A team of reporters from the Mississippi alt-weekly and a documentarian from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation accompanied Thomas Moore during his recently concluded trip to Jackson, Miss. Moore's brother, Charles, and his friend, Henry Dee, were killed there by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. During his visit, Moore convinced U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton, who served under Moore in the Army, to commit to forming a task force to re-investigate the case. Read the Free Press story here.
Joshua Greene faced a barrage of criticism after his story about an unidentified soldier being shipped off to Iraq appeared. Soldiers and others insinuated "that I or the soldier or both made the whole story up," Greene wrote in a follow-up column. "Nobody, they say, ever jumped out of a plane 4,426 times. Okay. Maybe it was a helicopter." In Greene's favor, a chaplain called to say the story had resonance, even if the number of jumps was incorrect. "And maybe I'm a flawed journalist, 'cause as the man [the soldier identified only as "Babe"] packed up his house, I didn't call him a liar enough as I sat complicit in sending him to war," Greene muses. The Free Times published a number of letters from readers questioning the story.
Twelve former employees of the Cleveland Free Times have filed a lawsuit in Ohio against New Times and Village Voice Media, reports the San Francisco Bay Guardian. The suit is the latest fallout from an October 2002 deal between the two companies that shuttered Free Times and New Times Los Angeles. The deal led to a Justice Department antitrust investigation that culminated in a consent decree in which neither company admitted guilt. The suit alleges that the workers who lost their jobs when the two papers closed were terminated illegally; the lawyer who filed the suit is seeking class-action certification.
