• "Michael Kelly, the first American journalist killed in Iraq."
  
  — Keith J. Kelly, media reporter, New York Post [no relation]

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• "Osama bin Laden. He confounds all the supposed rules of modern media. He employs no PR people, has no advertising budget and appears as infrequently as possible. Never, in our time, has there been a figure who has said so little, yet occupies the thoughts and attentions of so many."
  
  — Joe Dolce, editor in chief, Star Magazine

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• "Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett. On the road to war, the president's political spin doctors shrewdly exploited the nation's post-9/11 anxieties with rousing rhetoric and an endless loop of perfectly-orchestrated photo-ops. By wrapping the president in a teflon shield of populism and patriotism, America's First Flacks successfully neutralized both the press corps and the Democrats, preserving the administration's approval ratings despite a billion-dollar Iraqi quagmire, record deficits, a hard right social agenda, two million lost jobs and a string of quiet scandals."
  
  — Maer Roshan, founder, Radar

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• "Jon Landman, former Metro editor of the New York Times, who performed what should be every journalist's job: speaking truth to power -- even at personal risk. Landman's bravery in diagnosing and prescribing a cure for the disease that was Jayson Blair stands as a stunning rebuke to those who enabled Blair, as well as to those who, after the fact, would reward or lionize his destructive behavior."
  
  — Michael Gross, journalist and author of "Genuine Authentic: The Real Life of Ralph Lauren"

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• "Jayson Blair. He shook up the entire view of the New York Times, that it is the single-most important media platform in the country."
  
  — Mort Zuckerman, owner of the New York Daily News and U.S. News & World Report

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• "Al Franken. He broke the Fox News spell and reclaimed laughter for the left."
  
  — Tina Brown, Washington Post columnist and CNBC talk show host

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• "Bruce Wasserstein. He swooped in like a stealth bomber to pick off the prime media target of the year, New York magazine, from under the noses of such supposedly savvy players as Zuckerman, Weinstein, Peltz and Deutch. Wasserstein is an outsider and no one knows who he'll hire, or what he'll do."
  
  — Richard Johnson, Page Six editor, New York Post

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• "Bill Keller. He kept his cool under Howell Raines, and has proved a vital steward to the New York Times at a critically turbulent and difficult time."
  
  — Andrew Sullivan, editor, AndrewSullivan.com

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• "Jayson Blair. The pint-sized cretin not only toppled Raines and Boyd, but he succeeded in further eroding the public's trust and faith in journalism. And for his treachery, Blair got a fat book contract and the notoriety he craved. That's quite an accomplishment."
  
  — William Bastone, editor, The Smoking Gun

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• "Dick Parsons. All of the other top executives of the ill-fated AOL-Time Warner merger are gone -- ousted, disgraced and unemployed. Not only has Parsons survived, he has managed to consolidate his power at the world's largest media company. And in the process, AOL has been hacked off the corporate name. That's a pretty good year."
  
  — Alec Klein, Washington Post staff writer and author of "Stealing Time"

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• "Steve Jobs. With iTunes he showed the music industry a way out of its slump. At Pixar, he proved that a cartoon about fish could capture audiences left unmoved by most of this year's over-hyped blockbusters."
  
  — Peter Thal Larsen, U.S. media editor, The Financial Times

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• "Leslie Moonves, the CBS chief, for axing the thoroughly forgettable 'The Reagans' on his way to dominating sweeps."
  
  — Michael Paranzino, founder, BoycottCBS.com

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• "RSS -- a technology, not a person. RSS makes publishing content simple and direct online, and stands to change the media landscape quite a bit over the next year. A very close runner up is the TiVo, followed by search engines, peer to peer networks, weblogs, and broadband. All these technologies are forcing change on the media industry that far exceeds the influence of any one person."
  
  — John Battelle, visiting professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and blogger

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• "The Queer Eyes: 2003 was clearly the year of media 'mo-ery. 'Gay tone' was propagated widely: the New York Times itself got 167% more catty this year. And when not crowded out by pop stars titillating with gay tonguing, straight men applying gay product, and actors gay-for-paying, occasionally actual real gays were spotted. Most frequently featured: the so-called Fab Five, the well-oiled fun-loving bitchy-tongued gay replicants. These Pris's scissor-kicked their way across America, leapfrogging that fine line between self-celebration and self-degradation. Thanks to them, one could argue (after a few drinks), this year all their camp may have fought the American Family Association's scheme to put the gays in camps."
  
  — Choire Sicha, editor, Gawker.com

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• "Brian Roberts of Comcast. With federal approval of Comcast's takeover of AT&T Broadband, Comcast is now the country's most powerful cable TV monopoly. Roberts supports a political agenda that threatens the future openness of the broadband Internet. Fighting the Comcast monopoly must be on the agenda for 2004."
  
  — Jeffrey Chester, executive director, Center for Digital Democracy

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• "Rupert Murdoch. For better or worse, Fox News Channel has had a tremendous impact on the very concept of news and news objectivity. ... Murdoch has this ability to change the rules. If everybody else is doing cable, he's going to do satellite. If everybody else is doing 'objective' news, he's going to do 'point-of-view' news. He breaks rules and reinvents models."
  
  — Scott Donaton, editor, Advertising Age

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• "Rupert Murdoch. Whatever trend you examine -- be it media consolidation and the strangulation of democratic voices, media conservatism while whining about so-called 'liberal bias,' or tabloid titillation while bemoaning the lack of 'values' in American public life -- it's all Rupert, all the time. He's not only the news leader, he's the news maker. God help us."
  
  — Eric Alterman, media columnist for The Nation, MSNBC.com blogger and author of "What Liberal Media?"

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• "Journalists who lost their lives covering the war in Iraq and the news elsewhere in the world during the past year. Why should we give publicity to any of the people on this list, so many of whom are garden-variety egomaniacs or simply bad people?"
  
  — Jon Friedman, media editor, CBS MarketWatch.com

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• "Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass. In the past, plagiarists and journalistic liars wore scarlet letters. Today, they are glorified with book contracts and movies. It is little wonder that public opinion of the press is at an all time low. (I was much more positive last year in choosing Fox News chairman Roger Ailes.) 'Dishonorable mention' goes to Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, for hiring disgraced Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget as the 'expert' on Martha Stewart. Again, deviancy is being rewarded."
  
  — Steve Cohn, editor-in-chief, Media Industry Newsletter

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• "Michael J. Copps, since he was sworn as a 'marginalized' Democratic member of the FCC two years ago, has been a modern-day Paul Revere. He has traveled the country to warn of the perils of media concentration, set up appointments, called public hearings, become a first-class pain-in-the-ass to Chairman Michael Powell's campaign to relax media concentration rules. His efforts helped ignite a citizen movement against big media and for more diversity of voices, a movement that united a broader left/right coalition than the one that just passed a new Medicare bill. Perhaps this alliance and effort will falter. But this year Copps' rebellion mattered, helping defeat those who would reduce the federal regulatory referee to the role of mere spectator."
  
  — Ken Auletta, media columnist, The New Yorker

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