This week's New York brings Joe Hagan's second story this year about a wretched CBS News anchor, his first being that interminable cover piece on Katie Couric this summer. Today's slightly less endless article chronicles Hagan's talks with Dan Rather. Hagan doesn't uncover anything you don't already know about Rather's legal dispute with CBS or the documents scandal that started it all. He does, however, paint Rather as an around-the-bend loony toon, one of those old guys who madly scribbles notes to himself while muttering at the pigeons from his park bench.

• Five news orgs — including NYT — pay Wen Ho Lee $750,000 to settle his case. Which seems not a not entirely unreasonable amount after mistakenly being labled a nuclear spy. [NYT]
• CBS News Iraq reporter Kim Dozier now off respirator, breathing on her own. [CBSNews.com]
• Charlie Gibson thinks New York's Joe Hagan "is something of a snake" and will never talk to him again. Mind you, this is over a fluffy Q&A. [Chicago Defender]
• Best attack on Judy Miller ever: She could have prevented 9/11. [TAP]
• Time loses Baghdad reporters; New York to lose dapper WSJer Matthew Rose. [NYP]
• Time's Jim Kelly to take sabbatical, visit Statue of Liberty before starting new corporate gig. [MW]
• GMA EP Ben Sherwood quits. Presumably he just couldn't bear not having Charlie Gibson's full attention. [Media Mob/NYO]

Dashing Joe Hagan, the media-reporting up-and-comer who only nine months ago left the peach playpen of The New York Observer, where he'd been the NYTV columnist, to take over the media beat at The Wall Street Journal, is now set to leave the Journal and become a contract writer at New York mag. There's no formal announcement yet, but we understand Hagan will start with New York in late March, and he'll write on topics including media, business, and cultural institutions.