The Associated Press is “distressed” after the Justice Department secretly seized two months of phone records of its reporters and editors, including those of former CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier. AP executive editor Kathleen Carroll was on “Morning Joe” today to talk about the seizure, which the AP called a “‘massive and unprecedented intrusion’ into how news organizations gather the news.”

“I’ve been in this business more than 30 years. And our first amendment lawyers, and our lawyers inside the AP, and our CEO is also a well-known first amendment lawyer — none of us have ever seen anything like this,” Carroll said. Watch:

The AP reports that the Department of Justice secretly seized phone logs from its reporters and editors, apparently tied to the reporting on a foiled terror plot.

“There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” wrote AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, citing the severe Constitutional issues with the seizure.

Former CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier, now an intelligence and counterterrorism reporter for the AP, was one of the journalists who had their phone logs seized. Dozier was seriously inured in Iraq in 2006. She left CBS for the AP in 2010.

Read the full AP teport here.

Accepting his Fred Friendly First Amendment award this afternoon at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Club, CBS News anchor and managing editor Scott Pelley delivered an impassioned speech about the sorry state of journalism in 2013.

“Our house is on fire,” Pelley said of the business at large. “Never before in human history has more information been available to more people. But at the same time never before in human history has more bad information been available to more people.”

Pelley took “the first arrow,” recalling his own mistake over some of the early reporting out of Sandy Hook Elementary in December. Then he recounted early errors after the Boston Marathon was bombed. “We were attacked by terrorists on that day, and amateur journalists became digital vigilantes.”

Pelley joins 19 other TV journalists including Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Ted Koppel, and, last year, Martha Raddatz, as Fred Friendly honorees. He told the crowd, which included his CBS News colleagues past and present, that “disruptive technologies” are partly to blame.

“Twitter, Facebook and Reddit: that’s not journalism. That’s gossip. Journalism was invented as an antidote to gossip.”

Pelley also took on the chest thumping that goes on in local and national newsrooms around the nation every day.

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NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel is safe, after being kidnapped in Syria late last week and released overnight. Unfortunately, kidnappings, injuries and death are part of the job of the foreign correspondent and their crew. With stories out of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Egypt and Libya in the last few years, just about every news outlet has had at least a handful of staffers affected by violence or misfortune.

In April, 2003, NBC News correspondent David Bloom died in Iraq due to a blood clot.

In June, 2003, NBC News Soundman Jeremy Little was mortally wounded in a grenade attack in Iraq. He was treated in Landstuhl, Germany but succumbed a few days later to a post-operative infection.

In January, 2006, ABC anchor Bob Woodruff and camera operator Doug Vogt were badly injured in Iraq when a roadside bomb exploded next to the vehicle they were traveling in.

In May, 2006 CBS camera operator Paul Douglas and sound technician James Brolan were killed in Iraq when the U.S. Army unit they were embedded with came under attack. CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier was seriously wounded in the attack and survived.

In August, 2006 Fox News Channel correspondent Steve Centanni and camera operator Olaf Wiig were kidnapped while reporting in Gaza. Centanni’s family would make a televised plea for their safe return, and they were eventually freed. Wiig would see another incident in Egypt in 2011 (see below).

In May, 2007 ABC News camera operator Alaa Uldeen Aziz and sound technician Saif Laith Yousuf were killed in Iraq when the car they were traveling in was ambushed.

In August, 2008 Fox News camera operator Chris Jackson was injured in Afghanistan while traveling with Oliver North.

In August, 2009 CBS News correspondent Cami McCormick was injured in Afghanistan when the vehicle she was traveling in was hit by an IED.

February 2011 saw a number of incidents, particularly in Egypt:
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Candy Crowley is the 2012 winner of the American News Women’s Club Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the CNN anchor was roasted and toasted at a celebration dinner held at the National Press Club last night. The Hill has details on Dana Bash‘s speech:

The D.C.-based journo kept the wisecracks coming in her remarks, razzing Crowley for her increased presence in the anchor chair: “I’m here to report that some of the Candy-ism’s those of us who have worked with her for years have come to know and love, have suddenly changed. Well, maybe not suddenly — gradually — since, well let’s see when was it, oh — I know — the day you became an anchor.”

Bash continued, “That’s right — the woman who was content with a Diet Coke out of a vending machine to give her a kick start will now only drink — get this — ‘triple grande extra dry soy cappuccino.’”

The AP’s Kimberly Dozier emceed the event. Other roasters and toasters included Bill Richardson, Judy Woodruff, and Molly Boyle. Written notes were sent in from Mark Knoller, Nancy Pelosi, Eleanor Clift and Wolf Blitzer.

A memorial cricket match was held over the weekend at London’s Chiswick House between CBS News and the Rory Peck Trust. The match was played in honor of CBS News cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan who were killed by a roadside bomb while on assignment in Baghdad on May 29, 2006. The blast seriously injured correspondent Kimberly Dozier.

More than $13,000 was raised for the Rory Peck Trust which supports freelance news gatherers and their families in times of need. CBS News’s London Bureau Chief Andy Clarke tells TVNewser it was a resounding victory for the Rory Peck team, “but CBS News was comfortable in defeat knowing that they had remembered ‘the boys.’”

That’s the CBS team on the left of the picture above. The Rory Peck team, to the right, was captained by ITV News anchor Mark Austin. Here’s more on the match. And if you’d like to learn more about the Rory Peck Trust, click here.

In another example of international downsizing by American networks, TVNewser has learned CBS News is letting go four longtime camera/sound crews from the London bureau.

CBS News EVP Paul Friedman made the trip to London earlier this week — to a CBS News operation once headed by Edward R. Murrow — to deliver the bad news.

Gone are cameraman Siphiwo Ralo, a South African who, in the early ’90′s, helped the network get access to the ghettos as apartheid was coming to an end. He’d been with CBS since 1985. Also gone, Nick Turner, who learned of the changes via phone. He is undergoing cancer treatment and not working at the moment. Cameraman Massimo Mariani and sound man Andy Stevenson are also being let go. The men have covered war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia and beyond.

While two photographers will remain on staff, London producers will be doing more shooting for correspondents Mark Phillips and Elizabeth Palmer. Separate from this week’s news, correspondent Richard Roth, who has been in CBS’ London bureau since 1998, is leaving the network.

The CBS News London bureau was shaken to the core on Memorial Day 2006 when camerman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan were killed in Baghdad while on assignment with former CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier.

The crews are being given a year’s salary and could freelance for CBS in the future, but sources tell us they don’t expect much work.

And CBS is not alone when it comes to international downsizing.

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CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier is leaving the network and will join the Associated Press as intelligence reporter. Dozier, you’ll recall, was seriously wounded and her cameraman and soundman were killed when they came under attack while on assignment in Iraq in May, 2006.

Dozier, who wrote about her experience in 2008′s “Breathing the Fire,” returned to Iraq late last year.

In a note to staff, AP Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier writes, Dozier “will work with AP reporters around the globe, focusing on stories about the growing security threats against the United States and its allies.”

Click continued to read the note from Fournier, as well as one from CBS News and Sports president Sean McManus…

> Earlier: The TVNewser interview with Kimberly Dozier…
CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier is leaving the network and will join the Associated Press as intelligence reporter. Dozier, you’ll recall, was seriously wounded and her cameraman and soundman were killed when they came under attack while on assignment in Iraq in May, 2006.

Dozier, who wrote about her experience in 2008′s “Breathing the Fire,” returned to Iraq late last year.

In a note to staff, AP Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier writes, Dozier “will work with AP reporters around the globe, focusing on stories about the growing security threats against the United States and its allies.”

Click continued to read the note from Fournier, as well as one from CBS News and Sports president Sean McManus…

> Earlier: The TVNewser interview with Kimberly Dozier…

Read more

On Memorial Day 2006, CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier, her cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Brolan were reporting with the Army’s 4th Infantry Division when a five-hundred pound car bomb exploded near them. Douglas and Brolan were killed. It would take months for Dozier to recover from her physical wounds, and a year later was running 10K’s.

But it would take three-and-a-half years to get back to Iraq. Dozier returned last week for the first time since the attack.

Now based in CBS’ Washington bureau, Dozier traveled to Baghdad, Talil and Ramadi. On CBSNews.com she writes:

This time, we arrived with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, admittedly under heavy security, to Camp Victory outside Baghdad. I saw purposeful troops, but it didn’t have the same sense of the barely controlled frenzy I saw during the three years I spent there – with soldiers, civilian contractors and Iraqi tradesmen rushing back and forth, a steady stream of helicopters buzzing in and out, the roads choked with humvees and supply vehicles rushing to their next task.

Now, Camp Victory has the hum of a well-oiled machine-like they’ve got this down. The phrase that kept coming back to me was “on a glidepath.” Admittedly, one still studded by the occasional bout of horrific violence, but momentum for now seems to be in their favor.

Dozier’s reports were featured on CBSNews.com as well as CBS Radio News. There was no video crew this time around. CBS News gave Dozier the time to go as a private citizen at Adm. Mullen’s invitation. The trip is also providing Dozier material as she completes a paperback edition of her best-selling “Breathing the Fire” with a new chapter on her injuries and recovery. The author profits from the book are going to Fisher House, TAPS and other wounded warrior charities.

(Photo: CBS/Jim Garamone)

The team organized by CBS news correspondent Kimberly Dozier in honor of CBS Radio News correspondent Cami McCormick raised $12,000 over the weekend, all benefiting Fisher House.

The Fisher House team participated in a 10K which was part of the Marine Corps Marathon. “My single hour-twenty or so run (at a Penguin pace, but hey, I finished, and I never stopped running) raised more than $12,000 for Fisher House,” wrote Dozier in an email to colleagues.

McCormick’s family has stayed at Fischer House as she recovers from serious injuries suffered in a roadside bomb attack in Afghanistan in August.

Dozier also writes that McCormick, “hopes to be transitioning out of trauma status soon, to full rehab.”

Donations are still being accepted here.