Former LAPD Police Chief and Collaborate Or Perish! author William Bratton seems to have dropped something of a bomb on Current TV’s The Young Turks, telling host Cenk Uygur Tuesday night that his LAPD “had interactions with the CIA” to “to make them aware of our capabilities and our needs.”

While the CIA’s coordination with the NYPD has been big news, Bratton’s bombshell has proven a silent but deadly, barely registering with the news media.

According to Associated Press reporter Thomas Beaumont, the Republican campaigns have been much quieter than in previous election years, with no campaign having a paid staff larger than 20 members. Beaumont attributes the smaller staff sizes to how campaigns utilize technology to reach voters.

A crowd of early Black Friday birds at a Los Angeles-area Wal Mart got more than they bargained for as they tried to gobble up great deals Thursday night: chemical warfare. According to reports, up to 20 people were injured when an unidentified woman deployed pepper spray on her fellow shoppers, allegedly in order to gain an advantage in securing deals on discounted electronic items. According to the Associated Press, 20 people received minor injuries, some due to “rapid crowd movement.”

There’s a new development in the now-reopened 1981 drowning death of actress Natalie Wood. The Associated Press reported Friday afternoon that actor Christopher Walken told a DC sports radio station that “there was drinking and shouting on the boat and that then ‘there was tragedy.’”

Unfortunately, the quote was actually from one of the show’s producers, doing an apparently convincing Christopher Walken impression.

A disturbing pattern is emerging in the coverage of the Penn State alleged child rape story, in which media outlets employ varying degrees of dereliction that have the effect of softening the wrongs of its participants. The latest iteration of this is the reporting on an email from Penn State assistant Mike McQueary, to a friend, in which McQueary tries to mitigate his sickeningly inadequate reaction to witnessing Jerry Sandusky raping a child in the Penn State showers.

Here’s an odd bit of journalistic protocol for you. Yesterday we brought you the story of the allegedly shoddy and even violent treatment that a number of journalists received at the hands of the NYPD when they attempted to cover the eviction of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. In that story, we mentioned how many of the journalists resorted to using Twitter to disseminate information about the apparent “media blackout.” This was especially true when a number of journalists were actually arrested for attempting to do their jobs. However, an Associated Press reporter and photographer have gotten in a little trouble with their employer for Tweeting about their arrest. Not because they were arrested but because the AP could have totally broken that.

On the third full day of the Herman Cain alleged sexual harassment scandal, the Associated Press reports a third woman has come forward to allege that the current GOP frontrunner behaved inappropriately when he was head of the National Restaurant Association in the nineties. This latest accusation adds to the volume of the story, if not the depth, as the woman has opted to remain anonymous, and reportedly never filed a complaint against Cain.

On Sunday morning’s Up with Chris Hayes, the panel discussed the contrast between the way Politico reported President Obama’s speech before the Congressional Black Caucus, and the Associated Press‘ reporting. Unlike Politico, who used the official transcription to pull quotes, the AP’s article reflected the President’s folksier delivery by quotin’ him without the dropped g’s.

Mark Smith, the AP reporter who wrote the story, commented on the debate exclusively for Mediaite.

The Associated Press reports that facial recognition technology being considered for the upcoming 2012 Olympic Games in London is being tested by police in the aftermath of Britain’s riots. The AP’s Paisley Dodds and Raphael Satter write officers are “feeding photographs of suspects through Scotland Yard’s newly updated face-matching program” in an attempt to identify those who were responsible for the wave of riots that began in North London and quickly spread. “A law enforcement official tells The Associated Press that facial recognition is one of many tools police are using to hunt suspects still at large.”

On Friday morning’s Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy slammed Gawker over a blog post that attempted to extrapolate the identity of the CIA agent responsible for tracking and killing Osama bin Laden. Doocy is correct that the site acted recklessly, but along the way, he gets a key fact wrong, makes an unexplainable comparison to the outing of Valerie Plame, and actually shows a photograph of the man in question, in stunning Hi-Def, to millions of Fox News viewers.

The Associated Press is reporting that the FBI has opened an investigation into allegations Rupert Murdoch‘s News Corp. sought to hack into the phones of 9/11 victims. The AP’s Tom Hays, citing “a law enforcement official” says the investigation comes as New York-based News Corp. is “in crisis mode.”

According to the AP, the FBI’s New York office has not commented, nor has News Corp. or the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan.

The Associated Press has named Liz Sidoti its new political editor with the immediate task of leading the wire service’s coverage of the 2012 elections. Sidoti, who has been the AP’s chief political writer and led coverage of the 2008 campaign, has covered national politics for the AP since 2003. “Liz’s career is steeped in AP’s rich tradition of being first with political news; she’s a ferocious competitor. Even more remarkable is her ability to push and improve the work of those around her,” said Sally Buzbee, the AP’s Washington bureau chief. “She is a model for how journalists can cut through the political noise and fit the pieces together to explain what is happening in politics and why it matters to people beyond the nation’s capital.”

Whoopsie! The Associated Press had to send out a “mandatory kill” on a juicy story that turned out to be nothing more than a hoax: a bogus news release supposedly send out by General Electric headlined “GE Responds to Public Outcry – Will Donate Entire $3.2 Billion Tax Refund to Help Offset Cuts and Save American Jobs.”

The AP ran with the story, and was then forced to retract it about half an hour later. An AP story on its own mistake said “the fake release, which was emailed to the AP, included a GE logo and a link to a website designed to look like GE’s website. The AP published a 90-word story based on the release. Thirty-five minutes later, AP withdrew the story and advised its customers that the story was a hoax.” Associated Press business editor Hal Ritter explained “the AP did not follow its own standards in this case for verifying the authenticity of a news release.”

The Associated Press is reporting that an unnamed source identified as a network executive has confirmed that Katie Couric will be leaving the anchor chair at CBS Evening News. This comes as unexpected news to dozens of individuals who have not paid close attention to the many recent public and private comments concerning Couric’s future at CBS News that have given every indication that she is preparing to move on.

If it seems that lately CNN’s looked a lot more international, with correspondents–some you knew and others you didn’t–popping up all over the globe, well you’ve noticed some of the changes put in place by recently-named CNN chief Ken Jautz. “It’s important to stand out by being different,” Jautz tells the Associated Press’ David Bauder. “If much of the cable space is politically oriented and partisan politically oriented, the way to be different is…to talk about different subject matters and approach it differently.”

Many of the Left are furious with President Obama’s to renew trials at Guantanamo Bay, a clear sign that he’s not, as promised, closing the prison. Everyone’s looking for an explanation and, as Rush Limbaugh pointed out, the Associated Press has one. He’s accusing them of laying the blame on “Republican Congress members” in this article. As for Limbaugh himself, he has his own explanation. He explained today that he thinks the White House is keeping Gitmo open because “they’re going to need a place to put all of us.”

Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly is rasing eyebrows with her suggestion that a movement to replace the term “illegal immigrant” with “undocumented immigrant” is analogous to “re-brand(ing) the use of the word rapist to nonconsensual sex partner.”

Although her remark was clearly meant to evoke what some see as an Orwellian manipulation of language, the intense heat given to the mighty #Mooreandme protest over the dismissive treatment of rape allegations on MSNBC’s Countdown could spark a similar surge of outrage over Kelly’s remark. Here’s why I don’t think it should.

No matter what you want to call this blizzard that has crippled the Northeast, the one thing everyone can agree on is that it is ruining the travel plans of many. In fact, for one New York City taxi driver the massive snow has even impacted his movement plans.

If you’re looking for a new truck, you might also be in the market for an assault rifle. That’s the idea behind a new promotion at a truck dealership in Sanford, Florida, which gifts all new truck buyers with a $400 voucher to a local gun shop.

In an article about the impact of the midterm elections on legislative progress, CBS News included a photo that is drawing fire from right-of-center media like Newsbusters, calling it “racist.” The photo depicts the legislative divide with a photoshopped image that bisects the President’s face, with a darker skin tone on the left and a lighter one on the right, flanked by corresponding Congressional leaders.

While it’s hard to imagine that the photo, attributed to the Associated Press and CBS, escaped the notice of any number of editors, it is equally bemusing to contemplate where Newsbusters places its outrage. After the jump, exclusive reaction from CBS.

National Journal, a publication most well-known among wonky political insiders, wants to be the publication that starts and dominates the national political conversation. Can they do it?

The last place you’d expect a healthy rumble between the media and a high profile critic is at a meeting of religion journalists. But a speech by high-profile Catholic Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Denver at the Religion Newswriters Association meeting on his home turf turned into an opportunity for Chaput to air his grievances with the press and journalists–especially the New York Times’ Laurie Goodstein–who challenge Chaput on how he treats the media.

According to an exclusive Media Matters report, former White House Correspondents Association President Ed Chen is speaking out over the WHCA’s decision to move Fox News to the front row of the Brady Briefing Room, calling it “a travesty.”

However, there are several mis-characterizations in Media Matters’ report, and the WHCA is standing by its decision.

In a recent interview, Michael Hastings, author of the Rolling Stone article that led to the ousting of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, denied claims he broke any pre-arranged ground rules for his story, and added that he had another military embed in Afghanistan. The Pentagon, however, is denying him an embed assignment, citing trust problems.

Seventy-nine days later, though the BP Oil Disaster is still raging, the energy giant’s new July 27 timeline has given some a cause for optimism. But a new Associated Press investigation shows we might have more problems to worry about: 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico run the risk of “leaking even more crude into water already tainted by the massive BP spill.”