This week, late on Tuesday night, Reliable Sources host and Daily Beast contributor Howard Kurtz issued a correction for an interview he conducted with Rep. Darrell Issa for a story titled “Darrell Issa: The GOP’s New Top Cop,” published back in November.

As it turns out, Kurtz hadn’t spoken with Rep. Issa at all but, rather, with spokesperson Kurt Bardella.

The Daily Beast‘s Howard Kurtz has experience exposing MSNBC’s dirty laundry and he’s at again with a new column on the “surprise star of its liberal lineup” – Ed Schultz. Although Kurtz accurately reflects that the ratings of The Ed Show are dwarfed by Fox News‘ Special Report With Bret Baier, he still considers Schultz to be “Rush Limbaugh‘s TV Nemesis.” Although Rush would dispute Schultz is in the same league as him, with profile-raising pieces like this and with increasingly critical commentaries of President Obama, Schultz’s stock at MSNBC is certainly rising.

As Republicans in Congress work to earn a legislative victory in keeping the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy as well as the middle class, Democrats are up in arms over comments from former Bush Communications Director Dan Bartlett gloating over the tax legislation, calling it a “trap” and admitting that watching Democrats fall into it “does feel pretty good, to tell you the truth.”

The evolution of news media in light of personalized, instant-gratification social networking sites like Twitter has the landscape evolving at a rapidfire pace. For some in the media, this is a reason to mourn the passing of a more thoughtful time in exchange for the far too easy ability to take cheap shots sans editors and regret it in the morning. But some journalists, like those on the Fox News Watch panel, find the newfound honesty refreshing in a stale industry.

In the Daily Beast this morning, contributor Reza Aslan has a piece examining the troubling situation of Christian Iraqis — and charges that he says Hillary Clinton is aware of the situation but unwilling to take action to stop it. Aslan charges that “A full-scale genocide is under way in Iraq: a well-planned, well-financed, deliberate plot to cleanse the country of its Christian citizens,” and that both the US and Iraqi governments refuse to do anything about it.

On CNN’s Reliable Sources today, host Howard Kurtz landed a double interview with Sidney Harman and Kurtz’s Daily Beast boss Tina Brown to talk about the just-announced merger of Brown’s Daily Beast website and Harman’s struggling Newsweek magazine. The three discussed how the merger will work, Brown’s plans to hire more women at Newsweek, and how the print and online sides of the new company will mesh together.

Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, and Linda McMahon ran three very expensive campaigns for office — but despite the massive amounts of money poured into their campaigns, none successfully won their race. Together, their campaigns cost a whopping combined total of $217 million — and a large chunk of each of their campaigns was self-financed. In the Daily Beast today, Gail Sheehy runs the numbers to explore what else could have been done with $217 million.

Tonight was only Keith Olbermann‘s second show back from “exile,” and, while he seemed to have taken his temporary suspension with an air of whimsy last night, today he tackled the subject of journalists and political donations seriously, inviting two fellow journalists– the Daily Beast‘s Howard Kurtz and The Nation’s Greg Mitchell– to give their takes, since “I think you may have heard of my point of view here.”

Back in 2008 the media world spent a lot of time talking about how much the media world loved Barack Obama. For a while there it seemed like Candidate Obama was the only cover subject in which anyone was interested and that along with all the other change the nation was encouraged to believe in, Obama might single-handedly save the print industry. Oh what a difference two years makes. Sort of.

A month ago, New York Post columnist Keith J. Kelly reported that Tina Brown, magazine editor extraordinaire and Daily Beast founder, was in talks to become Newsweek‘s new editor-in-chief. According to Kelly, she’d be able to make the move without abandoning her beloved website; supposedly, The Daily Beast would be combined with Newsweek‘s online operations, forming one giant super-site.

Alas, the merger wasn’t meant to be.

Julian Assange is in serious trouble. The Wikileaks figurehead seems to be fighting tooth and nail to keep his job. “Anonymous inside sources” are suggesting there’s mutiny on the Wikileaks ship, and at the forefront of this opposition is Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir, who calls Assange a “good friend” but has encouraged him to step aside. So, who is she?

This is not something you’ll likely hear a lot of people in the media say. Rachel Maddow says she held off covering the Lower Manhattan mosque story because she thought that by doing so she would merely be “playing right into the hands of the people who ginned this up.” Three guesses who those people might be.

Andrew Sullivan’s blog at The Atlantic is adding a major name to the masthead with news that Conor Friedersdorf is joining the blog as a “senior editor.” In addition to Friedersdorf, Sullivan is adding a new staffer–Zoe Pollock–to focus on behinds-the-scene work and to some “underblogging.”

Fox News reporter Carl Cameron sold out his own network to a DailyKos blogger. That’s what a Daily Beast contributor would have you believe. In a story posted yesterday a report claimed that Cameron said that FNC had organized the Tea Party and overreached in their influence over the Sherrod scandal. Mediaite exclusively spoke to Cameron, who explained that much of what was reported was taken out of context.

Gerald Posner has succeeded where many others have failed: finding a new job in a bad economy. Earlier this year, the former Daily Beast chief investigative reporter resigned amidst a massive plagiarism scandal. Five months on, Posner seems to be settling into his new job as the Karzai family lawyer. No, we’re not kidding

A few days ago, federal officials arrested the 22 year old Army intelligence analyst who allegedly leaked the infamous Collateral Murder video to the website WikiLeaks. Philip Shenon of the The Daily Beast is now reporting, though, that the government is “desperately” seeking WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to persuade him not to publish 260,000 classified cables that the analyst, SPC Bradley Manning, also leaked.

You have to give Daily Beast contributor Simon Doonan credit for something: no one has come up with this solution yet. Doonan, bored of watching the “bumbling straight white dudes” of BP come up empty-handed while the Gulf of Mexico’s ecosystem bleeds away, has suggested deploying drag queens– namely, the late performer Dorian Corey– to plug the oil well.

This a photo of GQ Washington Correspondent Ana Marie Cox and top Obama advisor David Axelrod. Yes, Axelrod is important, but let’s focus for a moment on Cox, who has indelibly made a mark on the White House Correspondents Dinner in one crucial way: It was she who dubbed it “NerdProm.”

Norris Church Mailer, the wife of the late Norman Mailer, has a new memoir out today entitled A Ticket to the Circus. The book details her relationship with the famous author from the point she met him when she was 26 and he was 52 through his death. However, Church Mailer or her publishers have chosen to focus on another, briefer relationship that the author delves into in order to sell the book. In an excerpt published in the Daily Beast yesterday, the memoir depicts what it’s like to date none other than a 27 year old Bill Clinton.

We previously chronicled the accuracy of the Daily Beast’s attempts to rank the most influential liberals and conservatives in American media. Over the weekend the online magazine attempted a similar endeavor with the “Top 25 Centrist Columnists and Commentators,” and it’s about as flawed as the entire concept of centrism.

Luke Russert was paneling with David Shuster earlier today, in what may have been the most shameless (and yes, sadly, entertaining) moments on cable news thus far this week. Taking off on a Daily Beast feature ranking the top political sex scandals in recent history, Russert took a decidedly sporty style to analyzing what makes a political sex scandal interesting and who has suffered the most political shame: Democrats or Republicans. Video of the sophomoric and salacious video below:

It’s a title you would expect to go to something written on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page, but the good folks at The Daily Beast have won the gold with this gem from Gina Piccalo, who suggests that the 1980s are a completely forgettable decade in the history of modern cinema. Here’s why Piccalo couldn’t be more wrong.

You’d expect James Carville to be the one that would use Karl Rove‘s new memoir as an excuse to remind everyone of a time he won an obscure, near-impossible political campaign, but it’s his lifelong sidekick Paul Begala who is doing the honors this time around. Begala published his very best attempt at a fair review of Courage and Consequence at The Daily Beast today and, unsurprisingly, it’s a little biased.

After releasing a pretty inclusive list of the Top 25 Right-Wing Journalists in America, Daily Beast columnist Tunku Varadarajan took on the other half of the aisle, putting together a list of the most powerful and influential American liberals.

The evil pace of the Internet is apparently driving writers to plagiarize. Yesterday, New York Times business reporter Zachery Kouwe resigned from the New York Times after it was revealed his posts contained passages lifted from the WSJ. Intentional or just word exhaustion?