British writer and analyst Charles Leadbeater, and researcher Annika Wong, have put together a report called Cloud Culture to be published by the British Council next year. Their statistical study, provided to me by Leadbeater, is based on figures from the social media analytics company Sysomos. It shows that such a tiny proportion of Iranians are on Twitter that any stories about a new movement based on the social network are meaningless. The figure they provide, by they way, includes the thousands of foreigners who changed their Twitter location to Tehran when the 'Iranian internet revolution' story struck after the elections in June and Facebook and Twitter were afire with Iran sentiment. So the likely figure is even lower.

The report adds that only one third of Iranians have internet access at all. And because opposition supporters are young, and on the internet, and Ahmadinejad supporters tend to be older and rural, the picture on the ground is likely skewed by any analysis that relies on tweets.

Leadbeater and Wong also compile a series of hyperbolic quotes from a variety of media sources at the time of the protests:

• "Twitter has become a key information conduit as the authorities in Tehran have cracked down on reporting by traditional media." Chris Nuttall and Daniel Dombey, Financial Times.
• "After disputed election results and massive street demonstrations in Tehran, Iran, information is flooding out of the country – on Twitter." Ashley Terry, Global News.
• "This is it. The big one." Clay Shirky of NYU.
• "We've been struck by the amount of video and eyewitness testimony... The days when regimes can control the flow of information are over." Jon Williams, BBC World News editor.

The meme was just too tempting, it seems, for anyone to dig into its veracity. The media — this site included — loves to write about Twitter, and loved doing so even more in summer when it was even newer and shiner. The storyline also fit the fact that Iran is a young country, and chimed with the heartbreaking YouTube video of the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan.

The solidarity that thousands, even millions of Americans showed with the people of Iran during June's elections and the subsequent protests was admirable. It was also potentially dangerous. I was at the UN protests against President Ahmadinejad earlier this fall. Several young men were wearing dust masks they had purchased from hardware stores. I asked one why. "I am wearing it because I have to go back to Iran," said a softly-spoken and shy 28-year-old student who gave his name only as Mohammed. "I return next year and this is for safety, in case they are watching," he added, pointing to his mask. "It could be the best $3 I ever spend."

If Mohammed is picked up despite his dust mask, the fact that the protests in Tehran were partly fomented by Western support based on a false story about Twitter will be of no consolation. It's probably not much comfort to these people either.

Bahari was released on $300,000 bail by Iranian authorities yesterday. It was initially unclear whether he would be allowed to leave the country, but Newsweek just announced via press release that he has arrived in London. We trust he won't return to Tehran for his next court date. Bahari's wife Paola Gourley is due to give birth in six days.

Evin Prison is a very, very bad place. Another Canadian-Iranian journalist, Zahra Kazemi, died there in 2003 after reportedly being tortured and raped. The Iranians said she suffered a stroke. Bahari was dragged before cameras not long after his arrest and "confessed" that the western media were deliberately trying to undermine Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We are glad he is out, and hope that one day he can safely return to his homeland.

You would think a meeting between fighting tribal factions in Iran, would be a super safe place, but a suicide bomber killed at least 29 people at a "Shiite-Sunni Tribes' Solidarity Conference" on Sunday. The dead included six commanders of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards. A Sunni insurgent group took responsibility for the attack, but even with other people taking credit for the bombing some Iranian officials say there's an American conspiracy at work.

The Baluchistan truthers include Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani who said "If we review the past, there have been many secret and public reports on the US connections and aids to the terrorists in the province... and this shows Americans' enmity towards Iran's progress." In a statement released through the Fars news agency, the Revolutionary Guard said the bombing was the work of "terrorists" backed by "the great Satan America and its ally Britain." Iranian officials also promised to strike back at those responsible for the attack, which makes the allegations of US involvement pretty ominous.

Update: Now Iran is also blaming Pakistan for this bombing. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told reporters in his best James Bond movie villain voice that "some security agents in Pakistan are co-operating with the main elements of this terrorist incident... we regard it as our right to demand these criminals from them."

As for that first bit of news, we've uncovered an exclusive, an uncomfortable truth about Ahmadinejad yet to be revealed but here, for the first time, right now: he faked his way through his haftorah portion. Kidding! But no, really, he might be a Jew. Commence self-loathing, mother-hating, guilt-ridden jokes in three, two, and...

A close-up of the Ahmadinejad's ID reveals that the Iranian leader, who has described the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry as a "myth," was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver. The Telegraph said the short note scrawled on the card suggests that his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth. The Sabourjians, according to the report, traditionally hail from Aradan, Ahmadinejad's birthplace, and the name derives from "weaver of the Sabour", the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia.

Fuckin' Jews, indeed! This isn't the first time this accusation has come up, either. The name "Sabourjian" is on a list of reserved names for Iranian Jews by Iran's government. And yes, "experts" are saying that his attacks on Jews—which include wanting to blow Israel into the next dimension, as well as vehement Holocaust denial—could be over-compensating. Two more important questions then arise: what kind of car does he drive, and how big is his dick? THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE. So now that Ahmadinejad has his own birthers—ironically, The Jews—he's gotta come up with something to distract the public from figuring out why he's so goddamn good with money. Adonai-damnit, he's got nuclear capabilities. Go figure.

The New York Times reported today that senior staff members at the UN have, after vetting a report by the official (and official sounding) International Atomic Energy Agency, figured out that Iran is well on their way to making us all green...with radiation.

In recent interviews, a senior European official familiar with the contents of the full report described it to The New York Times. He confirmed that Mr. Albright's excerpts were authentic. The excerpts were drawn from a 67-page version of the report written earlier this year and since revised and lengthened, the official said; its main conclusions remain unchanged. "This is a running summary of where we are," the official said. "But there is some loose language," he added, and it was "not ready for publication as an official document." Most dramatically, the report says the agency "assesses that Iran has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device" based on highly enriched uranium.

Also interesting: Iran picked up this information via the Black market (where else?) and then proceeded to pick away at the specific pieces of information that were pertinent to their cause. But who planted it on the Black market? Who else? The Russians. In Soviet Russia, market black you:

...Many intelligence agencies assume that Iran obtained a bomb design from A. Q. Khan, the rogue Pakistani black marketer who sold it machines to enrich uranium. That information may have been supplemented by a Russian nuclear weapons scientist who visited Iran often, investigators say.

Do we have a ball game? We have a ball game. Also, is everyone in Russia a leaky weapons scientist? It's like everyone there down to the guy who keeps the pay phones working knows something about nuclear technology that can kill us all. It's apparently in their seventh grade curriculum, somewhere between The Outsiders and dividing fractions. The donkey show in Moscow—where donkey show you— is expensive and we're all gonna die, so the pay phone fixing nuclear scientist hooks up Iran and King Khan the Black Market Badass, and the self-loathing Jew pays to invest in wiping his guilt-shilling relatives out of existence. Also, gefilte fish. That, too. It always figured that the Jewish state's biggest menace would be a guilt-ridden one of their own (Bernie Madoff, here's looking at you). Really, though. Who needs a nuke when your country's revolting every six days? A guy with a small penis, that's who.

The disclosure last week was unambiguous: Iran has for years been building a secret nuclear facility near the holy city of Qom. The facility, according to anonymous intelligence sources who briefed the press on Friday, is suitable for producing enough uranium for a weapon, but not enough uranium for commercial applications. In other words, the Iranians are trying to develop a nuclear weapon.

But today, the Times publishes hemming and hawing from anonymous U.S. intelligence sources, who "have stood firm in their conclusion that while Iran may ultimately want a bomb, the country halted work on weapons design in 2003 and probably has not restarted that effort - a judgment first made public in a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate." Germany and Israel, the paper says, are quite confident that Iran is actively working on a weapon, but the U.S. is—perhaps suffering from a well-earned crisis of confidence after the Iraq debacle—claiming that building a secret site that can apparently only refine enough uranium for a nuclear bomb is somehow qualitatively different from re-starting a nuclear weapons program.

Today's Times piece is essentially identical to a Newsweek story that ran earlier this month—before the Qom disclosures—headlined "Intelligence Agencies Say No New Nukes in Iran" and claiming that the U.S. didn't believe Iran was seeking a bomb, but that many of our allies disagree. We pointed out last week how unfortunate it must have been for Mark Hosenball, the Newsweek reporter who wrote it, to have had his scoop superseded so quickly by news of the Qom facility, which to most rational minds would seem to indicate both that Iran is seeking a bomb, and that the U.S. has known that it is for years. But today's Times piece indicates that there is some deliberate kabuki going on, with the U.S. apparently wanting to take a stern stand against Iran and at the same time insisting that there is no "official" nuclear program. An admission of the latter would tend to back the U.S. into a corner—if there is an actual, active program to build a nuclear bomb, it would make it harder to justify not taking military action, no? And such a statement from the U.S. would certainly give cover to Israel if they decided to bomb Iran's facilities.

The trouble is, the hairsplitting is defining nuclear deviancy down. The original 2007 National Intelligence Estimate [pdf] that both Newsweek and the Times say we're sticking by said that "Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program." Today's Times, however, moves the goalposts slightly by reporting that our spooks think Iran "halted work on weapons design in 2003 and probably has not restarted that effort." Well, there are programs, and then there are designs. The 2007 estimate said there was no program—which would include, we imagine, an effort to enrich uranium for the purposes of building a weapon, which it seems like Iran is in fact doing. If the fact that there is, allegedly, no active design component to that program makes it not really a program, then what are we worried about them secretly enriching uranium for, anyway?

And who needs to work on a nuclear weapon design when you already have a nuclear weapons design? According to the Guardian, Iran has been sitting on a warhead blueprint since at least 2005, courtesy Pakistan's nuclear pied piper A.Q. Khan:

International suspicion of Iran's nuclear programme heightened yesterday when it was revealed that Tehran had obtained a blueprint showing how to build the core of a nuclear warhead.

So, to recap: Iran is building a secret nuclear facility to enrich enough uranium only for a bomb but not for anything else but we stand by our 2007 assessment that they have not re-started their nuclear weapons program which we are now retroactively amending to say they have not re-started a nuclear warhead design program even though they probably already have a nuclear warhead design. So you see, there's no nuclear weapons program.

This is all seen through a glass darkly, and much or all of it is probably not true, and there's nuance and detail that only sophisticated followers of the issue would understand. But the Times' job, and Newsweek's, is to report what's going on as clearly as possible and without submitting to the spin and info-ops wordplay that the spooks are clearly throwing up right now. We dumped on Hosenball's story last week because we read it at face value in light of news of the Qom facility, but it turns out to have been substantially correct inasmuch as it reported that the U.S. intelligence community claims to believe something that it clearly does not believe, because to publicly claim to believe it would reduce the administration's available options. So our apologies to Hosenball—we just wish that he, and the Times, had mentioned the how ludicrous it is for their sources to claim that whatever Iran is doing doesn't count as a nuclear weapons program simply because we've decided a priori that for Iran to have an active nuclear weapons program would make things very hard for us.

The semi-official Fars News Agency released this picture of a missile test that went down on Sunday — that's two days after the government fessed up to enriching uranium and one week before Iranian officials meet with U.S. representatives to discuss the nation's nuclear program. How serendipitous.

Iran, of course, say the plans are peaceful, but the rest of the world thinks they're fibbing. And Revolutionary Guard leader Gen. Hossein Salami's missile-related statement doesn't help matters: he insists Iran will "respond to any military action in a crushing manner." Yow.

But, no matter, because Iran got what it wanted: a bargain chip for next week's meeting and a guaranteed spot on the morning news cycle. Well played, but this won't likely endear you to people like Hillary Clinton. The Secretary of State said she and her crew will give Iran a chance to defend their "peaceful" claims, but she's not holding her breath. "We don't believe that they can present convincing evidence," she said on CBS' Face the Nation. And, really, can one blame her skepticism?

Today we learned that a) Iran has for years been building a secret nuclear facility suitable only for bomb-making purposes near the holy city of Qom, b) that, according to the Washington Post, "earlier this year they began installing the infrastructure required for 3,000 centrifuges that could produce highly-enriched uranium" at the facility, and c) that the United States intelligence community has known about it for years.

Which, in retrospect, makes Newsweek reporter Mark Hosenball's "online exclusive" of September 16 look rather suspect: "The U.S. intelligence community is reporting to the White House that Iran has not restarted its nuclear-weapons development program, two counterproliferation officials tell NEWSWEEK."

Hosenball's story reported that the intelligence community continued as recently as nine days ago to stand behind it's 2007 assessment [pdf] that "in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program" and "had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007." If it's true that earlier this year Iran began installing centrifuges in a facility designed only to produce uranium for nuclear weapons, then it looks like Hosenball got hosed.

Of course, reporting on counterproliferation efforts is notoriously murky, and there's got to be some margin for error. Especially confusing is the fact that the intelligence community released—during the Bush Administration, mind you—the aforementioned 2007 report absolving Iran of any suspicions of an active nuclear weapons program when they almost certainly knew of the secret Qom facility. According to the Post, White House officials claim to have known about the site for "several years"; the Iran report was released in November 2007, less than two years ago.

Maybe there's some arcane distinction between officially "re-starting" a nuclear program and actively building a secret site for the purposes of building nuclear bombs, but it sure looks like they've re-started something, doesn't it?

Also, from the New York Times:

American officials said that they had been tracking the covert project for years, but that Mr. Obama decided to disclose the American findings after Iran discovered, in recent weeks, that Western intelligence agencies had breached the secrecy surrounding the complex.

Surprise!

As the CEO of a publicly-traded company, tech stalwart Hewlett Packard, Fiorinia had a fiduciary duty to maximize profits for her shareholders. It takes immense hubris to think that can be reconciled with a future in public service. But then Silicon Valley is a famously arrogant place; that's why this election cycle has two political novices, Fiorina and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, trying to leverage corporate experience into elected office.

Fiorina's having a rough time of it. Her latest problem: defending herself against charges that HP made loads of money during her tenure by selling its products in Iran despite a U.S. trade embargo. "To her knowledge, during her tenure, HP never did business in Iran," Fiorina's campaign told the San Jose Mercury News.

Really? Fiorina had no idea? That's odd, since...

• Fiorina in 2003 noted Middle East sales were defying global trends, and, as the Merc notes, HP's partner there issued a press release saying sales topped $100 million and that "the seeds of the Redington-Hewlett-Packard relationship were sowed six years ago for one market - Iran."
  
• Three of the three HP partners in the Middle East contacted by Christopher Stewart for a story in Portfolio magazine's August 2008 issue readily agreed to ship printers to Iran. Portfolio notified HP of the incidents, but the company didn't condemn them, instead refusing comment. Fiorina was gone as CEO at this point, but Portfolio noted that diversion of American products to Iran trough Dubai had been going strong for many years.
• HP had an office in the Dubai free-trade zones notorious for funneling American goods to Iran, Portfolio reported — so it had ample means to be aware of how its products were being shipped.
  
• After the SEC noticed the prevalance of HP products in Iran, it asked the company about the matter, and got back a letter from the company saying its Dutch subsidiary sold $120 million to Iran in 2008.
• Finally, in January 2009, HP severed ties with Redington Gulf, the distributor that had publicly bragged about its Iran trade six years earlier.
  
  
  

If Fiorina appears to have turned a blind eye to shipments of her products into Iran, that's what she was supposed to do, as CEO; as both the Merc and Portfolio note, the company most likely stayed on the legal — and profitable — side of a gray zone, a loophole in U.S. trade sanctions. But it will be tough to look patriotic while explaining that to voters. Fiorina had better hope her fellow Republicans continue to be more interested by the supposed dangers of universal health care and illegal immigration than by the War on Terror launched by their party's last president.

Shane Bauer, one of the three detainees, has a story about corruption in federal contracting—completely unrelated to his travels to Iraq—in the forthcoming issue of Mother Jones. His friend Shon Meckfessel, who was with the three Americans in Iraqi Kurdistan, says they were simply sightseeing and hiked unwittingly into Iran.

Every year, Veronis Suhlers Stevenson issues a big report which basically tells you everything that will happen in the media industry in the near future. This year's is coming out soon! VSS says overall ad spending will fall almost 8% this year, and won't tick back up until 2011. Also interesting: "[In 2008] for the first time, consumers spent more time with media they paid for, like books or cable television, than with primarily ad-supported media, like newspapers and magazines." What are you people made out of money?!?


Iran has been "detaining" a journalist by the name of Maziar Bahari since the protests there in June. Now Newsweek is going all out in calling for his release, which is probably the most useful thing Newsweek's done this week. Cause there's really no "news" to be found, trust us.


Jon Fine reports that Joe Mansueto, owner of Inc. and Fast Company, "has expressed interest in pursuing a deal for BusinessWeek." Others interested include Bruce Wasserstein and several PE firms. You can afford this magazine, people! Let's get some competition here.


Dan Rather's hobby, in retirement, is tending to his little $70 million lawsuit against CBS, like lesser retirees tend to gardens. Now he's filed a new lawsuit trying to get CBS execs Les Moonves and Andrew Heyward personally attached to the suit, so he can legally claim their testicles as part of the settlement. Old age is treating Dan Rather well.

Sanctions have failed, Iran will nuke us all within days, and we (sorry, they! Only Israel has the balls to do what that commie fag Obama won't, because he loves the terrorists) will be greeted as liberators. No, seriously, John Bolton thinks the people of Iran would welcome a military invasion by Israel.

Significantly, the uprising in Iran also makes it more likely that an effective public diplomacy campaign could be waged in the country to explain to Iranians that such an attack is directed against the regime, not against the Iranian people. This was always true, but it has become even more important to make this case emphatically, when the gulf between the Islamic revolution of 1979 and the citizens of Iran has never been clearer or wider. Military action against Iran's nuclear program and the ultimate goal of regime change can be worked together consistently.

Hah. Ha ha ha.

Elsewhere, Dana Milbank reports on dumb messages on Obama's Facebook wall, David Broder wonders if there is maybe still racism anywhere (conclusion: probably!), and David Ignatius reports that those wacky Russians have loved strongmen for many years.

But how are these guys all doing traffic-wise? (Maybe we should stop linking to them!)

Michael van Poppel of BNO News caught CNN grabbing the posts of a user called PersianKiwi—one of the more prominent of the Iranian Twitterers—and inserting them into the mouths of sources in this online piece from last week.

Here's PersianKiwi posting on the morning of June 24:

they were waiting for us - they all have guns and riot uniforms - it was like a mouse trap - ppl being shot like animals #Iranelection 6:53 AM Jun 24th from web

I see many ppl with broken arms/legs/heads - blood everywhere - pepper gas like war - #Iranelection 6:35 AM Jun 24th from web

And here's CNN's online coverage of street protests in Iran, posted later the same day:

TEHRAN, Iran (CNN) — Security forces wielding clubs and firing weapons beat back hundreds of would-be demonstrators who had flocked to a square in the capital on Wednesday to continue protests against an election they have denounced as fraudulent, witnesses told CNN.

"They were waiting for us," one source said. "They all have guns and riot uniforms. It was like a mouse trap."

"I see many people with broken arms, legs, heads - blood everywhere - pepper gas like war," the source said.

A CNN spokesman couldn't immediately explain how PersianKiwi became a CNN "source."

UPDATE: CNN spokesman Nigel Pritchard says it was a mistake: "Multiple sources contributed to our coverage in this particular report, many directly to CNN. The material was corroborated using various methods, including other first-hand accounts from the scene. Regrettably, two of these specific quotes should have been attributed as coming from an individual on Twitter, as we have done on numerous other occasions."

[Via Soup; graphic by Michael van Poppel.]

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.A little while ago Michael Hirschorn wrote a piece in the Atlantic about the New York Times in which he pointed out that the paper could go out of business in May of 2009. This was a clearly hyperbolic statement, but now it's the chief thing that NYT "defenders" (as opposed to "impartial analysts") pick up and wave around: "Haha, look, we're still in business!" No shit. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Sorry, just had to get that off my chest. In Ad Age there's a piece suggesting that the Sulzbergers should be safely in charge of the NYT Co. until at least 2015, assuming a broader economic revival. Well, nothing to worry about, then. America's greatest paper won't be sold off to a heartless Mexican oligarch for pennies on the dollar for at least five or six more years. Once all the layoffs are done.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.This whole Iran business has news outlets showing web videos and Twitter messages that they haven't even personally verified, if you can imagine. Nevertheless, Iran now has more journalists in jail than any other nation. Foolish government, leave the journalists out there to keep spreading unverified Twitter messages which will destroy journalistic integrity forever, bwahaha!

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The Serious Media spent too much time and space covering Michael Jackson's death, says Tim Rutten in the most predictable column ever written. Stop writing about it then, Tim.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Ho hum, the US television industry is looking at a $2 billion decline in ad revenue over the next four years, according to a new report. They call this an "inflection point" but we call it a "you will never get that MTV VJ gig you used to practice with a hairbrush in front of your mirror for" point.

It looks like it could be winding down. The protesters don't have the brute force and weaponry that the police and Basij do, nor the incentive for violence, it appears. Also, some of their strongest voices are being identified and arrested:

- Andrew Sullivan notes one incredibly prolific blogger/twitterer from Iran who's appearing to have been detained.

- The daughter and four relatives of Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjan were briefly detained. Despite being one of the more powerful figures in Iran, Rafsanjan is "believed to be" a supporter of the protests, and thus, susceptible to the wide net cast during the crackdown.

- Strong words via Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as he lashed out again at President Obama, this time asking: "Didn't he say that he was after change? Why did he interfere? They keep saying that they want to hold talks with Iran ... but is this the correct way? Definitely, they have made a mistake."

- The nighttime raids and beatings are getting particularly bad, notes Human Rights Watch. The Basij have been given run of the country. They're destroying private property, beating civilians, savaging entire neighborhoods, and detaining essentially anyone they feel like taking on. They're doing it to quell the rooftop chants and protests at night; nobody's complaining to the police, who're turning a completely blind eye to this sort of thing.

- The Basij are fighting back on the internet, using crowdsourcing to identify prominent protesters they can arrest and detain.

The picture that's beginning to come together: the protesters are tired, and the dissenting contingent of Iran is exhausted and starting to get a little scared. And now that Mir Hussein Moussavi has promised to conduct only "official protests" under what could only begin to be described as government pressure - which, come on, I'm more likely to get clearance to run assnaked on Lex from 92nd on down tonight - the figurehead of the political opposition to Iran's standing government has been more or less crippled.

It's easy to sit around and blog about how hard people are fighting, or how hard reporters are actually reporting, but honestly: we really have no idea what kind of energy it takes to do so. Moving the ground beneath one's feet, let alone that of an entire government's, can't be easy. Maybe they just needed a weekend off, maybe there's more to come tomorrow, or maybe this game's already been called. Whatever it is, it isn't looking good for anybody who hasn't already aligned themselves with Iran's re-ignited regime.

Opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi appears to be running out of options. According to the New York Times, he's promising to conduct only officially permitted protests (not likely) and the Guardian Council, which already validated Ahmadinejad's election, has validated it again. "There has been no fraud in the election," a spokesman announced.

And after blaming foreign reports for all their troubles, Iranian officials are also making extra efforts to silence the media (satellite signals have been jammed), which shouldn't be too difficult for a regime willing to arrest an entire newspaper (an estimated 40 journalists have been taken into custody). And don't wait for Twitter to ride in on a horse and save everybody. "It is still possible that the information age will crack authoritarian structures in Iran," writes Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East program for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "But it is far more likely that the government will be able to use that technology to secure its own rule."

To top it all off, ‘influential' cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, speaking at Friday Prayer in Tehran, called for protesters to be dealt with extra persuasively (with death).

Meanwhile, President Obama is not impressed. "There is no doubt that any direct dialogue or diplomacy with Iran is going to be affected by the events of the last several weeks. We don't yet know how any potential dialogue will have been affected until we see what has happened inside of Iran," he says, adding that the "clock is ticking" on Iran's development of a nuclear program.

The Iranian government is taking the direct approach to censorship: They arrested the entire staff of opposition candidate candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi's newspaper. Reporters Without Borders says about 40 journalists in all have been arrested in Iran since the protests began. The Iranian government is run by jerks.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Conde Nast would really like Vogue to have a very strong September—traditionally the fattest month for fashion magazines—to help rescue the flailing company's finances. But Keith Kelly says that it doesn't look like it's going to happen this year. Vogue's biggest September issue ever came in 2007, when it had 727 ad pages; this year, the publisher's predicting "over 400 pages of advertising." Buy more fashion for the sake of the media!

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Julius Genachowski has finally been confirmed as the new chairman of the FCC. He's a former venture capital guy, a close friend to Obama, a supporter of net neutrality, and generally not a moralizing wingnut, as was the standard at the FCC during the Bush years.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The South Carolina paper that broke the story of Mark Sanford's Argentinian affair spoke on how the hell they sat on the love-letter emails for six months without publishing: They emailed the addresses back and never got a response! So they couldn't confirm it. And we thought that level of investigative malaise was solely confined to the blogsphere! They also say they still don't know who tipped them off originally, which is really the most interesting remaining part of this story until the XXX photos come out.