The classic book Peopleware had some excellent disussions about this issue. Like most productivity-related things, there is good news and bad news.

There is an excellent discussion in that book about how productivity of coders is impacted by the number and frequency of distractions. That helps your case.

On the other side, there was another great discussion about listening to music while programming. They referred to a study (at MIT, I think) where two groups were given a series of puzzles to solve. One group while listening to music, the other while not listening to music. Here's the rub: all of the puzzles had a "brute force" solution and a much simpler "aha!" solution. None of the people listening to music found the "aha!" solutions, and about half of the people not listening to music did. Now depending on your situation and the kind of code you are writing, you might want or need those "aha!" solutions and probably ought to skip the music.

Let's see, the big news stories this week: (1) Tiger Woods gets in a fender bender after he gets in a fight with his wife, and (2) the White House party crashers apparently lied about other stuff, too.

Journalism is already dead.