Opinion

Judy Miller is one disgusting poster child for freedom of the press. We can all agree on that, can’t we? She was the pipeline for the administration’s totally bogus claims that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But on the other hand, nobody thinks that it’s right to jail a reporter who merely received—didn’t even print—a leak from a presumably highly placed source which amounted to the disclosure of the identity of a CIA employee. Can we agree on that? -more-

First, the breaking news: The Berkeley Daily Planet has captured a flock of prizes in the statewide Better Newspapers Contest sponsored by the California Newspaper Publishers Association. At the awards luncheon on Saturday we learned that we’d won two first prizes, for editorial pages overall and for an editorial cartoon by Justin DeFreitas, second prize for a spot news photo by Jakob Schiller, and honorable mentions (top 10 percent of entries in Northern California, statewide finalists) for local spot news (Matthew Artz), writing (Richard Brenneman) and for another DeFreitas cartoon. Please excuse us if we’re mighty proud of this record, especially since we’ve only been around for two years. -more-