As the civil war rages on in Iraq, Congress and the Executive Branch seem unable to come to a consensus on the issue. The President has threatened to veto the recent supplemental spending bill, initiating a near stalemate in Washington. Meanwhile the ’08 presidential hopefuls are attempting to mold their own viable strategy for ending the conflict. Unfortunately, their rhetoric does not seem likely the shed any new light on this dire situation.

SEATTLE—The newspaper is not an endangered species, but sometimes it seems that way.

The industry’s overall profit margins are still in double digits. Newspapers have loyal readers and deep ties to communities, and their Web sites are getting more viewers every year.

But many key segments of the business are spiraling down, with little relief in sight. Circulation declines are so bad that a newspaper with flat-line growth is considered healthy. Sales of classified advertising have tanked. Some newspapers are in the red, and others no longer see the revenue and profits they once did.

The Washington Post’s Tom Ricks is one of America’s most respected journalists who has diligently covered The Pentagon for years. His expertise and experience in covering military affairs is encyclopedic. His book Fiasco has outlined the “complete failure” America has launched in Iraq. Many of his colleagues at The Washington Post have also written similarly engaging books about different aspects of the Iraq war.

However, while Fiasco has received much critical attention (and has sold many copies), what has not been addressed are the ethical ramifications that emerge when reporters like Ricks publish books that argue positions about a war they are still being paid to report and cover. While The Washington Post, like many newspapers, typically offers sabbaticals or some other compensatory reprieve for reporters while they are writing such books, mainly to relieve them of their regular journalistic beats, Ricks and others do ultimately return. Unfortunately, they cannot fully divorce their journalistic objectivity from the positions they argue in such books. And this is a fundamental problem of journalism ethics.

MIAMI - The Pulitzer Prize, the American newspaper industry’s highest honor, was awarded Monday to Debbie Cenziper of The Miami Herald for House of Lies, a riveting series on widespread problems in Miami-Dade County’s public housing agency.

Winning in the category of local reporting, Cenziper led a team that wrote more than 30 articles in the 2006 series, which revealed developers took millions of dollars in taxpayer money to build affordable housing for the poor, but failed to deliver, leaving thousands without their promised homes.

The series led to massive changes in the county housing agency and the arrest of three developers.

NEW YORK - The New York Daily News’ Editorial Board won the Pulitzer Prize Monday for its groundbreaking series of editorials, “9-11: The Forgotten Victims,” which documented the growing medical fallout from the World Trade Center attacks.

In riveting, persuasive prose, the five-month series established how breathing the atomized air of the World Trade Center after 9-11 had sickened more than 12,000 emergency responders, at least five of them fatally.

The series also forced all levels of government to reexamine their initial medical response to the attacks, and in many cases react with a range of new benefits and services for rescuers, volunteers or their surviving family members.