In a world where Lady Gaga has nearly 11 million Twitter followers, it seems almost quaint now that in 2009 CNN entered a playful contest with actor Ashton Kutcher to see who could reach a million followers first (Kutcher won by a thin margin). CNN’s Twitter account in question, @cnnbrk, had only been recently acquired by the network; it was created a few years earlier by a London web developer named James Cox. He had just been looking for a way to get CNN’s breaking news alerts sent to his phone and so spent a few hours hacking a script that would push these alerts through his Twitter account. Because Cox had entered so early in the game, the account took off and grew much faster than any of the official handles CNN eventually opened, and so it’s not surprising the company worked with Cox to bring the account under its control.

If NPR won’t fight back against charges of bias, Ira Glass will.

The This American Life host already took to NPR’s On The Media to submit his rallying cry, arguing to host Brooke Gladstone that “we have nothing to fear from a discussion of what is the news coverage we’re doing.”

The Congressional Budget Office released its preliminary estimate of the Senate health care bill yesterday. Upon the report’s release, conservative bloggers and pundits began trying to discredit the CBO, saying that the office allows Democrats to cook the numbers and its estimates are often not a good indicator of reality. And if the CBO is so unreliable, then these bloggers wouldn’t cite it uncritically when it favors their positions, right?