Wednesday’s edition of Washington Post Media‘s free Express daily featured a headline that’s garnering viral guffaws and questions about their editorial judgment. Aggregating an AP story about former Libyan rebels rooting out Gaddafi loyalists, the paper, in an obvious attempt to appeal to the political center, headlined the item “Libya Ferrets Out Gadhafi’s Taint.”

Was the headline a prank, an error in judgment, or…something in between?

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll has just been released, and the results are not particularly encouraging for former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin with regards to a potential bid in the 2012 presidential race. The poll suggests that that less than 6 off 10 “Republicans and GOP-leaning independents see Palin in a favorable light,” throwing cold water on any speculation that Palin is the presumptive GOP nominee (though there is certainly plenty of time for public opinion to change.)

NPR reportedly received a bomb threat yesterday amidst a week of controversy over the firing of news analyst Juan Williams. From the Washington Post: ”
The letter didn’t reference the Williams firing specifically, but people at NPR, who spoke about it on the condition of anonymity, said the timing and tone suggested it was sent after Williams’s widely publicized termination. “

Attorney Harry Whittington, the man then Vice President Dick Cheney infamously shot whilst on a hunting trip has apparently never received an apology from Cheney (insert heartless joke here). In a longish profile in the Washington Post today Whittingon reveals that the complications from the incident were more serious than reported at the time.

“With pomp and panoply befitting a visit from a foreign dignitary, ABC raised the curtain on its newly revamped This Week,” begins Tom Shales‘ Washington Post review of Christiane Amanpour‘s first This Week show, signaling the irrational column to come. Considering there was a noticeable lack of “pomp and panoply,” it’s a strange way to start.

It only gets more offensive from there, in the latest of Shales’ attacks on the former CNNer.

The Washington Post‘s Top Secret America project received a fair amount of applause and praise when its first segment was unveiled on Monday. It was touted as a great work of investigative journalism about an increasingly relevant topic. Thomas Mahnken begs to differ. In Foreign Policy, he lays out the project’s flaws, and decides that if the report was handed to him as a graduate research paper, it would get a failing grade.

I read Mark Zuckerberg’s op-ed in today’s Washington Post with an open mind op-ed, interested to see how he would confront and react to the Facebook privacy criticism. As I read it, I became confused — because it didn’t read like an op-ed, it read like an op-ad.

Yesterday, the CBS News website published a column that asserted that Solicitor General Elena Kagan – a leading candidate for the Supreme Court – is in fact gay. In the piece, former Bush administration aide Ben Domenech said that Kagan could potentially be the “first openly gay justice”; pleasing Obama’s base. Howard Kurtz reports that an unidentified administration official “said Kagan is not a lesbian,” and reports that Anita Dunn blasted CBS News for “posting lies.”

This is what budget cuts look like in the extreme. The Washington Post has just announced that it will be closing its news bureaus in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, to save costs. In a memo to staff, WaPo leadesrhip says it will maintain its commitment to national news, but frankly, with three major bureaus closing, it’s hard to see how.

Either not everybody at the Washington Post is on the same page about what “off the record” means exactly, or executive editor Marcus Brauchli is a liar: Did he or didn’t he know that the advertised salons would be off the record? That question and others have come to light after a letter from Brauchli to now-resigned Post marketing director Charles Pelton was sent to the Times by Pelton’s lawyer.

In an online column yesterday on the Washington Post‘s opinion blog, Anne Applebaum voiced her disagreement with the “outrageous arrest of Roman Polanski,” arguing that to put Polanski on trial or to jail him “does not serve society in general or his victim in particular.” But Applebaum failed to reveal that she’s married to a Polish foreign minister who is fighting for Polanski’s release.

9/11 is a date that has come to represent a lot of complicated ideas. Memories of the attack come with a real sense of unity and global support that immediately followed. Suddenly it became a political football, used to exemplify a lack of patriotism (or a pre-existing bias). But judging by the coverage in today’s Newspapers, we seem to have moved on, or have at least started the process…

Via Romenesko comes this little nugget regarding the the controversial firing of Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin from an “Ask the Post” online chat with Washington Post editors Liz Spayd and Raju Narisetti. Short answer: It had nothing to do with his viewpoints.

The Washington Post salon scandal, first reported by Politico, has kicked off a response in the media chattering classes that just won’t die. Today’s installment comes from Ken Silverstein at Harper’s who points a finger right back at Politico, accusing the online powerhouse of being guilty of its own shady canoodling with politicians and the people with deep pockets who fund them! BREAKING: Reporters mingle with politicians and the people who pay the bills!

At least when it comes to page views. The New York Times‘ Brian Stelter is reporting on the speculation that the Washington Post fired columnist Dan Froomkin because his column’s page views were low.

Page views have long been the metric of success at online institutions but thus far mainstream papers have been mostly able to avoid pandering to the click-through. No longer, it would seem.