National Journal reporter Beth Reinhard got a chilly reception from Republican frontrunner Ron Paul, when she ran into him eating his breakfast all alone at the Des Moines Embassy Suites. Reinhard asked the unaccompanied candidate whether his supporters would support the eventual nominee if it wasn’t him, which drew a sharp retort.

“Right now, the only thing that bothers me is people who don’t respect my privacy enough to leave me alone for five minutes when I’m eating breakfast.” Paul is reported to have responded. Reinhard reports the Republican hopeful coldly went back to reading his USA Today.

Debate fatigue? A recent USA Today/Gallup poll released yesterday shows a whopping 70% of Americans are solidly opposed to the neverending reality show known as the “2012 presidential campaign,” or at least “can’t wait for it to be over.” The desperation for the campaigns to end transcends ideological boundaries, geography, and age, with men being slightly less averse to the whole thing.

A new USA Today / Gallup poll reveals that, either despite or directly because of what seems to be a near-constant barrage of Occupy Wall Street news items from all sorts of ideological points of view, the American public is, to put it in layman’s terms, “super meh” about the whole endeavor.

It’s getting to the point where this just has to be a part of accepted modern life; every few months or so, a news organization of some kind is going to get hacked for an hour.

Following in the footsteps of NBC News, Fox News, and PBS, USA Today is the latest to fall victim to the nimble fingers and crude MS Paint drawings of today’s hacker elite. The hack occurred yesterday as the paper’s Twitter account started posting links to the Facebook page of a group called the Script Kiddies.

According to a new Gallup Poll, the majority of Americans feel that Barack Obama has been “about the same” or “worse” than George W. Bush as president. 65 percent of those polled feel that Obama is doing “about the same” or “worse” than Bush; or, if you’d rather, 65 percent feel that Obama is doing “about the same” or “better” than W.

A new USA Today/Gallup poll shows plenty of reason for Mitt Romney to smile, and for Rick Perry to check his rear-view mirror. On the heels of a debate that saw Perry take a beating on Social Security, his lead in this poll has dropped from 12% in late August, to just 7% in a poll taken days after the CNN/Tea Party debate. Prior to the debate, a Zogby Poll had Perry with an 18-point lead. Coupled with the fact that Perry still loses in head-to-head polling with President Obama, while Romney wins, is Perry’s campaign headed for trouble?

A Snapshot graphic that ran in the USA Today this past Friday has been getting some unwanted attention throughout the Internet today. The graphic explains the dangers of excessive heat and depicts a cartoon sun holding a thermometer. That’s not what it looks like though…

What does it look like? I’m not going to tell you. You’ll have to ask your parents.

When the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal broke in May, many reporters tried to bring the story home for Americans by comparing it to Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s revelation that he’d fathered a love child. With DSK back in the news this week after new reports that he may be innocent after all, pundits are again drawing parallels to another case being discussed, that of Casey Anthony. “Combined with the seeming collapse of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case, the shock showed a press quick to jump to conclusions, if not about actual guilt, then at least about guilty verdicts,” TIME‘s James Poniewozik said, upon the conclusion of the Anthony trial this week. What do these two stories really have in common with each other?

Fox News may rule on cable, but on the web, CNN’s the leader–and it’s crushing the titans of print. According to ComScore, for the first three months of 2011, CNN averaged nearly 8.5 million unique U.S. visitors each day. The best-performing newspaper, The New York Times, was ranked third on the ComScore list with an average 5.6 million.

MSNBC was in second place behind CNN with 7.4 million unique U.S. visitors, and Fox News averaged 2.3 million.

Among the books President Obama has written, seemingly the least politically charged of all of them is his recently released children’s book, “Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters.” It’s a picture book which features images and stories of many prominent historical figures, such as Helen Keller, Cesar Chavez, Georgia O’Keefe, and Sitting Bull. However, proving that even children’s books can be controversial, media outlets have taken issue with the historical figures he appears to endorse in the book.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced that his city’s current schools chancellor, Joel Klein, is stepping down to take an executive vice president position at News Corp. Stepping up to the city position will be media mogul Cathie Black, former USA Today publisher and current Hearst chairwoman. It’s like an odd version of musical chairs, except that everybody wins.

In September, Fidel Castro dropped a bombshell that should have elicited more comprehensive responses from both major media outlets and leading political figures alike. Without much prompting, the ailing former leader bluntly proclaimed that communism isn’t working for Cuba. While the failures of “share-as-we-go” economics have been known for some time now, Castro’s comments may preface major changes in U.S.-Cuba relations.

In a USA Today column, Rand Paul sets out to distance himself from the Libertarian label. Ironically, he winds up spending the majority of his time articulating his libertarian philosophy rather than making a case for a philosophical alternative.

USA Today is reporting that Cold War era paranoia is alive and well in today’s society (albeit modified to accommodate the more ambiguous range of threats we face today) in the form of a booming underground bunker industry. But these aren’t your average hole-in-the-desert bunkers, mind you. These are bona fide luxury comfort subterranean shelters.

Parents, here’s another reason to keep your kids away from the TV this summer. A recent article in USA Today would like to add temper tantrums and a fondness for TV melodrama to the list of what happens when we watch too much television.

A lot has been written about CNN and their upcoming prime time adjustments, at one, possibly two, hours. We’ve heard the partisan versus objective arguments – but is it an issue a of “raucous” versus “passive” model?

Who: Brian Williams, interviewed by Jeff Greenfield
What: “In the News with Jeff Greenfield – Brian Williams”
Where: 92^nd St. Y
When: April 18, 2010
Thumbs: Up

The Democrats’ extremely short health care honeymoon appears to be over. This week, according to Gallup, voters are apparently back to preferring the GOP candidate. Something so rare it’s only happened three times before now. Reporters are apparently “flummoxed.”

Ink-stained wretches, it’s not just you! The social media and Twitter elite fret about the future of journalism too — and wonder how it will survive the digital revolution. At SXSWi, there was no shortage of panels obsessively deconstructing this topic (and tweeting about it, natch).

We’ve heard Radio Glenn Beck, who jokes about shady Scott Brown needing to be chaperoned around D.C. We’ve seen TV Glenn Beck, who occasionally will slip in something pretty offensive about Pres. Barack Obama.

Well if you haven’t met him yet, here’s Interview Glenn Beck, who likes to shock liberals and conservatives alike – and there’s no better example than his USA Weekend profile out Sunday.

More specifically, Rachel Maddow tells USA Today that she would like to have Dick Cheney on her show and that in her mind the interview would be “a long discussion. I would essentially treat it like a trial.” Alas, Dick Cheney will apparently not consent to appear on Maddow’s MSNBC show. He’s not the only one.

Is there a more media savvy politician out there than Sarah Palin? I’m not convinced. Earlier this week Palin called for chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s firing on her Facebook. Today USA Today published an oped penned by Palin defending her choice to appear at the Tea Party convention this weekend. Solution: If you can’t afford it feel free to virtually participate on her Facebook page!

The Freedom Forum is a nonpartisan, international foundation dedicated to the promotion of free speech, and its Newseum, in Washington D.C., chronicles five centuries of news history.

Yet while journalism flounders to stay in the black, executives at the Freedom Forum are raking in the big bucks.

When looking ahead at the next year, pundits turn into prognosticators. Bloggers covering all sorts of topics and industries are now giving their predictions for what’s to come in 2010. Conventional wisdom says to go the conservative route with these choices in order to avoid looking foolish when none of your projections pan out. At the same time, there’s a key difference between picking things that are realistically possible and those that are already on the road to happening. I’ve assembled my favorite predictions covering a variety of fields and what’s supposedly in store for the near future:

Fark, one of the oldest and strangest news aggregators on the Internet, is teaming up with USA Today. But this could just be the beginning. The founder of Fark tells Mediaite that more partnerships with major media outlets are in the works: