TO PUBLISH OR NOT TO PUBLISH: Howie Kurtz is reporting today that "Washington Post" executives Len Downie and Robert Kaiser have written a book titled "The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril." Among the items of note: At the height of the 1996 presidential campaign, the "Washington Post" sat on a story about an affair Bob Dole had 28 years ago.The story was leaked to the press anyway.

The book gives broadcast journalists a lot of grief (not that they don't deserve it).

"The decline of serious, ambitious television news over the last two decades of the 20th century cannot be called surprising," they write. "Ours had become a celebrity-besotted culture, with television the single most powerful promoter and ratifier of celebrityhood."

But they also reveal how out of touch they are when it comes to what nearly every journalist inside their own newsroom is reading:

They're also dismissive of Slate, Salon and the Drudge Report.

Obviously, we're not getting the whole story here, but that's a fairly bold head-in-the-sand position to take in the year 2002.