“Does anyone happen to know what this bizarre creature is- just found in our pantry- & how one can encourage it to exit?” he tweeted, attaching a video of the little and long-snouted thing, lowly hissing in the corner.

Twitter was quick to identified the little guy as an opossum, and advised Greenwald to lead him peacefully back out into the wild with a trail of cat food. Ever-wise, their plan worked: cat food and “creature are gone,” and Greenwald is back to business.

Check out the thing for yourself:

H/T Huffington Post

The story behind the dangerous leak is a complex he-said, she-said beginning with two of Wikileaks’ most high-profile public wars: against former Julian Assange right-hand man Daniel Domscheit-Berg and the editors of The Guardian. After one of the latter, investigations editor David Leigh, published a password in his book on Assange and Wikileaks, the latter accused him of putting the files in peril, to which The Guardian responded that the location of the files rendered the password useless until someone put the files online, such that the password was “a meaningless piece of information to anyone except the person(s) who created the database.” It didn’t take long for whoever is bored enough under house arrest to spend all day on Twitter the keeper of the Wikileaks Twitter account to call The Guardian a “disgrace,” and went a bit further in an official statement:

In its statement, WikiLeaks took credit for helping to spark the Arab Spring with its publication, in partnership with the French newspaper Le Monde, of scathing cables from the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia about the now deposed Tunsian President Zine el Abidin Ben Ali and his family. It also said its quick publication of cables revealing Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman’s ties to the CIA helped scuttle the possibility he would replace deposed President Hosni Mubarak.

Now that the entire file dump is online and Wikileaks is on board with the release, that title and other colorful variations are applying more to the whole ordeal than just The Guardian, which has also now reported that Australia may arrest the already-arrested Assange over the ordeal. Over at Salon, vocal Wikileaks supporter Glenn Greenwald has declared the leak “a disaster from every angle;” Wikileaks collaborator Der Spiegel preferred to deem it a “catastrophe.” It’s not hard to see why. Both Wikileaks and The Guardian are implicated in a mess that has a high probability of costing lives, the former justifying to its opponents their reputation for being reckless and untrustworthy; the latter doing the same for its shrewdness and callousness to their same.

For all intents and purposes, a breach of this magnitude would have been A1 above the fold at almost every media outlet last year, when Assange was being considered for Time‘s Person of the Year distinction and the ongoing Bradley Manning saga made it routinely into primetime. But this time around, the media seems surprisingly mum at the firestorm, at least domestically. Many will argue that the blame for this rests with the media itself for paying attention to other matters, or simply being overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of 250,000 diplomatic cables to weed through. It would be more accurate, however, to place the responsibility on the head of the operation, Assange– not just for completely losing control of his own files and organization, but for failing to adapt to the rapidly evolving American media climate in a way that would have added permanence to his importance and, thus, that of his files.

The sort of readers that have followed Wikileaks’ work closely enough to have read much of their raw material as it was released are not those to whom Assange, had he an astute media strategy, should have catered. It is the average American news consumer that could potentially drive this story, for which a barrage of raw material, no matter how jarring, is not attractive enough a bauble in mid-2011 as it was when carefully curated for them during the comparatively tranquil news world of early 2010.

“Collateral Murder,” the video depicting American troops shooting down at a group of Iraqi insurgents (and killing a Reuters photographer), was released in April 2010– a month during which the biggest news topic would become the BP Oil Spill and becoming fluent in the political topics of the time required significantly less time and effort than it would today. Those who follow politics religiously may have a hard time comprehending this, but for the average American that has their home, family, job (or lack thereof), hobbies and interests to balance, keeping up with a presidential primary that requires the memorization of dozens of names and an overwhelming number of policy choices demands a level of dedication and concentration absent from American politics since, well, the last primary season– and even that one began much sooner, and whittled down to two candidates before things got overwhelming for the mainstream.

The new market was simply far less saturated at the peak of Wikileaks’ influence than it is today, and Assange has not adapted his operation to the new, far more competitive climate. Couple the presidential race with economic woes, natural disasters, revolutions the world over, and every transparently meaningless lovers’ spat the President and House Speaker John Boehner choose to torture Americans with, and Julian Assange starts looking more and more like the Sarah Palin of news cycle topics: he waited so long on giving Americans what he had to offer that Americans no longer have time to bother.

Shockingly, Hayes is less than delighted with the positive reception and attention Cheney’s book has been getting, particularly since Cheney has been telling interviewers that, yes, he still supports waterboarding and other forms of what he calls “enhanced methods of interrogation.” Hayes shared that he initially thought “everyone” at Simon & Schuster, the book’s publisher, should be deeply ashamed of themselves, although he admits he’s since refined and refocused his considerable ire. What troubles him most, he shares, is “the fact that he has managed to escape not only legal sanction for advocating and overseeing the implementation of the war crime that is torture, but that he has appeared to manage to escape social sanction as well.”

He continued:

When powerful people are not held to account, when they have no worry about their reputations, it creates a moral hazard, not unlike what’s happened with the banks. Anti-social behavior is awarded, failure is also awarded, trapped inside a system of perverse incentives.

Greenwald joined Hayes, weighing in on how Cheney’s assessment that his book will have “heads exploding” all over Washington (So. Many. Jokes…) works to reduce valid moral outrage about the beliefs espoused within the book to mere, expected “partisan anger.” This works to essentially downplay if not ignore, as Greenwald listed, the various questionable-to-illegal actions Cheney has promoted and advocated over the years, including enhanced interrogation / torture, the war in Iraq, and increased access to people’s personal information (or, if you like, the implementation of “a domestic spying program”).

Greenwald expressed concern over the media (and, perhaps, the public’s) apparent refusal to treat Cheney and other former Bush officials as war criminals, choosing instead to hold them up as celebrities.

The two also criticized the Obama administration’s policy of “looking forward” rather than prosecuting Bush officials like Cheney, which, as they see it, essentially gives high-powered officials in the U.S. a carte blanche to break the law without repercussion.

Oh and about that giant Brazilian Jesus sculpture hovering just beyond Greenwald’s left shoulder throughout the segment. Yeah, even he was like “Ok…”

Have a look at their discussion, via MSNBC:

The op-ed, titled “What Crown Heights taught me: Al Sharpton reflects on race, rhetoric and rage that split the city,” explores the mistakes Sharpton feels he made during the early 1990′s race riots in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Joining the protests after receiving a phone call from the father of a 7-year-old boy who had been killed, Sharpton admits that when he got to Crown Heights, he “did not know the full volatility of the situation.” And as the father described to him the violence that at stemmed from his son’s death, Sharpton says he “was outraged; I was also saddened and wanted to comfort him and the others who suffered.”

“My emotions told me to be angry,” he writes, of the violence he witnessed and even himself endured, but, “My training told me otherwise.”

He goes on to wonder if certain remarks he made while acting as a sort of de facto leader were worth it, suggesting that “Our language and tone sometimes exacerbated tensions and played to the extremists rather than raising the issue of the value of this young man whom we were so concerned about.” And twenty years later, he writes, “I have grown.” He would have taken a more measured tone, he says, expressing “more clearly…the precious value of” lives lost on both sides of the racial divide.

Though the piece aims to be an earnest retrospection on a time that, even twenty years past, still makes little sense, it will likely be taken by Sharpton’s supporters as an act of healthy reflection rather than an admittance of failure. His hedging towards a more measured tone, however, does speak in part to the concerns of Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, who has wondered if Sharpton’s avowed new outlook might be dangerously and unethically tame for someone now claiming to be a journalist. Greenwald is right to suggest that this newfound unwillingness to be outwardly critical is worrisome, but Sharpton’s proven ability to look back at his own changing standpoints might end up proving refreshing, especially in a cable news environment not often friendly to such back-stepping.

It occurred during and interview with Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, a WikiLeaks supporter who Barr’s security firm attempted to intimidate. Towards the end of the interview, as Greenwald was talking, attentive viewers or people with really nice HD sets could notice that the image of a Guy Fawkes mask flashed over Colbert’s face for less than a second. The Guy Fawkes look is, of course, one that has been used as a symbol for Anonymous as a reference to the book and movie V for Vendetta. (Memo to Glenn Beck: Wael Ghonim also claimed V for Vendetta as an inspiration. Episode linking the uprisings to Anonymous, please).

Colbert has always been good at working with influential online communities. Just look at his love for Reddit. If Anonymous is a hornet’s nest, then this subliminal message could best be described as putting a big sign up saying “All hornets welcome!”

Check out the interview from Comedy Central below. The subliminal mask image occurs around the 3:20 point.

Central to that article’s premise is the notion that John Tyner, the originator of the “junk-touch” protest heard ’round the world, is not what he appears to be. Greenwald rightly labels the article a “smear” (an opinion shared by Nation reporter Jeremy Scahill), prompting a lily-livered response from Ames and Levine, and widespread refudiation from fellow liberals.

Aside from being a fun bit of grab-some-popcorn internet entertainment, this feudlet is a handy object lesson in policing your own side.

In the original Nation piece, the authors establish their premise, that Koch Brothers-style Astroturfers are “behind the TSA scandal,” using little more than their Spidey sense and some “scare quotes:”

Does anyone else sense something strange is going on with the apparently spontaneous revolt against the TSA? This past week, the media turned an “ordinary guy,” 31-year-old Californian John Tyner, who blogs under the pseudonym “Johnny Edge,” into a national hero after he posted a cell phone video of himself defending his liberty against the evil government oppressors in charge of airport security.

As Greenwald points out, Ames and Levine toss several paragraphs worth of verbal field greens together, but the word salad just doesn’t go with the rest of the meal, which is, itself, a pretty thin gruel of “ties” and “trails” that, absent a connection to Tyner, reveals nothing more than natural opportunism. The folks looking to use this crisis to privatize airport security (or to normalize racial/ethnic/religious profiling) aren’t behind this scandal, they’re on top of it, riding it for all it’s worth.

This is important to note because, in their response to Greenwald, Ames and Levine sort of concede that their treatment of Tyner might maybe potentially possibly have been a smidge unfair, but the rest of their article was rock-solid:

In retrospect, our article was less than clear about Tyner’s lack of Astroturf affiliations, and we regret in particular including extraneous details from the Union-Tribunearticle about Tyner’s past—that he went to a private Christian school and lived in a Republican community near a Marine base—because it distracted readers like Greenwald from the article’s main findings.

We believe that Tyner is in all likelihood innocent in his motives, but our larger point is that his discourse and the movement that has embraced it is far from innocent. In focusing entirely on our characterization of Tyner, Greenwald ignores the larger thrust of our argument and the vast majority of the evidence assembled in the piece, leaving a distorted impression of it.

Actually, no. The “larger thrust” of the article was that Astroturfers are behind the TSA scandal. Without the yellow assertions about Tyner, there is no larger thrust, the Astroturfers are just along for the ride.

Ames and Levine then resort to the time-honored tactic of the journalist who’s losing an argument: “Why didn’t you call me?”

How did Greenwald get to this conclusion? We’re stumped—he never tried contacting either one of us before publishing his story. That’s one big reason why we’re both so disappointed—because that’s what journalists do: we call our subjects to confirm, or not confirm, evidence and suspicions that we have compiled.

There’s just one problem with this: Greenwald was writing a critique of a news story, not a news story of his own. There shouldn’t be any reason for him to call a journalist. It’s the journalist’s responsibility to make sure everything is on the page. It reminds me of those drug commercials that tell you to “ask your doctor” about their product. If the drug is any good, I shouldn’t have to ask him, unless he’s a really shitty doctor. Greenwald puts it this way:

As I have told the multiple establishment journalists over the years who raised the same “you-didn’t-call-me-first” complaint:  with media criticism, what a journalist claims after the fact about what they published doesn’t really matter; what matters is the piece they published to the world.  That stands on its own.  And that’s what I assessed and critiqued.

What’s heartening about this episode is the willingness of The Nation’s fellow liberals to police their own side:

In addition to their own Nation colleague Jeremy Scahill (who denounced it as a “shameful smear“), Mother Jones‘ News Editor Daniel Schulman wrote:  ”This Nation story isjournalistic malpractice of the worst kind“; The American Prospect‘s Scott Lemieux, on his blog, called it “Liberal McCarthyism” and an “embarrassment“; and the usually rhetorically restrained Ezra Klein condemned it as a “hit piece” which I had “rightfully hammered.”

I often encounter resistance from liberals when criticizing one of their sacred cows, but this feud illustrates the importance of doing just that. Liberals take pride in being the smart, reasonable appreciators-of-nuance that must save the knuckle-dragging Fox Nation from itself. If you’re going to sit on a high horse, you’d better be able to handle the altitude, and hold yourself to a standard that’s orders of magnitude greater than that of your opponent.

The debate was so compelling, host Joe Scarborough called an audible, telling his control room not to go to break.

Greenwald argues that the midterms could as easily be spun as a repudiation of conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats, while O’Donnell seems to view them as a (perhaps unpleasant) linchpin of any Democratic majority.

Greenwald makes some excellent points about the ways in which political pundits draw conclusions, pointing out the flaws in example after example, but his “Blue Dog” analogy clouds the issue somewhat. As he explained in his column, that conclusion is equally flawed, but in bringing it up, he allows O’Donnell to take him into the weeds rebutting it.

The one point at which I agree with O’Donnell is his statement that “I’m not a liberal who’s so afraid of the word that I had to change my name to ‘progressive.’ ”

The re-branding of “liberals” into “progressives” has always aggravated me, as it seems to validate the notion that “Liberal” is somehow a dirty word. However, I don’t know that Greenwald has ever done this, and if he has, it’s probably an adoption of the now-popular parlance, and not an indictment of liberalism.

Ambinder was apparently pushed to run the story two days early after Mike Rogers, whose track record on outing conservative politicians is very good, reported on Blogactive that Ambinder was preparing a story that would confirm that Mehlman was gay and the story was slated for Friday or early next week.

Within an hour of Rogers going public with his scoop that Mehlman was about to come out as gay, Ambinder posted his story.

It’s a rumor that has circulated around Washington, D.C., for years.  Mehlman–who was recently in the news for buying a condo in New York City’s very-gay Chelsea neighborhood–has previously denied he’s gay but now he tells Ambinder that he “arrived at this conclusion about his identity fairly recently” and “anticipated that questions would be asked about his participation in a late-September fundraiser for the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER), the group that supported the legal challenge to California’s ballot initiative against gay marriage, Proposition 8.”

Here’s what Rogers had to say about the news.

If I had to say what one thing really moved me to create this site it would be the 2004 reelection campaign of George W. Bush, the most homophobic national campaign in history. That campaign was run by one of the nation’s worst closeted individuals, Ken Mehlman.

If I first started writing about Mehlman in 2004, why is Ken getting his Roy Cohn Award now? Because I am able to report – here for the first time — that Ken Mehlman, the former Chairman of the Republican National Committee is set to come out of the closet in a column by Atlantic writer Marc Ambinder Friday morning or early next week. This will be on the heels of him being included in fundraising letter supporting marriage equality.

In 2006, Mehlman’s sexual orientation led to an uncomfortable moment for CNN after they edited a transcript and a video that featured Bill Maher outing Mehlman on Larry King Live. That story was later told in the documentary Outrage, which featured Rogers and his work to “out” closeted  gay conservatives who work against the LGBT community.

Ambinder seems like a natural to break the Mehlman story.  In 2006, he wrote about the challenges that Mark Foley scandal created for gay Republicans, including the lavender mafia that surrounded Foley and reached into the Republican establishment. A well-connected openly gay reporter, Ambinder would have the connections inside the web of gay Republicans to convince Mehlman to give him an exclusive.

According to the story, Mehlman and Ambinder have been talking for a number of years about Mehlman coming out and his views on gay issues.

A story about Mehlman, who was instrumental in GOP successes during his reign at the RNC, is definitely an interesting one although Mehlman is no longer a player inside the party. So does it matter if someone who is now largely out of power is outed as gay?

Rogers would argue that it does matter because it shows the alleged hypocrisy of closeted gays inside political movements that work against openly gay people.  It’s also a profoundly sad story, in many ways, given the lengths Mehlman has gone to in saying he isn’t gay.

Mehlman acknowledges that if he had publicly declared his sexuality sooner, he might have played a role in keeping the party from pushing an anti-gay agenda.

“It’s a legitimate question and one I understand,” Mehlman said. “I can’t change the fact that I wasn’t in this place personally when I was in politics, and I genuinely regret that. It was very hard, personally.” He asks of those who doubt his sincerity: “If they can’t offer support, at least offer understanding.

“”What I do regret, and think a lot about, is that one of the things I talked a lot about in politics was how I tried to expand the party into neighborhoods where the message wasn’t always heard. I didn’t do this in the gay community at all.”

Reaction to the news has been mixed. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald, who is openly gay, tweeted: “Having trouble deciding if reading that Ken Mehlman self-justification produces more disgust or pity – I guess those two sentiments overlap.” Joe Jervis at the influential JoeMyGod is having none of it, calling Mehlman a “quisling,” and using some salty language to show his disgust.

John Aravosis at AmericaBlog refused to pile-on:

I know a lot of people will want to criticize him for heading up the GOP as a closeted gay man. He says he only recently came to terms with being gay. I suspect he always knew he was gay, but recently came to terms with accepting it, and embracing it. And good for him. He’s now doing the right thing, helping support marriage equality. I’m not going to fault him for that. Coming out is a horrendously difficult and complicated thing. It’s not rational.

You will likely recall that last month Maddow accused Fox News of ginning up the Shirley Sherrod tape debacle in an effort to “scare white people” and as a result Maddow thinks between that and ACORN and Van Jones and the Black Panthers we should be “familiar with the formula.” Says Maddow:

What’s worth noting about all of these different ‘scare white people’ stories is that they’re not really actual news stories. No real news organizations started running with this story as actual news. The best ‘scare white people’ stories are invented out of whole cloth, from inside the conservative media world so they can be the just right kind of scary, in just the right kind of way, in order to drive the just right political consequences. So ultimately if the conservative media drives this to make it big enough than normal news organizations pick it up too, sometimes because they’re guilted into it by conservatives. But no non-Fox News, non-conservative media outlet ever starts these things.

And she has a point. That has been the (successful) trajectory of most of these stories. And this mosque story was not news until the New York Post and subsequently Sarah Palin stoked it up and media outlets hungry for headlines jumped in. However, unlike some past examples Maddow offers, this one seems to have taken on a very real, possibly dangerous life of its own. As Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald noted, this ain’t no August news story anymore: “The Park51 conflict is driven by, and reflective of, a pervasive animosity toward a religious minority — one that has serious implications for how we conduct ourselves both domestically and internationally.”

On Sunday Maureen Dowd said “the unbottled anger and suspicion concerning ground zero show that many Americans haven’t flushed the trauma of 9/11 out of their systems.” And I think she also may have a point, some of the “protests” in Manhattan this weekend weirdly felt like a long-delayed reaction to 9/11.

Maddow, meanwhile, worries that without any “adults around to hit the brakes” the far, far right wing of the conservative party is now being allowed to drive the national conversation on Islam. Watch the segment below.

The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard has released a damning new report which, in the words of Glenn Greenwald “provides the latest evidence of how thoroughly devoted the American establishment media is to amplifying and serving (rather than checking) government officials.” It is not pretty.

From the early 1930′s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture: The New York Times characterized it thus in 81.5% (44 of 54) of articles on the subject and The Los Angeles Times did so in 96.3% of articles (26 of 27). By contrast, from 2002-2008, the studied newspapers almost never referred to waterboarding as torture. The New York Times called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles (1.4%). The Los Angeles Times did so in 4.8% of articles (3 of 63). The Wall Street Journal characterized the practice as torture in just 1 of 63 articles (1.6%). USA Today never called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture.

Essentially once America started doing it, the American free press stopped calling it torture. Jason Linkins wonders if the press was concerned about losing access. Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News says:

The study proves scientifically something we’ve been talking about here at Attytood since Day One, about the tragic consequences of the elevation of an unnatural notion of objectivity in which newspapers abandoned any core human values — even when it comes to something as clear cut as torture — to give equal moral weight to both sides of an not-so-debatable issue.

It’s an observation which somewhat tenuously brings to mind the Dave Weigel flap from last week — Weigel was fired over concerns regarding objectivity…as in his journalistic objectivity had been compromised by the leaked Journalist emails since presumably reporters are not allowed to hold opinions on anything. It also brings to mind much of the uproar over Michael Hastings‘ McChrystal Rolling Stone article; Hastings was accused by Lara Logan of essentially being unpatriotic when he reported remarks made by McChrystal that resulted in his firing. The sense from Logan at least, was that as a responsible reporter Hastings should have protected McChrystal from himself.

Will Bunch thinks the report highlights a larger problem, namely the country has lost it’s ability to “distinguish right from wrong on its most basic level, because of our need to filter everything through some kind of bogus political prism.”

As I said, the report is not pretty. I have to wonder, however how or if any of this might have been altered had social media played a large role in journalism in 2004. I don’t want to afford Twitter or Facebook more power than they deserve, but one main conclusion to be drawn from this report is that language still matters. A lot. And while many media figures bemoan the cacophony that has accompanied the deluge of people contributing to the conversation via all these new online platforms one thing it has unquestionably accomplished is that it has taken the power of language out of the hands of the few and handed it over to the hand of the many. Something this report makes clear is not a bad thing.

You can read the full report in PDF here.

Now he’s leaving The Daily Kos after reading a “diary trashing first me and my colleague Rachel.”

Olbermann wrote a blog post, presumably his last for awhile, headlined “Check, Please”, as a response to the diary he found and one particular comment that insinuated his criticism came because attacking the President was good for ratings (a pretty strange notion when discussing MSNBC). “It can’t be verified because it’s nonsense, and it wasn’t checked because nobody bothered,” wrote Olbermann. “Unfortunately there’s been a lot of this here lately.”

According to Olbermann, this is symptomatic of a larger issue at the liberal site that he has been a part of for years now, and he’s ready to go his separate way:

You don’t agree with me, fine. You don’t want to watch because you don’t agree with me, fine. But to accuse me, after five years of risking what I have to present the truth as I see it, of staging something for effect, is deeply offensive to me and is an indication of what has happened here.

You want Cheerleaders? Hire the Buffalo Jills. You want diaries with conspiracy theories, go nuts. If you want this site the way it was even a year ago, let me know and I’ll be back.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald tweets, “Not saying this isn’t thin-skinned – it is – but what he’s reacting to is very common.”

It’s interesting to see Olbermann react strongly to the commenters who, almost universally, have been supporter of his show and his network. As he sticks with his ‘non-Obama-cheerleader’ position, it’s now clear there are some in this country far farther left than he is. It is a testament to the polarized American public that Olbermann would be on the outs with the Daily Kos and his liberal Twitter followers.

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The controversy centers around a “beach party” held at the Bidens’ home at the Naval Observatory where journalists were invited to spend the day with White House staff and the Bidens for a kid-friendly event.  It’s the kind of event that happens a few times a year in a company town like Washington, D.C., where the press and the administration hang out for a casual break from the grind.

For Glenn Greenwald, however, the events occur too often and show too cozy a relationship between the media and the administration.  Responding to a post  by Marc Ambinder, Salon’s Greenwald said the spectacle of journalists chatting with White House officials at a party “helpfully reveals what our nation’s leading “journalists” really are:  desperate worshipers of political power who are far more eager to be part of it and to serve it than to act as adversarial checks against it — and who, in fact, are Royal Court Spokespeople regardless of which monarch is ruling.”

Ouch.

While not directly mentioning Greenwald, The Atlantic’s Ambinder anticipated the criticism acknowledging “these aren’t ordinary afternoons, and the very idea that a journalist would accept a slice of watermelon from the Vice President strikes many a critical activist as criminally insane — an example of the cozy relationships that exist between journalists and their sources, an example of how the oppositional role of the press has been compromised by people in power.”

Ambinder defended his decision to go by saying “a bunch of really good, hardened, news-breaking, interest-accountable holding reporters are in fact able to share more comfortable moments with people they cover.”

Progressive commentators piled-on the beach party with Daily Kos‘s Susan Gardner complaining journalists were “a class totally unworthy of the First Amendment protections the Founders created for them. America deserves so much better.” Matthew Yglesias chimed in that reporters can get “captured by their sources” while officials become “unduly concerned about the press coverage they get.” Maybe Yglesias’ bosses at Obama’s favorite think tank and farm team for the administration–the Center for American Progress–can mention that next time they are invited to a State Dinner.

It is a perennial question that arises every year during press dinner season–capped by the White House Correspondents Dinner–where people wonder whether reporters should be yukking it up with the president and members of Congress in the evening after being adversaries during the day. The New York Times–whose staff was at the Biden beach party–does not participate in nerd prom.

(Full disclosure.  During the Bush administration, I attended four “nerd proms” and took mid-level members of the administration at least twice.  I met Justice Antonin Scalia once and learned that my guest had a weakness for the Food Network. Alas, I’ve never been to the White House or the Vice President’s House, except on a tour.)

So who wins between Ambinder and Greenwald?  Arguably, it’s a draw.

Greenwald is rightly concerned that these kinds of cozy events look bad for people who think journalists shouldn’t be so friendly with the people they cover.  It does give the appearance of bias and impropriety and appearances are as big a worry as actual bias and impropriety.  In addition, Greenwald is right to be concerned that journalists can become so enamored by the attention from D.C.’s ruling class that they may fail to ask the tough questions for fear of not getting an invite to the next hoedown.

On the other hand, the idea that Ambinder or any reporter is suddenly going to say nice things about Emanuel and Biden just because they noshed hot dogs together on a hot, June Saturday doesn’t really understand how journalism or Washington works. Just as attorneys can be civil with opposing counsel, journalists can be civil with the people they cover without it meaning they won’t ask hard questions the next day.

Of course, relationships can become too close and journalists can be too friendly with the people they cover.  But a single beach party with the kids or an evening in tuxedos and evening dresses with administration officials isn’t likely going to compromise the adversarial relationship between journalists and the people they cover.

Would journalists be better off if they never had friendly interactions with the people they cover? If Ambinder runs into Emanuel at Ben’s Chili Bowl, is he supposed to turn on his heels lest it be viewed as too friendly an interaction? Where exactly is the line?

That is…now. But if you think back to the 2008 campaign, you’ll realize that this whole caring-about-the-Supreme-Court thing was sorta absent. Bush had appointed Justices Roberts and Alito, and swung the court decisively to the right. Whoever became president would have the chance to do the same. Conventional wisdom was that the next president would probably appoint two or three new judges, changing the face of the court significantly in the short term, with significant ramifications for the long term.

Right now we can all agree: That’s a huge, big deal. But back then, you could not have gotten anyone to care about it if you’d written it in lipstick on a pig. From my recent piece on AOL News:

I wondered about that in the spring of ’08, when McCain quietly made a speech vaguely against “activist judges” but filled with code words strategically aimed for the right wing. I wondered about that in the summer when Sarah Palin was sprung on an unsuspecting world as the Republican vice-presidential nominee and a pro-life icon. And I wondered about it in the fall when Katie Couric flummoxed Palin by asking her to name a specific Supreme Court case with which she disagreed. (She couldn’t.)

While there was nonstop coverage of Palin (which actually hasn’t stopped since), the discussion never veered into questions of how Roe v. Wade could be overturned by a McCain court or even why specific Supreme Court cases might be important. Even when Dahlia Lithwick — a top thinker and go-to on all things SCOTUS — got a Newsweek cover out of it in September ’08, it was less about the court than a tart essay about Sarah Palin (with a sexy-lipstick-themed cover, no less).

It’s not that Lithwick wasn’t writing about the court — that’s her specialty. It’s that outside of that specialty, it just wasn’t a hot topic.

And amazingly, it wasn’t. Jeffrey Toobin had told me in May 2008 that overturning Roe v. Wade, would “not take long if there is another Republican appointee.” But nobody seemed to care. I mean, yes, there were a few articles, obviously, but – we all know the difference. Proportionally, the Court got very little ink. Take a look at Politico’s archives from that time, or even Glenn Greenwald‘s – there, if you looked for it, but just not the focus.

But when it comes to buzz about the 2008 election, there is only one arbiter that matters: Game Change, by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. There, in the index, was the answer, under “Suprme Court, U.S.”: Four references. I checked them. Three were about how Steve Schmidt had formerly worked on the Roberts and Alito confirmations; one was about Katie Couric’s question to Sarah Palin. “Rezko, Tony” got eight. It’s official: No one cared about the Supreme Court during the 2008 election.

But they do now! So sharpen thee your Kagan headlines. The Supreme Court matters. Maybe it’ll even matter in 2012, too.

Oh sure, NOW you care about the Supreme Court! [AOL News]
Sunday Show Highlights: A Whole Lot Of Kagan Going On [Mediaite]

Related:
Toobin: A McCain Court Could Overturn Roe In “Maybe A Year” [ETP, May 2008]

It is unfair to say that she kicked the military off Harvard’s campus. Harvard did that.

Don’t worry, Will drops a second shoe here. But first, just to be clear about what he means when he says “Harvard did that” let’s skip ahead to Glenn Greenwald, who notes:

This Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell controversy is a complete side show to the real questions that are — that should be asked. Because many universities have as a policy that they don’t allow employers onto campus and use resources to recruit who can’t certify that they refrain from discriminating against some of the university students. And that was the general policy that Dean Kagan applied in that instance. It was a perfectly appropriate thing to do.

So there’s that. But as Will points out, it’s not military policy she’s objecting to, it’s the “law of the land”:

It is as unfair for her to say, as she repeatedly has done, that this is the military policy that she’s objecting to. She’s objecting to the law of the United States, passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic president in 1993. Eighteen currently sitting Democratic senators voted for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, including Harry Reid, John Kerry, Mr. Leahy, who is here today, and no longer a senator, the vice president, Joe Biden.

And that is the sticking point (if there is actually going to be a sticking point). In her move to bar military recruiters Kagan was ostensibly objecting to a what could be considered a non-partisan federal law. I doubt any of this is going to hinder her confirmation much — as a number of people pointed out this Sunday, she can refrain to answer questions on topics she might later have to rule on — but between DADT and Andrew Sullivan it looks likely that we are headed to some sort of national conversation about Gay rights. Video below

Last night Rachel Maddow picked up on the theme wondering whether Elena Kagan might be the Left’s Harriet Miers in so far as, will Obama be able to muster the support from his own party to confirm her. All signs point to no on this, and moreover, as Maddow pointed out Kagan has, shall we say, a tad more experience that Miers did. However, if there were more Glenn Greenwald’s in the party she might have something to worry about. Greenwald told Maddow last night her lack of a paper trail is a huge concern.

“She’s a complete blank slate. She’s somebody who’s managed over the course of the last 20 years to avoid taking an position or expressing an opinion on virtually every substantial political and legal question…she has purposely avoided expressing any opinion.”

Video of the segment below. I suspect this is probably the extent of the shouting we are going to hear over Kagan’s lack of record….even Rudy Giuliani thinks she’s not a bad idea. Meanwhile, Greenwald took issue with some latter parts of Maddow’s show, you can read about it here.

The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday.

And yes, this is a first. According the Glenn Greenwald, while a program that allowed the Joint Chiefs of Staff compile “hit lists” of Americans existed under George W. Bush, it was never implemented. Greenwald finds this new development utterly alarming.

No due process is accorded. No charges or trials are necessary. No evidence is offered, nor any opportunity for him to deny these accusations (which he has done vehemently through his family). None of that.

Instead, in Barack Obama’s America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens — and a death penalty imposed — is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone’s guilt as a Terrorist. He then dispatches his aides to run to America’s newspapers — cowardly hiding behind the shield of anonymity which they’re granted — to proclaim that the Guilty One shall be killed on sight because the Leader has decreed him to be a Terrorist.

American or otherwise, Representative Jane Harman (D-CA) and chairwoman of a House subcommittee on homeland security, the other day called Mr. Awlaki “probably the person, the terrorist, who would be terrorist No. 1 in terms of threat against us.” Video of MSNBC’s report on the decision below.

At CNN, Dana Bash writes a piece for the Political Ticker asking “What’s Next?” The piece reads as if Bash has her arms outstretched in a confused half-shrug, waiting for directions, despite being a series of factual questions. Will Democrats be able to come up with a bill that would drum up Republican support? If they need to use reconciliation, will the bill they draft be eligible for the process (which is only legally able to affect bills involving taxes or the deficit)?

While the journalists at CNN left the event with more questions than answers, the pundits felt their cynicism swell at the idea of such dissonant parties working together. Over at MSNBC, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald sounded off on Morning Joe Today, dissatisfied with the calls for bipartisanship that lead to the summit. “Having the two parties compromise and dilute their positions and pick positions arbitrarily in the middle,” he notes, “for the sake of doing so just to eliminate discord and disharmony and disagreement that’s what strikes me, not only as anti-democratic, but counterproductive,” calling those who demand bipartisanship for its own sake undemocratic. The commentary on Fox News was equally incendiary, with Shepard Smith barely containing his disdain for the entire process almost before the summit was over, calling it “poppycock” and pointing out that the likelihood of any substantive change coming out of the event was low. Outraged, he told South Dakota senator John Thune, “you people up there who are supposed to be representing us are making it perfectly clear you’re gonna sit in your corners with your own talking points and we’re gonna lose. We’re gonna get nothing.” Talking Points Memo compiled the best moments of Smith’s coverage, shown below:

Whether the event was a victory for the President remains to be seen, as there is still time to determine what bill Congress will pass, if any. Ultimately, as much as the health summit was labeled a publicity stunt, the media’s reaction to it shows it did more to make each side more loyal to their cause than to promote public compromise, but the press wasn’t the audience President Obama was trying to court yesterday. If anything, the President got everyone to agree on one thing: the health care summit did little to change anyone’s mind on health care.

The Dealer said that Ellie Light is a nurse from California named Barbara Brooks. Now, their findings include an update at the top stating, “A woman claiming to be Barbara Brooks has now contacted the Plain Dealer and said she is not the letter writer; she claims her ex-husband is running a spoof.” Wait, what?

According to Gawker, Brooks’ ex-husband is Winston Steward:

“I’m not Ellie Light,” she told us. “My husband is. I never told anybody that I was Ellie Light. Winston wrote every single letter. He’s been doing it since he saw that the Gulf War was being fought under false pretenses. I told him from the beginning that he shouldn’t write letters under phony names, but he wanted to get them out there.”
…
“That wasn’t me,” she says. “I don’t know how they got that. Maybe my husband was impersonating me.” As evidence, she cites this clip of her husband calling into Michael Smerconish’s radio show to claim responsibility for the letters. Steward called in and spoke in his regular voice, and neither Smerconish nor any other listener apparently caught on to the fact that he was a man. If he can pretend to be a woman on the radio without really trying, Brooks says, maybe he talked to the Plain Dealer’s reporter, too.

Now, copycats are coming out of the woodwork to claim they’re Ellie Light. And yet, we’re still confused how one letter can get picked up by so many unconnected newspapers. It’s quite an impressive feat and a question falling by the wayside! No matter who “she” is, what is this magical power she has over editors? Maybe a newspaper should just hire her to write op-ed columns.

Oh, and “I broke the dam!”:


(photo)

Because it seems like these are things we already know to be true, evidenced through attacks both executed and thwarted. Here is writer Joby Warrick’s opening two paragraphs, emphasis added:

When al-Qaeda’s No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, called off a planned chemical attack on New York’s subway system in 2003, he offered a chilling explanation: The plot to unleash poison gas on New Yorkers was being dropped for “something better,” Zawahiri said in a message intercepted by U.S. eavesdroppers.

The meaning of Zawahiri’s cryptic threat remains unclear more than six years later, but a new report warns that al-Qaeda has not abandoned its goal of attacking the United States with a chemical, biological or even nuclear weapon.

They are interested in large scale attacks, the reports also says. Are you scared yet?

The dominance of “official sources” or “experts” in newspaper reporting has been consistently criticized for decades (Noam Chomsky‘s Manufacturing Consent comes to mind first) and yet, in practice as the only source for front page news, it’s especially egregious — serving only to conjure fear by beefing up conventional wisdom with a CIA-affiliated report.

Glenn Greenwald, in an update to his post today on Obama’s spending freeze, skewered Warrick’s article and the CIA report with a hearty dose of sarcasm and cynical anger:

Apparently, it’s breaking news — meriting screaming red-alert headlines — that Al Qaeda would like to (“aims to”) acquire WMDs and use them against the U.S. But we should all try to remain a little calm, at least. I’m sure if we just buy some more fighter jets, create some better underground bombs, invade a few more Muslim countries, keep more Muslims imprisoned forever with no charges, give the Pentagon, the CIA and their private contractors a lot more unaccounted-for cash and stay out of their way, expand our domestic spying networks even further through private sector telecom contracts, pour tens of billions of dollars more into the coffers of our Middle East client states, and kill a few more civilians with drones, this problem will be handled. It’s just a matter of making sure we bulk up our military budget — and Look Forward, not Backward to what was done in the past — and we’ll be able to Stay Safe from this Terrorist-WMD menace.

Obviously, threats to the United States’ security are important, and should be known by the newspaper reading public. But let us not forget that the ultimate goal of terrorism is to instill an overwhelming sense of fear and anxiety in an enemy. Why would a news organization aid this process while adding no legitimately new information?

Now, many are wondering what the story is with this prolific letter writer. Hot Air wonders if someone is “doing a little Astroturfing for Obama,” and counts the Light letters in nearly 50 newspapers in 23 different states. Newsbusters used the opportunity to slight newspapers: “It should warm your heart to know that mainstream newspaper editors are so out-of-touch, something can appear in the blogosphere and all of their competitors for three weeks without them even noticing.”

Indeed, if it’s a scam, it is an embarrassment for a host of editors from small newspapers. But there are just as many questions for whatever person or group is behind Ellie Light. Do they really think a Letters to the Editor page still matters in a propaganda campaign? It’s almost quaint.

In the Daily News, Light writes:

Today, the president is being attacked as if he’d promised that our problems would wash off in the morning. He never did. It’s time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work, and that a president can’t just wave a magic wand and fix everything.

Not an entirely different message than can be found in more widely read forums across the internet. So, why plant them?

One Plain Dealer reporter has followed the story deeper than most, emailing with Light to affirm her identity. She was eventually told by Light, “I found that editors were eager to present a point of view on the topic that wasn’t so overheated and angry. Indeed, I think the viewpoint that my letter expressed was less important to the editors than the even and non-emotional tone.” No answers there.

But this morning, a woman claiming to be Ellie Light called the radio show of Philadelphia conservative Michael Smerconish. “I’m only me,” she said, according to Politico. “I need to own up – I did misrepresent my home town in some places,” Light continued. “My letter was pretty darn good. It took a long time to write. I took more interest in honing it than most people take today.”

Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald, meanwhile — far from a conservative blogger himself — wrote one possible explanation, if light is indeed being disingenuous. Noted by Hot Air, the Greenwald post describes a paper written by “one of Obama’s closest confidants,” Cass Sunstein. Greenwald summarizes the contents of the Sunstein paper thusly:

Sunstein advocates that the Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.” He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government).

Keep in mind the above Greenwald piece was written before the Ellie Light situation specifically picked up any notice. A scary proposition and the rest of Greenwald’s take is well worth a read.

Hannity had Michelle Malkin — the Hot Air proprietor — on to discuss the matter last night, where she blamed the Obama administration for “spreading a bogus sense of grassroots support.” Hannity asked if Light might be connected to the Democratic establishment, while Malkin turned the blame mostly to the “gatekeepers” allowing the “astroturfing.” See the whole clip below, and check back for updates on this story as it develops:

Fortunately, some have. Last week, we ran a poll of some of the contenders for Top Site of 2009: Politico topped our editorial list. Find out why, and see the runner-up and the winner of the poll, after the jump:

Winner: Politico

Sure, Politico has a print edition — with a mighty circulation of 32,000 — but its heart beats online. Given its prominence in the online discourse, it’s hard to believe that it launched in January of 2007, but its strategy of frenetic, up-to-the-minute coverage allowed it to quickly dwarf much older, much larger publications in its online footprint.

2009 was a transformative year for Politico: it weathered the inevitable post-election traffic downturn admirably; its executive editor, Jim VandeHei, was named to the Pulitzer Prize Board; and it became profitable (ironically, thanks in large measure to its print edition, according to Michael Wolff). According to paidContent, Politico had revenues of more than $20 million and profits of more than $1 million in 2009 — especially impressive given the relative lack of campaign advertising compared to last year. Politico’s parent company, Allbritton Communications, has certainly taken note: it announced that it would be launching a new DC news site in spring of 2010.

Politico is not without its detractors — Glenn Greenwald has accused it of deliberately puffing up conservative controversies in the name of traffic. But for finding a viable way to cover a topic as potentially poisonous as politics in a more or less nonpartisan way while garnering mainstream acceptance and acclaim, Politico has changed the game in 2009.

Runner-Up: Talking Points Memo

On the flip side of the coin is Talking Points Memo, which makes no bones about its “politically left perspective,” but which has blossomed into a vibrant, ever-expanding empire with hard journalistic bonafides. Last year, TPM was the first blog to ever win a Polk Award, for editor Josh Marshall‘s series on the politically motivated midterm dismissal of Department of Justice attorneys under the Bush Administration.

This year, TPM has continued to blaze a trail: it has reversed the old journalism paradigm by rolling out ambitious plans for expansion, putting out a call to hire a publisher, and — maybe the best mark of crossover success — earned Josh Marshall an invite to an off-the-record luncheon with President Obama, alongside heavyweights from The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN.

Readers’ Choice: Ars Technica

Thanks in large measure to strong Twitter support, Ars Technica dominated our reader poll with 30% of the votes, giving it a solid plurality (compare that to Politico’s 17% and TPM’s 8%). All of which underscores two of Ars’ greatest assets: love and loyalty.

The site has hit its speed bumps in ’09: in April, it reportedly laid off seven of its seventeen editorial staffers, a move which some criticized on management issues following Condé Nast’s acquisition of the site in late 2008. But when it comes to depth, and expertise, Ars still occupies a dominant space in the tech pantheon, and as 2010 beckons, it brings a heft and authority to bear that leaves most blogs in the dust.

After the “hey look, Twitter did a new thing!” factor wore off, there was a backlash against Twitter lists. Early on, Jeff Jarvis astutely pointed out that aside from adding a “listed” stat for accounts, the lists themselves weren’t being used all that much:

As Mediaite pointed out, they take a long time to make correctly, and even then the current infrastructure favors already-big players like corporations and celebrities. The laundry list of problems goes on: they’re easy to game with blogroll-like listing exchanges; there are so many redundant lists as to cancel out the value of any individual one.

The response to the tragic Forth Hood shootings highlights a potentially fruitful approach. Rather than creating broad, evergreen, mostly useless lists like “/blogs/,” a topical list like “/ft-hood/” can emerge in a time of need to filter out the drek that inevitable emerges in a sure-to-be-flooded hashtag like #forthood.

Writing on the same topic, the Columbia Journalism Review notes that many of the best and most authoritative lists covering the tragedy emerged from established media outlets riffing off of other established media outlets. “Journalism and curation—it’s becoming increasingly difficult to determine where the one ends and the other begins,” CJR writes. Lists “represent a new—or, more precisely, a newly facilitated—way for news organizations to collaborate … So The New York Times gets to provide its users real-time information from Waco’s NewsChannel 25—and NewsChannel 25, in turn, gets to have its reporting amplified to the readers of the paper of record. Win and win.”

One problem: what if everyone is getting it wrong? Glenn Greenwald compellingly condemns big media outlets and Twitter alike for putting out tons of inaccurate details about the Fort Hood shooting (were there three gunmen? was the shooter a convert to Islam? did the shooter die? did combat fatigue have something to do with it?) and influencing early news consumers’ views of the situation as a result.

A feed of information can only be as good as its components, but upping the quality of those components can only be good news for its consumers and, by extension, for its curators.

Related: two especially good lists:

NY Times’ curated list

CNN Breaking News’ curated list

Twenty-four hours into the life of the RNC’s new web site and parodies of the Faces of GOP web banner were circulating on the internet. Some are apt, some are funny and naturally, most are offensive.

Political satire blog Wonkette took a lighthearted approach, trying their best to give the nameless faces some semblance of identity. They think they identified civil liberties blogger Glenn Greenwald among the bunch! How’d he get in there?

Savvy coders exploited the RNC’s failure to lock down aspects of their code and created a platform where you can add Michael Steele to any web site. Tiny Michael Steele for you, and tiny Michael Steele for you and tiny Michael Steele for you. Even Mediaite! (h/t HuffPo)

Across the web, countless bloggers and designers are trying their hand at “user generated content,” creating their vision of the Faces of the GOP. Alex P. Keaton, one of the most notable Republicans of the 1980s, stars holding a framed photo of Richard Nixon. Of course, not all are carried out in good taste, as RNC stud Levi Johnston makes a cameo. And others are highly inflammatory. One such spoof features entertainment legend Al Jolson in black face. And then of course, there’s Kanye West — no stranger to internet memes himself.

It’s obvious that the RNC never imagined this many branding mistakes in one project, let alone one day. On top of sloppy mistakes made in rushing the product to the market place, failing to understand the internet, that this product was allowed to see the light of day proves that the RNC remains clueless about the state of their brand.

The RNC is limited in responding to brand hacks. If they try and remove the negative remixes they come off a censures and draw attention to a non-issue. The hacks clearly illustrate the incongruity in the visual identity the RNC choses to display and the underlying message of todays Republican party.

Brands should expect the remix culture of the internet, and acknowledge that they can’t control what happens to an identity once it goes viral on the internet. Over at brandchannel, I implored the RNC to align their new identity with their messaging, lest the youth audience they seek to appeal to find it transparent. Too late.

Rather than expressing appreciation for this turn of the tables, Greenwald had some reservations about the piece:

What “basic journalist” ethic has been violated by the posting of those emails? Be specific.
Is that kind the of “journalism” you practice — you only publish things if the subject of what you’re publishing authorizes you to do so and gives you permission? What’s the source of my “ethical obligation’ to keep those documents confidential?

Speaking of “journalistic ethics,” you just wrote a piece accusing me of violating journalistic ethics. Have you ever heard of the ethical rule about including the side of the story of the person you’re accusing? I have a long, detailed post today responding to this accusation that you not only failed to link to, but even failed to summarize or acknowledge at all — to say nothing of your failure to seek my comment. That’s what is called a failure of journalistic ethics.

When I wrote that commentary, I was under the impression that Glenn had received the emails himself, as a member of Journolist. I got that impression from the website on which he posted them, which lists no other source for the emails.

Had I seen Greenwald’s followup on Salon, I would have noted this attribution:

I’m not a member (of Journolist) and never have been. Yesterday morning, one of the participants (whose identity I don’t know) emailed me to advise me that Joe Klein was sending out extremely insulting and derogatory emails to the entire group about me, and forwarded that email discus sion to me, telling me he thought it was wrong that I was being repeatedly attacked by Klein in front of hundreds of people — including many people who are my colleagues and peers — without my knowledge and without being able to defend myself.

Having now seen that, I no longer agree that Greenwald had a duty to keep these off the record (a conclusion with which Dan Abrams agrees), but that he did have a duty to include the attribution when he posted the emails.

On the other hand, I could have easily checked Salon for a response from Greenwald, but didn’t. Believing that he was the recipient of the email, it wasn’t necessary to the piece.

After a series of nasty emails, Greenwald and I spoke on the phone this morning, and are no longer mutually convinced that the other is a journalistic Satan.

Klein wrote:

Twice in the past month, my private communications have been splashed about the internet. That such a thing would happen is unfortunate, and dishonorable, but sadly inevitable, I suppose. I ignored the first case, in which a rather pathetic woman acolyte of Greenwald’s published a hyperbolic account of a conversation I had with her at a beach picnic on Cape Cod. Now, Greenwald himself has published private emails of mine that were part of a conversation taking place on a list-serve.

Greenwald and his acolyte might have a legitimate axe to grind with Klein regarding his bona fides as a liberal pundit, and I’m not crazy about Klein’s sexist-y, contemptuous reference to a “woman acolyte.” Having read her account of the encounter, he doesn’t really have a leg to whine on about her publicizing of that conversation, but he’s dead-on about the handling of his emails. No matter the justness of your cause, you can’t say “boo” about someone’s journalism skills if you violate the most basic of its ethics.

That’s why I was a little bit surprised to learn that Joe Klein recently published an email from a reader, complete with the reader’s full name and email address. This is arguably a violation of a more sacred trust. Klein is in the public eye voluntarily. His readers, even the jerky ones, ought not to be thrust there by him, with none of the benefits he enjoys.

This kerfuffle comes on the heels of another high profile case of email privacy violation, the publication of Mike Hendricks’ ham-fisted job pitch to PR firm Ogden Publications. In both cases, the offenders published emails to satisfy some personal grudge, and took pains to protect the identities of the email recipients.
There may be situations in which the news value of an email might merit its publication, with as much protection of personal info as possible, but none of these examples rises to that level.

The bigger question here might be “Is this the end of Journolist?” An off-the-record email list ceases to be useful once its contents become fair game. I’m betting Journolisters will be a lot less candid from now on.