John Koblin reports that Andrew Rossi, the filmmaker associate producer behind Control Room (which was excellent), is now working on a documentary about the NYT's media desk. Hardworking multimedia jackanape Brian Stelter describes some of the action footage that is already accumulating in the filmmaker's archive:

"He watches me edit, watches me write, watches me write emails, watches me tweet, watches me do interviews," said Mr. Stelter. "There are some days that are going to be more exciting."

Well. It's, ah...more interesting than our average work day, at least. So...put it on your viewing schedule!

See, the Obama administration just called out Fox as "an opponent" instead of a "legitimate news organization." But Ailes and Axelrod had coffee last week! What's up?

If the Obama White House treats Fox News as the research and propaganda arm of the opposition, Brian Stelter and the Times treat the cable channel more like a foreign nation that the current administration doesn't officially recognize. With Roger Ailes as Foreign Minister and flacks acting as diplomats, Fox and MSNBC work toward detente, the Obama administration refuses to normalize relations without a reduction in arms, the network seeks high-profile defections from John Stossel and Lou Dobbs, and there are rumors of secret treaties between O'Reilly and Olbermann.

As always, Fox pretends to be a regular news station that broadcasts actual news, but, amusingly, they admit to keeping to that high standard only when the unemployed are watching:

Fox argues that its news hours - 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. on weekdays - are objective. The channel has taken pains recently to highlight its news programs, including the two hours led by Shepard Smith, its chief news anchor. And its daytime newscasts draw more viewers than CNN or MSNBC's prime-time programs.

Yes, they are at pains to point out that they have one fantastic, independent, entertaining news anchor, who adheres to a reality-based interpretation of events. And besides: isn't nine hours of truth a day enough for you monsters?

There is a degree to which the entire "war" is mutually beneficial, with both sides firing up the base. But we imagine the Obama White House has also been surprised by the depths of Fox's irresponsibility (witch-hunting, actively organizing and promoting protests of the president's legitimacy, everything Glenn Beck does and says). It's within their power to rein in O'Reilly with flattery, but there's obviously nothing to be done about the rest of Fox's non-"news hours" personalities. They're a bunch of Ahmadinejads.

The thing about Liquid Plumr is... well, freelancer Zoe Stagg figured it out.

The New York Times' Brian Stelter posted this depressing picture early in the workday. Thanks for the pick me up!

Today is the first day of the rest of Tom Green's miserable, but now significantly less bloated, life. (Probably not, actually, but he had to say something to reconcile "Drink Scotch Ebveryday [sic] !" with "Say no to drugs and alcohol!" for at least a few hours.)

RedState.com's Erick Erickson had trouble imagining that people might object to his writing on a purely volunteer basis.

Marketer Will Conley says we are being lulled into complacency. But in a bad way.

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Podcaster Jeff Smith was not nearly as pleased with the autumn wear in Chicago as The Awl's Choire Sicha was with the pullovers in New York.

There must be very few people who blogger Perez Hilton feels comfortable lecturing about ethics. Apparently Kim Kardashian is one of them.

Larry David as a no-doubt carefully calibrated caricature of himself is pure Twitter bait, and celeb-news editor Bonnie Fuller wasn't ashamed to bite the hook.

Irin Carmon of Women's Wear Daily found some feature fodder for the New York Times Magazine. No charge.

Brian Stelter is back from Philly so... what are you waiting for? Get back to work, Twitter followers!

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Author John Scalzi provided a horrifying glimpse into the not-so-distant future. Science "fiction?" We think not.

Dan Frommer of Business Insider explained that clouds can't crash on you in iHeaven.

New York's Jessica Coen basically called it.

AOL was not about to be condescended to by Brian Stelter of the New York Times. Busted!

You know who else allowed his nation's critical communications system to fail during wartime? The Awl's Alex Balk does.

Webmonkey editor Michael Calore never made to attachment number 23.

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Brian Stelter reports in today's New York Times that Fox Business is hoping to simulcast Imus' utterly unlistenable radio show in the same way MSNBC did before they fired him after the "nappy-headed hoes" incident involving the Rutgers women's basketball team a couple of years ago.

Stelter says that the deal is in "advanced negotiations" and that Fox hopes Imus' shitty program can be effective at "motivating new viewers to turn on the hard-to-find network for the first time." The show would reportedly run from 6 to 9am, replacing a show that currently doesn't garner enough viewers to even register a rating by Nielsen, and the idea seems to follow a blueprint for success that Fox has used effectively in the past.

In turning to Mr. Imus to bolster Fox Business, the News Corporation is taking a page from the playbook of its sibling channel Fox News, which now drives the company's financial growth. Fox, founded 13 years ago, successfully translated talk radio values to TV, sometimes by directly hiring radio talkers like Sean Hannity. Already, Fox Business counts two radio veterans, Dave Ramsey and Tom Sullivan, as hosts.

Well it's about time! Seriously, have there ever been two entities more perfect for each other than Don Imus and Fox?

As you may recall, back in May Keith Olbermann lashed out at Cityfile, Wonkette and Gawker for reporting that he'd angrily walked out on MSNBC after losing a Ben Affleck booking to Rachel Maddow. Olbermann claimed that the reports of his hissy-fit were greatly exaggerated and that he'd actually taken a few days off to mourn the death of his mother, which had occurred two weeks prior.

Now he's taking all kinds of heat from foe and friend alike over this whole Richard Wolffe situation, and on Monday he claimed that he was too busy in June and July fighting with Bill O'Reilly or something to pull Wolffe aside off camera for five minutes to ask a few questions about any potential conflicts of interest with the lobbying job he started in April. This led us to wonder, "Were Olbermann and his producers too bogged down dealing with other things' in April and May as well?" Well, tonight Olbermann offered up a familiar excuse to TVNewser in regards to why he didn't question Wolffe during the April/May time frame:

The bloggers are leaving one component out, unfairly so: In April, I knew vaguely that Richard Wolffe had gone to work for a non-news firm, and that's about the last I heard of it. It was entirely concurrent with my mother's fatal illness, and I turned it over entirely to my management team. My first awareness that this was more than just a non-news job, was this week.

If Jonathan Berr, whoever he is, does not like my prioritizing caring for my mother and dealing with her death, and then doing as many shows as I could, ahead of vetting the comments of our analysts and my management team, frankly, I feel sorry for him. Getting myself through those two months were, and are, more important than what is still being investigated about Richard.

Now, besides the obvious, there are a number of disturbing things about this statement, the first being Olbermann's dismissive "whoever he is" tone towards Jonathan Berr. Who is Jonathan Berr and what did he do to spark Olbermann's ire? Well, he's a writer for Daily Finance who happened to write a eminently reasonable piece critical of Olbermann's recent actions from the perspective of an Olbermann fan. The points he brought up and the questions he asked in his piece were not irrational or inflammatory in any way and deserve consideration. As such, the "whoever he is" condescension is way out of line, and frankly it's quite ugly, seeing as how Berr was nothing less than respectful in his Olbermann article.

Another disturbing thing about Olbermann's statement is the ease with which he seems willing to throw his staff under the bus for failing to do what he should have done in regards to a simple quizzing of Richard Wolffe. The title of the show is Countdown with Keith Olbermann, is it not? Does the old, tired Harry Truman adage "the buck stops here" not apply to cable news anchors whose names appear prominently in the titles of their shows?

Then there's this, an apparent blatant contradiction in the statement separated only by a few words — "In April, I knew vaguely that Richard Wolffe had gone to work for a non-news firm...My first awareness that this was more than just a non-news job, was this week." Um, say what? Which is it Keith? Please clarify.

Finally, I personally can't even begin to imagine the pain involved with losing a mother. My mom's mortality does cross my mind occasionally and the mere thought of it shakes me in places I never knew I was capable of being shaken, someplace deep down where the body meets the soul. But with that said, Olbermann was in the building and working after his mother's death, and if he was able to go on the air and host a show each night, how could he have not taken the time to question Wolffe's lobbying side gig? Again, how much more than a, "Richard, tell me about this new job of yours," would it have taken? And fuck, a simple Google search or two would've raised a number of red flags, but apparently even that would've been too much an effort.

The bottom line here, and everybody knows this, is that this is all a bunch of horseshit, and sadly it didn't have to be that way. If Olbermann would've just stepped up in the beginning and said something along of the lines of, "I know this looks bad, but I became too bogged down by other things, not to mention too trusting of another human being, and let this one slip by me...I'm truly sorry," this might have all gone away quietly (Notice that most of the heat he's been taking on this hasn't come from Fox News, but from Olbermann allies on the internet!). Instead, he's offered up nothing but lame excuses and angry diatribes all week, flailing about madly in the quicksand all the while, and frankly he's looked nothing less than pathetic in doing so.

While Olbermann used his "Worst Persons" segment to call out O'Reilly, Rupert Murdoch and Brian Stelter, the Times media reporter who broke the story about the truce, O'Reilly tonight returned to flogging NBC's parent company, General Electric, for corporate corruption, as has long been his proclivity.

Since news of the secret arrangement broke last Friday night, O'Reilly has made no direct mention of Stelter's story, instead choosing to flaunt his independence tonight by chastising GE for polluting the Hudson River, among other things, and implicating Barack Obama as an accomplice in the process. O'Reilly then brought out noted corruption expert Dick Morris to lament about how truly revolting NBC and GE are because of the GE's corporate influence on its news organization.

So yeah, it's looks as though things are returning to normal in the Olbermann vs. O'Reilly cable news death feud, and really, isn't the world better off for it?

According to Brian Stelter of the New York Times, the goal of NBC's multimedia advertising assault is to transform his upcoming show's already sky-high level of public awareness into a tidal wave of frenzied anticipation. NBC executives want you counting down the days until the premiere of Leno's new show, they want you talking about it to your co-workers around the watercooler at work, they want you Twittering about it constantly, hell, they want you masturbating to Jay Leno (And you know that you want to!). But most of all, NBC executives want you to laugh, because your life is shit and you should laugh at Jay Leno's stupid jokes just to add an extra layer of shit to it all.

"For us this is like, in effect, launching five shows," Adam Stotsky, the president of NBC Entertainment marketing, said in an interview.

The network's strategic proposition for Mr. Leno's show is "life needs more laughter," Mr. Stotsky said.

"Most people are dealing with daily pressures, day-to-day drudgery; the economy's got them down, or they may be tiring of the crime time that exists across the 10 o‘clock landscape," Mr. Stotsky said. The comedy show "will be the antidote."

See! You all need more Jay Leno in the black hole of suck you call a life. There's no use denying it, so just bend over, bite down and take your Leno, because he's coming in hard.

NBC's promotional tactics for Mr. Leno involve infiltrating mundane activities and inserting Mr. Leno's mainstream humor. That's why the network made a push into movie theaters last weekend, most notably with a two-and-a-half minute segment on National CineMedia's advertisement reel that runs on 16,000 screens across the country.

Later in the month, Mr. Leno's bits of comedy will also appear on airplanes, at gyms, in elevators and in New York City taxi cabs. "These are moments that are just begging for a bit of laughter," Mr. Stotsky said.

You hear that America? Adam Stotsky and Jay Leno are coming to save you. Aren't you excited?!

Olbermann kicked off his "Worst Persons" segment by lashing out at Brian Stelter, the Times media reporter who broke the story that on June 1st Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly were told to stop taking each other to the woodshed on the air because their bloody feud had become detrimental to the corporate interests of the parent corporations running MSNBC and Fox News. Olbermann said tonight that he spoke to Stelter twice last week, both on and off the record, and denied to him that anyone had attempted to silence his stinging criticisms of O'Reilly and Fox News. Olbermann claims that the whole thing is all just a "misinterpretation" of an on-air proclamation he made on June 1 of this year following the murder of George Tiller, the subject of frequent inflammatory attacks by O'Reilly. Here's what Olbermann said at the time:

Fox News Channel will never restrain itself from incitement to murder and terrorism, not until its profits begin to decline, when its growth stops. So not so much a boycott here as a quarantine, because this has got to stop.

That I have a commercial conflict of interest here is obvious. So I‘ll make the first symbolic contribution to this quarantine. One of my pleasures, obviously, is constantly criticizing him in that Ted Baxter voice. It is the idea of laughter as a social sanction against inflexible behavior.

But this is no time for laughter. This is serious. Serious as death. As serious as George Tiller‘s death. So as of this show‘s end, I will retire the name, the photograph, and the caricature. The words may still be quoted in the future as developments dictate. The goal here is to get this blindly irresponsible man and his ilk off the air.

So it's all a "misinterpretation," you see, though Stelter reported over the weekend that MSNBC and Fox News "lieutenants arranged a cease-fire, according to four people who work at the companies and have direct knowledge of the deal." Someone, either Olbermann or a reporter for the New York Times, is lying. Who do you believe?

From there, Olbermann, likely inspired by a burning urge to squash any notion that he'd been put on a leash with an exclamation point, turned his attention to O'Reilly, who he affectionately called a "racist clown," and O'Reilly's boss, "corporate jackal" Rupert Murdoch. Here's the complete video of the segment:

Wall Street Journal editor Alan Murray hilariously lampooned the state of mainstream business journalism in a pithy tweet that married weak sourcing with a ridiculous and sensational headline. Ah, the joys of satire.

New-media commentator Reed Kavner was taught a lesson at the gym, presumably having to do with determination rather than pity.

After the long-anticipated firing of NBC's Ben Silverman, even straight-laced Brian Stelter at the New York Times couldn't resist a dash of snark.

TechCrunch's Sarah Lacy explains just how rich the Zappos founders are, and figures "wealth managers" are reading her pronouncements. Yes, and still waiting for her past predictions to pan out.

The question isn't why Twitter's Biz Stone misspelled an abbreviation for "oxygen," but why he was typing it in the first place. Likely answer: His burning hatred of the English language and its lengthy glory.

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PaidContent's Rafat Ali advised Lazard's Bruce Wasserstein to get his shit together before he starts messing around with BusinessWeek. Just a little not-so-friendly advice.

The Hollywood Reporter's Matt Belloni caught Fox News' Dennis Miller at the Comi-Con geekfest. We presume Miller's on-air report will go something like, ""The place is crawling with freakazoids, Chachi. I haven't seen this many virgins in one place since the Jonas Brothers' VH1 Behind the Music. Heh-heeeeehh."

Salon's Joan Walsh worried for G. Gordon Liddy's mental health. Specifically, that he might be getting it back.

The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan found CBS' Andy Rooney to be the most "eloquent" eulogizer in a group of journalists.

Brian Stelter confirmed: There are waking moments when Brian Stelter won't tweet.

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Tweeting from the Michael Jackson memorial service, geeky actor LeVar Burton took umbrage at another celebrity mourner's wardrobe choices (below, via Getty Images).

The New York Times newsroom was no haven from the Jackson telecast, according to reporter Stephanie Clifford.

It was also no haven from live tributes, Timesman Brian Stelter added.

Branding whiz Tim Siedell was all the way out in Nebraska, so he had to imagine the Jackson memorial, if only for Twitter's sake.

At Allen & Company's annual retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho, the nation's financial press pretended it was transgressive, according to the Wall Street Journal's Julia Angwin. Adorable.

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In a piece on how web users are spending increasing amounts of time watching video on the web, Stelter credits Hollywood for the change in our viewing habits:

TV networks get much of the credit for the longer-length viewing behavior. In the past two TV seasons, nearly every broadcast show has been streamed free on the Internet, making users accustomed to watching TV online for 20-plus minutes at a time. By some estimates, one in four Internet customers now uses Hulu, an online home for NBC and Fox shows, every month. "Dancing With the Stars," the popular ABC reality show, draws almost two million viewers on ABC.com, according to Nielsen.

Stelter goes on to theorize that this Hollywood-inspired increase in time spent watching video on the web has led to much of the new scripted content on the web is being created independently, outside of the traditional, soul-sucking Hollywood development system.

The viral videos of YouTube 1.0 - dog-on-skateboard and cat-on-keyboard - are being supplemented by a new, more vibrant generation of online video. Production companies are now creating 10- and 20-minute shows for the Internet and writing story arcs for their characters - essentially acting more like television producers, while operating far outside the boundaries of a network schedule.

Much of the video innovation is coming from people who - empowered by inexpensive editing equipment and virtually no distribution costs - are creating content specifically for an online audience.

"On the Web, producers have this delicious freedom to produce content as long as it should be. They're starting to take advantage of that," (Blip.tv co-founder Dina) Kaplan said.

Though we agree with much of what Stelter says, one point we'd like to expand on that isn't addressed in Stelter's piece, something we addressed previously in a post titled "The End of Television as We Know It" back in May, is that we believe eventually someone will independently shoot and distribute an episodic series online that will become a cultural phenomenon, something people discuss around the proverbial water-cooler on a regular basis, and that will be the moment when the scale is officially tipped and the television networks run the risk of becoming little more than relics of a bygone era. How far off into the future is something like that happening is anyone's guess, but it certainly seems as though we're getting closer and closer with each passing day.

Rise of Web Video, Beyond Two-Minute Clips [New York Times]

The lesbians just love Kurt Andersen, according to Kurt Andersen.

The Associated Press is still mad as hell at the internet, and isn't going to take it any more, but in the meantime Lauren McCullough would like the internet to please send free content kthxbai.

Joining the day's crowdsourcing trend, the New York Times' Brian Stelter asked for fact-checking help.

Ryan Block of gdgt found some slipping standards at a Steve Jobs-less Apple.

The Times' Jennifer 8. Lee found an ethical issue with her coworker's choice of Twitter application.

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CNET's Caroline McCarthy came under attack from angry fans of the Dave Matthews Band. Would no one Back Her Up?

Salon's Joan Walsh did not appreciate having to watch Fox News Channel.

ABC backup anchor John Berman was not-so-silently praying for technical difficulties.

Web producer Annemarie Dooling grew tired of flaky renters.

The New York Times' Brian Stelter ate a depressing dinner.

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Key warnings from the the guidelines, from standards editor Craig Whitney:

Be careful not to write anything on a blog or a personal Web page that you could not write in The Times —­ don't editorialize, for instance, if you work for the News Department. Anything you post online can and might be publicly disseminated, and can be twisted to be used against you by those who wish you or The Times ill — whether it's text, photographs, or video. That includes things you recommend on TimesPeople or articles you post to Facebook and Digg, content you share with friends on MySpace, and articles you recommend through TimesPeople. It can also include things posted by outside parties to your Facebook page, so keep an eye on what appears there. Just remember that we are always under scrutiny by magnifying glass and that the possibilities of digital distortion are virtually unlimited, so always ask yourself, could this be deliberately misconstrued or misunderstood by somebody who wants to make me look bad?

He's talking about us! Although we wish everyone well. We hear that the paper may be cracking down on Twitter use by staffers soon. So now's the time to look at some the NYT's most prolific Tweeters! Not surprisingly, most of them are prolific reporters, as well, and just can't stop writing things, every minute of every day. It's truly amazing.

Superhuman metro reporter Sewell Chan's Twitter page is uniformly innocuous.


Dealbook wonder boy Andrew Ross Sorkin's is livelier, but still disappointingly uncontroversial. Lots of live-tweeting and extra Dealbook-like commentary.


Young media obsessive Brian Stelter is an outrageous link-Tweeting machine. Truly incredible. Not too controversial, though. You work too much, Brian!


Magical trend specialist/ metro lord Jennifer 8. Lee hears the WSJ may be clamping down on Twitter! She also reveals that the NYT newsroom is patrolled by drunken thieves!



Finally, King of All Media David Carr is wild with the Twitter! He Twitters whatever he wants! Maybe enough to give Craig Whitney palpitations? It's all so charming, though! He has a big personality! Fight the power!


So overall there's not much that we would find scandalous there (more drunk Twittering from the whorehouse, people, thx), but probably enough to make Craig Whitney want to tell people to be quiet. Keep an eye out for a sudden NYT clampdown on newsroom Twittering. Then everything can get back to boring again.
[Disclosure: I'm Facebook friends with Carr and Stelter, hopelessly compromising my objectivity.]

Ross is the guy who breathlessly announced that he had the phone records of Deborah Jeane Palfrey—a.k.a. the Washington Madam—only to come up with the names of two lousy low-level clients in a much-hyped sweeps-month 20/20 investigation that went nowhere. For years he relied on Alexis Debat—an ABC News consultant who was revealed in 2007 to have concocted fake interviews with American politicians for publication in a French journal—for stories ranging from secret U.S. operations in Iran to Americans joining the Taliban. (ABC News says those stories were still true.) He's the guy who reported inaccurately in 2001, in the aftermath of the anthrax attacks, that the anthrax letters contained a "potent additive...known to have been used by only one country in producing biochemical weapons - Iraq." And he's the guy who, just last week, falsely accused Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of calling Barack Obama an "indentured servant" to the coal industry by taking a quote from his interview with Kennedy dramatically out of context.

Now Ross has drawn the ire of the New York Times for his 2007 exclusive reportfeaturing former CIA agent John Kiriakou, who came forward on the record to confirm that the CIA had waterboarded suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah. Kiriakou pointedly used the word "torture" to describe the process but insisted that it was exceedingly limited, and that it worked—Zubaydah started cooperating after one 30-second session, Kiriakou told Ross.

As the New York Times' Brian Stelter and Scott Shane point out, Kiriakou was either lying or didn't know what he was talking about. According to the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel memos released this month, Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times.

Ross' story, the Times reports, "heightened the public perception of waterboarding as an effective interrogation technique" and "ricocheted around the media," leading Rush Limbaugh to proclaim: "It works, is the bottom line. Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works." What didn't ricochet around the media was the fact that the torture occurred in Thailand, and Kiriakou was sitting at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.:

But lost in much of the coverage was the fact that Mr. Kiriakou had no firsthand knowledge of the waterboarding: He was not actually in the secret prison in Thailand where Mr. Zubaydah had been interrogated but in the C.I.A. headquarters in Northern Virginia. He learned about it only by reading accounts from the field.

On "World News," ABC included only a caveat that Mr. Kiriakou himself "never carried out any of the waterboarding." Still, he told ABC that the actions had "disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks." A video of the interview was no longer on ABC's website.

Ross never claimed that Kiriakou was in the room when Zubaydah was tortured, but if his viewers had known that Kiriakou was on the other side of the planet when it was happening, they may not have fallen so hard for his bland lie that it only happened once, briefly, and that it worked.

In Ross' defense, when you are writing about the CIA and top secret intelligence programs, a certain margin for error has to be built in to the equation. Sure, Kiriakou didn't know what he was talking about. But he was a CIA officer, he did have access to intelligence about Zubaydah, and he was willing to talk. Who wouldn't put him on TV? You're only as good, the saying goes, as your sources.

Brian Ross' problem is that he often has shitty sources. Kiriakou, Debat, whoever was telling him that Iraq was behind the anthrax attacks. ABC News and others defend him as a hard-working reporter with many important stories and awards under his belt—including a Polk-award-winning December 2005 report that named Poland and Romania as the locations of the CIA "black sites" that the Washington Post had uncovered a month before. But at least one former colleague says he's just gullible.

"Ross has a reputation for being able to be spun, because he's so desperate for stories," a former ABC Newser tells Gawker. "If he has one source for something, and he seems trustworthy, he'll go with it. The New York Times' investigative guys say, 'We never take anything Brian Ross reports with anything less than a pound of salt.'"

Indeed, according to another knowledgable source Gawker spoke with, Kiriakou was in talks with at least one other reporter around the time Ross lined him up for the exclusive. The other reporter didn't trust Kiriakou—for one thing, he was willing to meet in the open, in public places, which suggested that the information he was offering wasn't all that valuable—and passed him by. But Ross bit.

ABC News has issued a fierce defense of the Kiriakou story, disputing the Times' claim that Ross underplayed the fact that Kiriakou had no direct knowledge of the waterboarding and pointing out the three occasions on which the Times itself relied on Ross' story.

And ironically, in reporting on Ross' latest episode of gullibility, it appears as though the Times has left itself open to charges of cooking a story. The Times' Stelter and Shane quoted former Human Rights Watch lawyer John Sifton high up in their piece accusing the press of "sanitizing" the torture program by running with stories like Kiriakou's claims. But it turns out that, while Sifton did say the press coverage tended to sanitize torture, Sifton says he also repeatedly defended Ross to Stelter, telling him that Ross shouldn't be singled out for getting details of a highly secretive program wrong.

"Placing blame on ABC News is unfair and nonsensical, and for the New York Times in particular it is hypocritical," Sifton wrote today in an angry letter to Times public editor Clark Hoyt. "Mr. Kiriakou's account given on ABC News was hardly the first time a media company has quoted CIA officials providing rosier-than-reality accounts of interrogations.... [F]or the Times in particular to focus on the Kiriakou story is downright nutty. If it is a crime to cite uncritically Mr. Kiriakou's accounts of Abu Zubaydah's supposed 30-second waterboarding, then the Times is just as guilty as ABC News. This is because the New York Times itself interviewed and cited Mr. Kiriakou in a June 2008 article by Scott Shane about CIA interrogations, which focused on CIA analyst and interrogator Deuce Martinez — a point Mr. Stelter didn't mention."

Sifton also takes Stelter to task for initially claiming that his story was about the media's treatment of the torture issue in general, and not Ross' story specifically. Sifton, who says Ross is as good a reporter as you can be when it comes to covering CIA activities under a veil of secrecy, says he told Stelter specifically that it would be unfair to single out Ross when any number of other reporters have made similar mistakes. "I didn't know that this story was going to be a hatchet job on Brian Ross," he told Gawker.

Ross is working on a follow-up to his Kiriakou story, and for the time being ABC News has appended an update to the story on the web:

U.S. Government documents released in April 2009 indicate that Kiriakou's account that Abu Zubaydah broke after only one water boarding session was incorrect. According to a footnote in newly released, previously classified "Top Secret" memos, the CIA used the water board "at least 83 times during August 2002 in the interrogation of Zubaydah."

Following the release of the documents, Kiriakou said: "When I spoke to ABC News in December 2007 I was aware of Abu Zubaydah being water boarded on one occasion. It was after this one occasion that he revealed information related to a planned terrorist attack. As I said in the original interview, my information was second-hand. I never participated in the use of enhanced techniques on Abu Zubaydah or on any other prisoner, nor did I witness the use of such techniques."

CNET video correspondent Natali Del Conte kicked back.

New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter was an eyewitness to injustice.

Mancunian editrix Louise Bolotin sang her heart out.

VentureBeat editor Eric Eldon found a benefit to his Facebook obsession.

Fox Chicago anchordame Nancy Loo suffered for her art.

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