U.S. News cover story -- while playing down its fun and creative aspects.

Foul play -- even in the guise of allegedly lonely teenagers -- is always possible with no referees. But amateur detectives, it turns out, are pretty good at busting fakers.

Playing Hardball With Matthews

The phone call that ultimately led to the indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby was triggered by his anger at Chris Matthews. And therein lies a small peek at how Washington works.

In the summer of 2003, according to the new book "Hubris" by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Libby -- then Vice President Cheney's chief of staff -- was upset over Matthews's criticism of the Iraq war. Libby had Adam Levine, a White House spokesman who once worked for Matthews at MSNBC's "Hardball," call the host to complain.

In the call, which the book says led to a shouting match, Levine said that Matthews had been harping on the role of Libby and other neoconservatives who, Levine noted, have Jewish-sounding names. "Some of what you're saying about this sounds anti-Semitic," Levine told Matthews.

In an interview, Levine confirms the call. "The sole purpose of making the phone call to Chris Matthews," he says, "was to try to correct what I believed and Scooter believed were incorrect statements Chris was making" linking Libby to a passage in President Bush's State of the Union message about Saddam Hussein seeking enriched uranium in Africa, which the administration later retracted. "I in no way believe Chris is anti-Semitic. I know for a fact he's not."

Matthews says that he was in the forefront of "pointing out the ideology behind the war" and that he knows from his experience in the Carter White House that the vice president's top aide must have been involved in vetting the infamous "16 words" in Bush's address. "It obviously bugged him that I did that," Matthews says of Libby. But, he says, "I don't know Scooter Libby. I don't know what happened between him and the vice president and why that call was made."

After the complaint to Matthews, Libby called Tim Russert, NBC's Washington bureau chief, to ask why Matthews was always taking aim at "Libby and Wolfowitz and Perle." During the investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative, Libby testified that he learned about Plame during that phone call with Russert. But after the NBC newsman testified that the subject of Plame never came up, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald obtained an indictment of Libby, who is contesting the charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Couric Watch

It didn't take long -- six days, to be precise -- for some critics to start pronouncing Katie Couric's CBS tenure a failure.

After taking the "CBS Evening News" to first place in her debut week, Couric dropped to third last Monday, and rivals declared her surge over. But she won two of the next three nights, and finished second on the other. To be sure, Couric's more feature-oriented approach has stirred controversy, but history shows that news ratings move at a molasses pace.

"I said from Day One I'd be happy with consistent and even slow growth," says CBS News President Sean McManus. "Even being in a race for No. 1 is a pretty darn good accomplishment, a sea change considering where the 'CBS Evening News' has been the last 10 years. For some people, it's an attractive story to say that Katie is back at No. 3, when in reality this is going to be a fight for the next couple of years."