“Anonymous” wins a Polk Award? What’s going on here? The award is of historic journalistic merit, for the network video of the dying of Neda Agha-Soltan, from a bullet wound suffered at a protest in Tehran last June. Right up there with the Pulitzer Prize-winning photos by Eddie Adams of the spontaneous street execution of a Viet Cong prisoner in 1968, and John Paul Filo of the Valley Daily News & Daily Dispatch of Tarentum and New Kensington, Pennsylvania, of a student mourning over the body of a murdered student protester and Kent State in 1970. . But “anonymous”? Unprecedented. Important. (more...)

Apparently, Iranians don't do satire very well, no doubt one of the nasty side effects of not having a functional free press. Earlier this year Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari suffered the brunt of Iran's confusion over a Daily Show interview he had participated in. Bahari was jailed during June's protests and then interrogated over video footage of the interview showing him being interviewed by "an American journalist pretending to be a spy." In reality this "spy" was Jason Jones. (more...)

Today is a quiet day in the Twitter news cycle, with the Rose Bowl and the Outback Bowl and various other bowl games on TV along with hockey legends Bobby Orr and Bobby Clarke at the NHL Winter Classic, and reminiscences about #10yearsago and post-NYE nuggets about J.Lo and Kathy Griffin making the rounds. But I just came across a jarring tweet from new media entrepreneur and investor John Borthwick: (more...)

“Readers keep emailing me to tell me that as far as cable news is concerned, today's events might as well be happening on Mars. I cannot confirm this because when real news happens, the last place I look is the cable news channels. But I cannot say I am surprised. Since this does not have a cheap and easy way to splice into the red-blue fight, they have no idea of how to cover it.”

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News of violent protests in Tehran, Iran have reignited the Twitter movement #iranelection, which many point to as a defining moment for the 140-character service during highly contested elections last summer. The New York Times is reporting that police opened fire on a crowd, killing at least four, on the anniversary of the death of "Shiite Islam’s holiest martyr." (more...)

Depending on whether you are more worried about Facebook, Russian hackers, or the U.S. government playing the role of Big Brother this will either come as reassuring news, or be just plain worrisome. President Obama has just named a new Cybersecurity Coordinator, or in the lingo of Glenn Beck, a Cyber Czar! (more...)

“Mainstream media have been accused of pathologizing the African-American male, but — let’s face it — three men who happened to be black moved a lot of units this year. Just try to imagine this past year in media without President Obama, Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods."

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It's nearly impossible to be surprised by political hypocrisy on any level these days, particularly when you are talking about iron-fisted rulers of countries like Iran. But still, this is sort of funny, in an Onion headline sort of way: Apparently, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran has a blog. The WSJ reported yesterday that Ahmadinejad spends 15 minutes a week updating "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Personal Memos" where he "he goes to vent and stay in touch with the common folk." On the one hand this is particularly galling considering Iran's treatment of reporters and bloggers and its vicious crackdown on protesters last June who were desperately attempting to reach the world with news of what was happening through social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. On the other hand, is it really a surprise? Of course a man desperate to control his own message is on the Internet. Next we'll discover he's also on Twitter. In fact some of his recent UN statements strike as very Twitterable, though perhaps not in the tone intended. Anyway, according to the WSJ the Farsi version of the blog has not one negative comment on it (the fact it allows comments at all is sort of amazing), no doubt Ahmadinejad either employs strict comment monitors or people are just too scared to say what they really think. The English-language version(!) apparently has plenty, though as of this morning I couldn't access so maybe its servers were unable to handle the excess attention. Stay tuned.

video It is a very small world. You may recall back in June The Daily Show sent correspondent Jason Jones to Iran just ahead of the elections to film a series of "funny" spots about how the country was dealing with the election. Of course, neither the Daily Show nor the rest of the world could have anticipated the sweeping and violent protests that followed the elections. Yet instead of shelving the spots for a more appropriate time, the show opted to air the segments anyway; it was a decision that struck as amazingly tone deaf (I actually thought it bordered on offensive), particularly for a show that prides itself on being one step savvier than the rest. (more...)

Here's some news that has nothing to do with Sarah Palin. We've mentioned a couple of times on this blog before the New York Times reporter Nazila Fathi, who during the protests over the Iran election this past June was often the only reporter on the ground reporting for the Times. (more...)

tweetfinder Want to know what it feels like to be a reporter on the ground in a war zone? How about while it's happening? ABC's Jim Sciutto, who was one of the few Western reporters on the ground during the Iran protests, found himself under rocket fire during last night's attacks in Kabul. See his series of tweets below. (more...)

Complain all you want about Fox. Rage about the fact the White House has foolishly decided it's a smart idea to return Fox coverage fire with (White House?) fire. At least we don't live in Iran. (more...)

Remember the days when newspapers were able to break big stories? Actually that day is today. Looked at the home page of the New York Times yet this morning? Wow. (Actually, the front page of the print edition is no picnic either, welcome back 2002!). (more...)

It is a measure of the power the New York Times op-ed pages still possess -- despite the financial struggles both the paper and the industry face -- that Jon Meacham editor of Newsweek opted to turn to them to advocate for the release of Newsweek journalist Maziar Bahari. (more...)

There are stories in both the New York Times and the WSJ today about how President Obama is losing the health care debate in the media.

And despite his efforts — in speeches, news conferences, town-hall-style meetings and other forums — to address public misgivings, 69 percent of respondents in the poll said they were concerned that the quality of their own care would decline if the government created a program that covers everyone.

But losing to what exactly? Health care is a tough topic to sell on any day -- it's detailed, unwieldy and not at all sexy, all terrible qualities where cable coverage is concerned. However you'd think in a slow news July it might get a bit more traction. Instead what we have been getting is the Birthers, and discussions over what type of beer the President prefers. Is that about to change? (more...)

With the sound off Michael Jackson's memorial service certainly looked like a presidential funeral. According to Nielsen it was actually bigger. The New York Times' Brian Stelter has the numbers, and they confirm what we all already knew: Michael Jackson's funeral was watched by a lot of people, though not as many people as a regular episode of American Idol, apparently: (more...)

The recent kerfuffle between Nico Pitney (Huffington Post) and Dana Milbank (Washington Post) over a clumsy exchange in a White House press conference brings to mind two media mavens rarely mentioned in the same sentence: Marshall McLuhan and Thomas Jefferson. Seen in the context of their ideas about media and government, a tiff between a blogger and a journalist raises ethical issues about the role of the press in our democracy and about the need for ethical leadership in an environment where government, blogs, and traditional journalism are increasingly interlaced. (more...)

If only more news outlets would have listened to TMZ when they first broke the news. Michael Jackson coverage was plentiful at the end of last week, but was not enough to overtake the amount of Iran coverage, according to this week's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) report. (more...)

'Watching The Lord of the Rings in Tehran' is the number three most read story on Time.com right now. As has been noted on Twitter the irony that the country is trying to distract its citizenry with an epic story (originally penned by a Brit, no less) about an unstoppable evil force ultimately overthrown by the little people (in this case literally) is hard to miss. (more...)

CNN and Fox News Channel spent a large portion of last weekend covering the crisis in Iran. Was it a response to #CNNfail, the Twitter uprising from the weekend before calling attention to a perceived lack of coverage? Either way, the ratings for last weekend proved one thing - viewers wanted the coverage. (more...)

The Daily Show sent correspondent Jason Jones to Iran for a series of tongue-in-cheek segments that aired last week and last night. Then, things got real. During last week's segments, the "aged" feel was apparent, if not entirely disclosed. But last night, the tone changed a bit. (more...)

As NPR's David Folkenflik first noted on his twitter feed, yesterday's Sunday Times featured two stories without bylines. One piece recounted Times reporter David Rohde's Saturday escape from Taliban captors following a seven month ordeal (and accompanying news blackout). The other piece was datelined Tehran. (more...)

While not exactly original, this week's most popular headline was certainly on point: The revolution, aka the ongoing unrest in Iran over last week's questionable election results, has been burning up Twitter with people inside and outside the country tweeting and retweeting in a constatly-updating sea of green. (more...)

As has been noted here and elsewhere -- most notably in the pages of the actual paper(!) -- New York Times managing editor Bill Keller has in the last week unchained himself from his managerial desk duties at the Times building and reappeared smack in the middle of Iran's (and possibly Twitter's, depending whom you read) historic uprising. (more...)

Just days after The Daily Show broadcast correspondent Jason Jones' visit to the "walking colonial Williamsburg" otherwise known as the New York Times offices -- during which Jones asked one editor to explain why "aged news is better than real news" and trumpeted the 'more fun to read' and profitable* news sites such as HuffPo -- the show is filing some aged news of its own! (more...)