Peter Scheer

BY PETER SCHEER — Attorney General Jerry Brown’s spokesman Scott Gerber was unceremoniously “disappeared” from Brown’s incipient gubernatorial campaign this week because of a lapse in judgment that, quite frankly, has been overblown. Gerber’s mistake: to surreptitiously record a  phone conversation with a reporter,  which was later discovered because Gerber, in a plea for changes to the story,  presented an editor with verbatim quotes too extensive and accurate to be the result of efficient note-taking

BY PETER SCHEER—As I read about the latest contractions in the newsroom of the New York Times (100 reporters and editors) and the San Francisco Chronicle (investigative reporting staff–gone), the question occurs: Why are universities across the country continuing to churn out journalism graduates? Do they know something that the rest of us don’t? Do they have some reason to believe that demand for academically-trained newbee journalists is about to stage an extraordinary recovery? Job

BY PETER SCHEER—On Monday, Washington Post investigative reporter nonpareil Bob Woodward caused a tremor inside the Beltway with an exclusive account of  Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s 66-page report to President Barack Obama, warning that without the deployment of more US troops, the administration’s Afghanistan policy will fail. There has followed the usual Washington parlor game of pundits and journalists speculating about who leaked the report to Woodward, and why.  By Tuesday the ascendant theory was that