Okay, before we delve into Med Grow Cannabis College and its myriad innovations in marijuana education, let's get all the dumb dope jokes out of the way: Yes, Med Grow Cannabis College does give new meaning to the phrase "higher education."

They didn't even use the extra two days to change this lead. Dude.

[Sorry, losers. Pic via]

The Washington City Paper broke the story, and has the full internal memo on the bureau closures. Key graf:

At a time of limited resources and increased competitive pressure, it's necessary to concentrate our journalistic firepower on our central mission of covering Washington and the news, trends and ideas that shape both the region and the country's politics, policies and government.

Total economic move. The Post is smart to protect its core competency, but this is pretty...sudden. But they may look smart for it, eventually, by not sucking themselves dry covering shit WaPo readers can get elsewhere, better, if they actually want it at all. The NYT, meanwhile, recently expanded its coverage in San Francisco and Chicago, so we have a nice little dichotomy to see which strategy looks smarter a couple years from now.

The incident began when the little deer "ran between people" and leaped into the lion pit, then was attacked and toyed with by a pair of bloodthirsty beasts for "as much as 20 minutes." Then, as is depicted in the below video, the little deer broke free! And escaped to the relative safety of a body of water. The crowd shrieked, gasped, cheered, and caught it all on video. When zoo personnel finally broke up the crowd to rescue the nimble survivor, the harrowing tale reached its happy ending...

OR SO IT SEEMED.

For there, in The Washington Post's Monday Metro section, was the tale's true, tragic conclusion:

Alerted, zoo personnel sent visitors away and brought the lions indoors. With the enclosure empty, the deer left the moat on its own. It was anesthetized and taken for evaluation by specialists. ...

Baker-Masson said the examination indicated that in addition to head and neck scratches, the deer had a serious wound on its belly. ...

They found it "pretty evident" that the deer "would not survive," and it was euthanized, Baker-Masson said.

And thus concludes the sad story of the Deer That Almost Lived, the saddest viral video ever uploaded to the internet, in retrospect. Even sadder than Bambi's mom and the Lion King's dad, because this one is real, and must have caused at least one 5-year-old to wet his pants out of terror that day at the zoo.

Near-retiree Washington Post editor Henry Allen punched writer Manuel Roig-Franzia in the face after Roig-Franzia called him a "cocksucker." Hank Steuver, a WaPo colleague whose editor is Allen, thinks the man may have some issues:

What made Henry snap was that a writer called him a naughty word, an epithet that rhymes with "coughstucker" and is playfully or spitefully reserved as a way to insult a man, by implying he's gay.

Being an enthusiastic coughstucker myself, I would someday like to ask Henry if it was the insulting delivery of the word, or the subtext of gayness that the word implies that angered him most?...Was it about the person who said it? The way he said it? Or that it was said at all? If another person in Style called me a coughstucker, I'd just have to shrug and use the Popeye retort: I am what I am.

You're totally missing the point, Hank. Imagine how you would feel if someone called you a vagina sucker! It's a slur because it was meant to be a slur. Why not ask Manuel why in the world he would use "cocksucker" as anything less than a term of endearment? Outrageous! A slur is not rendered moot to the average testosterone-filled male simply because it's true. I may be ugly, but I don't want it pointed out to me.

[And be sure to watch that dramatic re-enactment video of the fight, performed by Washington City Paper employees. A+. It does make Henry Allen appear somewhat unstable though! Via Romenesko]

Gene Weingarten's nomination for Worst WaPo Styles Piece of All Time: This thing. "The Light and the Labyrinth." I read it but do not understand it? It has to do with a labyrinth *apparently*. Full analysis in the comments, please. And the conceptually worst Styles story of today is "Rich Kids Like Heroin, Surprisingly."


How is the media in Russia making money, these days? Sexy nude women and bloody murder. They've surpassed us already.


Hey, it is a story about The Onion, in the New York Times. The funny thing about The Onion is how boring its writing process is: "It's a very specific, regimented format...We spend hundreds of hours in the room deconstructing the jokes. I don't think there's anything comparable to the amount of material we generate and reject just to come up with the week's headlines." Actually that's the unfunny thing about The Onion.


The most important issue currently facing television viewers: Whether voiceovers in commercials next year will say "Two thousand ten" or "Twenty ten." Or maybe "Two thousand and ten." Regardless, as long as they remember to say "no homo" afterwards they'll be okay.

Erik Wemple reports that Allen and Roig-Franzia had been beefing for days before the incident, ever since Henry questioned one of Manuel's stories and Manuel called him a "dick." Then, last Friday, Manuel allegedly "reached across the table and grabbed Allen's notepad, tearing a page from it."

Cruising for a bruising, Manuel. Selling woof tickets. Your mouth is writing some pretty big checks. Can your ass cash those checks? Subsequent events indicate your ass cannot.

Fast forward to the battle in question later that day, when Manuel called Henry a "cocksucker" after he criticized another story:

At that, Allen leapt into action, shoving Roig-Franzia. He then popped him in the cheek [Ed. note: We hear there's still some question as to whether it landed on the cheek or the back of the head]. According to an eyewitness account, Roig-Franzia didn't try to match the 5-11, 200-pound Allen punch for punch, instead opting for more of a civil-rights-movementy kind of stance.

We think you get the picture. Allen was told never to return to the newsroom, the CP says, but guess what: he already took a buyout and was retiring this month anyhow. Haha.

Henry Allen wins. And incidentally—Allen reportedly told Roig-Franzia that the "charticle" that got him so mad in the first place was the second-worst story he'd seen in 43 years. The worst, according to the CP: "a mistake-ridden profile of Paul Robeson that never saw the printed page." Paul Robeson was also a badass.

Violence is wrong, etc.
[Self portrait by Henry Allen himself]

Your Fighters:

Henry Allen, Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran WaPo feature writer and editor who is "nearly 70" and an ex-Marine.


Manuel Roig-Franzia, much younger WaPo staff writer who knows how to "make a mean gumbo."

The Washingtonian has the stunning details of the journobrawl: Reportedly, Roig-Franzia and his colleague Monica Hesse filed a charticle about historic political ethics violations that enraged Allen, who called it "the second worst story I have seen in Style in 43 years." We can't wait to hear what happens next!

"Oh, Henry," [Roig-Franzia] supposedly said, "don't be such a cocks——-."

Allen lunged at Roig-Franzia, threw him to the newsroom floor, and started throwing punches. Roig-Franzia tried to fend him off. Brauchli and others pulled the two apart.

That would be WaPo editor Marcus Brauchli, who reportedly helped break up the fight himself! Then he reportedly pulled Allen into his office, maybe to fire him?!? Although one could argue that Roig-Franzia should possibly be fired as well on general principle if he did in fact lose a fistfight to a near-septuagenarian!

WaPo staffers, we know you have more details, and maybe sexxxy fight pixxx! Can this be accurately termed an "ass whupping," or was it just a "sucker punch," or was it more of an "embarrassing flailing about?" Email us at once.

UPDATE: FishbowlDC (which apparently broke this story, hey), has a source saying "it was a single punch and no one was on the ground."

We're thinking it was like this, but if Zimmer had ducked and then knocked Pedro Martinez out:

According to the Washington Post's Jenna Johnson, Cooper posted an ad on a Georgetown jobs board last week looking for someone to do the wash, drive him to and from his part-time job at—wait for it—a financial services company, pay parking tickets, run errands, and schedule hair appointments.

A lot of Cooper's fellow students are aghast, and think entitled trust-fund twits like Cooper give Georgetown a bad name as a finishing school for entitled trust-fund twits, which it is. But come on—Cooper was raised in Bethesda, graduated from the Landon School, a private "boys' school" designed to turn out incipient entitled trust-fund twits, and his "Linked-In profile says he is considering jobs in finance, entertainment or both," so what are we really to expect of him?

Based on the ludicrousness of the wanted ad itself, which is posted in full below and says things like "tasks such as doing laundry that involve a lot of waiting around (time when you could be doing other tasks or doing your own stuff) will be counted for the approximate amount of time it would take to do the labor involved, [so] laundry will be counted for half an hour even though a laundry cycle takes 1.5 hrs to complete," we're pretty sure it's a prank. But it's in the Washington Post, so it's got to be true, right? Also, this YouTube video of someone named Charley Cooper's trip to Cancun during Spring Break 2008, which is posted on the same page as several other videos by a Charley Cooper who attended the Landon School and so almost certainly by Charley Cooper in question, presents independent corroborating evidence of trust-fund twit entitlement:

The Post interviewed Cooper for its story, but he insisted that it be conducted over Facebook—another red flag (that's his Facebook photo above). He said the need for someone to schedule his hair appointments was prompted by an illness in the family, and that "if I didn't already have a job, I would definitely be interested in a job that pays 10 to 12 dollars per hour and is flexible in terms of hours."

Hoax or no, the Case of Charley Cooper brings to our attention a serious matter: The increasing willingness of newspapers to appropriate the hard work of bloggers. Cooper was first reviled as a "prematurely self-important" by the blog of student newspaper the Georgetown Voice on Friday, and today the Post picked up the story in whole cloth, adding only an interview with Cooper and a wealth of background information and reporting on him. Isn't it a blogger's job to mock twits like these? And if newspapers are free to just grab instances of eyeball-exploding arrogance and unearned wealth from blogs and serve them up to their readers in exchange for a mere link, how are blogs supposed to survive? Just asking.

Here's the ad:

Job Description:

I am a Georgetown undergrad student and part time employee in the financial services industry. I am looking for someone to take care some of my everyday tasks for 1 hr a day, 5 hrs/ week, $12/hr. I live on campus which would make things very easy convenient for a Georgetown student. The normal pay per week will be $60 ($300/month), even though on occasion it will be possible to work additional hours and/or receive bonuses at my discretion.

The schedule is completely flexible because I do not need to be around when you do the work. You can even spread it out over the course of the day. As my PA you will receive an email once a day by 9:00 am with a task list for that day and a time estimate for each task. Important tasks will be bolded on the list and must be done that day (even though everything on the list should theoretically be finished on a daily basis). At the end of the day you will send me an email telling me what tasks are incomplete or that all tasks have been completed.

Tasks such as doing laundry that involve a lot of waiting around (time when you could be doing other tasks or doing your own stuff) will be counted for the approximate amount of time it would take to do the labor involved. For instance, laundry will be counted for half an hour even though a laundry cycle takes 1.5 hrs to complete.

Job Requirements:

PA example tasks -Organize closet -make bed -Drop off / pick up dry cleaning -Drop me off / pick me up from work -Do laundry -Fill up gas tank -bring car for servicing -schedule appointment for haircut -Pay parking tickets -manage electronic accounts -shopping and running errands -other random tasks.

Preference will be given to applicants who are comfortable with city driving (car will be provided) and who are available when I need to be picked up and dropped off for work. Preference will also be given to Georgetown undergrads for convenience.

Available Openings: 1

Hours: 3.0 to 7.0 hours per week

Compensation: $10.00/hour to $12.00/hour, Occasional Bonuses

Start Date: Immediately

End Date: End of School Year

Time Frame: Academic Year

The short version of the story: the Washington Post planned to have dinners between reporters and lobbyists that the lobbyists would pay to attend, so they could talk to reporters. That's a little shady, but still more or less allowed. What's not cool is if those dinners were off-the-record, meaning that the public couldn't have knowledge of what lobbyists did or did not say to reporters who wrote about their jobs. The idea of the press and the people who push money around Washington to promote legislative causes getting together for expensive, secret pow-wows that would line the pocket of the Post is such a massive conflict-of-interest and ethics violation, it makes Fox News' "Fair and Balanced" tagline seem completely legit in comparison. The Post eventually woke up and canned the idea.

In July, Politico broke the story, and it resulted in the resignation of the Washington Post's marketing director, Charles Pelton, in September. What's great about being a sales and marketing exec at a newspaper is that they don't give a shit about ethics until somebody tells them "stop." In this case, that person should've been Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli, whose reporters would be at these dinners. But Brauchli was cool with it. When the Times talked to Brauchli about the story in July, he claimed he thought the dinners would be on the record. When Pelton The Shady Marketing Director resigned over this in September, a bunch of lobbyists were like THAT SUCKS and Marcus Brauchli was like, I HAD NO IDEA HE WAS SHADY and issued a flat-out denial to the Times of any knowledge that the dinners were planned to be off the record.

Today, via The NYTpicker, the New York Times buried a note today in their corrections column:

...In a subsequent letter to (Charles) Pelton - which was sent to The Times by Mr. Pelton's lawyer - Mr. Brauchli now says that he did indeed know that the dinners were being promoted as "off the record," and that he and Mr. Pelton had discussed that issue.

Politico got the full letter between Pelton and Brauchli in which Brauchli claimed that he knew the records would be off the record, but not that kind of off the record. You know, the kind where we don't know who said what but we can still know who said it, which is a very specific kind of off the record called the "Chatham House Rule," which you've never heard of because you don't know bullshit journalism technicality lingo. You just know that "off the record" sure as shit sounds like "off the record," and that Brauchli claimed not to know the dinners were any kind of "off the record." Even Politico's Michael Caldrone, when he talked to Brauchli about it, got the same impression.

So, that happened. Brauchli-the executive editor of one of the largest newspapers in America-lied to the New York Times about how much he indeed knew about the ethical violations he and the Washington Post were in pursuit of before they killed the idea. But why'd the Times bury it in the corrections section? The NYTpicker contacted the Times for comment:

In an email to The NYTPicker, a NYT spokeswoman stands by the postscript. "The note speaks for itself," wrote Diane McNulty, the spokeswoman. "Information came to our attention after the Sept. 12 article and we decided that this note was warranted." McNulty did not elaborate.

Either the Times is embarassed they didn't dig deeper or needed to set the lines running for a larger report on how Brauchli's completely full of shit. Sadly, this is the kind of ethics violation Clark Hoyt would go to town on if he was allowed to write about anything else besides the New York Times. Also, sadly, this is how your newspaper sausage is made.

Under editor Fred Hiatt, the Post op-ed page has gone completely off the rails. They picked up Bill Kristol after the Times dumped him for being not just wrong but boring and lazy. They openly allow George Will to lie, to straight-up lie, without fact-checking or corrections, because we all know reality is open to different "interpretations" and if a prominent columnist writes something patently untrue the best response is to then publish a "true" column by someone else as a counterpoint, because that doesn't just represent everything misleading and terrible about the moden political press. They still publish Richard Cohen. The regular columnists are, for the most part, interchangeable ancient "moderate" liberals who haven't written or thought anything vaguely interesting since 1974. Anne Applebaum was allowed to publish a blog post in support of Roman Polanski without disclosing that her husband is Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who opposes extradition. Richard Cohen, again.

And on October 10, the Post published an insane editorial on how the Nobel Prize should've been awarded to a murdered Iranian protester. This suggests that either the entire editorial board doesn't know that Nobel Peace Prizes are never awarded posthumously or they simply don't give a shit. The piece is still not corrected, because presumably any "correction" would have to read "the entire premise of this editorial is bullshit, sorry."

So how do you follow that up? How about by running an op-ed by a law professor and a right-wing think tank goon about how Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was... unconstitutional, maybe? Who knows! Who cares! They acknowledge that two other sitting presidents have received the award, but they do not even do the meaningless-but-intellectually defensible thing of arguing that those awards were also unconstitutional, they just say this time it's different because Obama got it so therefore Congress should forbid him from accepting it, because of the House of Saud.

In conclusion, blogs are killing newspapers by being irresponsible and not caring about "the truth."

The skit comes to us by way of Kansas City Star TV critic Aaron Barnhart, who credits one of his readers for picking up on it. It showed Letterman in one of those Geico ads where a wad of money with eyeballs follows people around to the tune of Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching Me." Letterman notices the eyeballs on his desk, picks up a book, and smashes them. Blood spills out from beneath the book, the end. (Barnhart's YouTube page, where he posted the video, is here.)

It's sort of an odd skit to air the day before the arrest of a man who showed up outside Letterman's home in the early morning hours and threatened to reveal intimate details about his life if he didn't pay up. But as tempting as it is to believe that Letterman was acting out his revenge fantasies on his own show and sending a coded warning to his tormentor, we have to agree with Barnhart's conclusion that the skit is almost certainly a lovely coincidence: The extortion plot was closely held information at World Wide Pants, and it's highly unlikely that staffers were tossing ideas about it around the writer's room.

What isn't highly unlikely, however, is that the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz would pen a scolding and schoolmarmish column arguing that Letterman has gotten a pass from the press for dipping his pen in the company ink. Lo and behold:

If Letterman were the chief executive of a defense contractor, instead of a TV production company, would the media critics be so quick to let him skate on sleeping with the help?

You know, he's got a point. What if Letterman were a Catholic priest? You think Monsignor Letterman would get such soft coverage if he were sleeping with a nun? Or what if he were Stephanie Birkitt's father? Kurtz's incisive counterfactual has exposed the media-critic punditocracy for the hypocrites they are, because they insist on treating David Letterman as a private citizen who wasn't elected and receives no taxpayer dollars and broke no laws and wasn't married at the time the affairs were alleged to have happened and therefore was sadly free to do with his dick as he pleased, instead of treating him like a defense contractor, which would be much more satisfying for Howie Kurtz.

The Post has launched a reality-show-style contest seeking out a columnist for the paper to anoint as "America's Next Great Pundit," because "pundit" no longer means "person who expounds from knowledge and experience" but instead means "category of celebrity, like glorified hooker or bug-eater."

Here's your chance to put your opinions to the test — and win the opportunity to write a weekly column and a launching pad for your opinionating career!

Start making your case.
Use the entry form to send us a short opinion essay (400 words or less) pegged to a topic in the news and an additional paragraph (100 words or less) on yourself and why you should win. Entries will be judged on the basis of style, intelligence and freshness of argument, but not on whether Post editors agree or disagree with your point of view. Entry deadline: Oct. 21, 2009 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

Then get ready for the great debate.
Beginning on or about Oct. 30, ten prospective pundits will get to compete for the title of America's Next Great Pundit, facing off in challenges that test the skills a modern pundit must possess. They'll have to write on deadline, hold their own on video and field questions from Post readers. (Contestants won't have to quit their day jobs, but they should be prepared to put in about eight hours a week for three weeks.) After each round, a panel of Post personalities will offer kudos and catcalls, and reader votes will help to determine who gets another chance at a byline and who has to shut down their laptop.

Eyes on the prize.
The ultimate winner will get the opportunity to write a weekly column that may appear in the print and/or online editions of The Washington Post, paid at a rate of $200 per column, for a total of 13 weeks and $2,600. Our Opinions lineup includes a dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, regulars on the national political talk shows and some of the most influential players inside the Beltway. We'll set our promising pundit on a path to become the next byline in demand, the talking head every show wants to book, the voice that helps the country figure out what's really going on.

THE VOICE THAT HELPS THE COUNTRY FIGURE OUT WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON. Somewhere, in America, a sad blog commenter knows WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON. The Post certainly doesn't. But they're going to find that person by way of the internet, test their knowledge of WHAT'S REALLY GOING ON by putting them through challenges to find out if they have the "skills a modern pundit must possess," such as how to make videos of themselves, and then pay them $200 per column to tell us what's REALLY GOING ON. Give these people a bailout. Their continued operation is crucial to the survival of our democracy.

The New York Observer's moving again. It went from an UES townhouse to a normalish Flatiron office building to, now, an office building on West 44th street between 8th and 9th. Owned by Jared Kushner! His quote: "If I'm paying rent, I'd rather pay it to myself." That man, he has the soul of a poet, I tell ya.


O ho, the Washington Post Magazine has been "revamped" for our dynamic modern age, and it's reportedly "A truly solid product for Columbia Heights hipsters, McLean mommies and everyone in between." So, upwardly mobile 24-38 year-old whites living in the DC metro area will enjoy it!


Michael Moore made a movie about how rich people are bad but then he had a party for it in.........a Ritzy Manhattan Penthouse! To be fair, most of the media people that go to these Ritzy Manhattan Penthouse parties would never show up to a party at a homeless shelter, so cut the dude some slack.



Watch CBS Videos Online
Shucks, Katie Couric's "highly hyped 44-minute Webcast sit-down with Glenn Beck" did not turn out to be the journalistic tour de force that some had hoped for. Rather, critics say, it was a bit soft. Hard to believe Katie Couric would be a bit soft, Haha, get it? Because really she is.

Sharpen your knives, BusinessWeek staffers: The NYT says that 20% layoffs at the mag are "being pitched to investors as something of a done deal." Surprise! Look to your left. Look to your right. Then look at two more people. One of you will be laid off, on average. Statistics are fun. Also: Jon Fine reports that Bruce Wasserstein's dropped out of the bidding, so Bloomberg is looking strong, in terms of "Being the one to buy your magazine and then lay you off."


$4.64 per month. That's how much, on average, survey respondents said they would pay for online access to their newspaper's website. Although half the people said they wouldn't pay anything! So the actual average price point would be about $2.25. Good luck, Steven Brill.


Help A Reporter Out, the source-finding PR-journalist connection website founded by voluble flack Peter "Zzzzzt" Shankman, claims to be raking in more than a million bucks in ad revenue per year. Which seems crazy, but according to some quick math by informed people, is plausible! All this from, basically, an oversized, popular Facebook group. Lucky. This concludes our discussion of Peter Shankman, which only encourages him.


The publisher of the Washington Post thought that an upcoming magazine story was icky and gross, as well as depressing, so the mag spiked the story, which is a total coincidence and in no way a bid to please this lady, the one who signs everyone's paychecks.

Weymouth has been telling editors that there have been too many stories similar to the one last November about a 13-year-old dwarf undergoing surgery to lengthen her legs.

That is weird. Isn't that weird? It is.

A lady went to a swingers club, as a freelance journalistblogger, and had a threesome with two other ladies. So there!


Haha, some anonymous commenter on WashingtonPost.com wrote that Maryland politico Cheryl Kagan was "carrying on with others husbands" and it was such an ordeal to get the comment removed from the story that the ombudsman decided to write his own story about what an ordeal it was, and that story included the full, libelous comment. Makes perfect sense.


Briana Karp, the homeless girl who was miraculously signed to poverty-level Elle internship, tells Mediaite that she's grateful for the gig:

Nobody has specifically seen the story and called offering me a job yet, which is fine by me – I am hopeful that I can score a good job on merit, talent, and a great résumé!

Thinking like that is how homelessness happens in the first place.


Writing for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting will make you poor(er). This email went out to contributors to FAIR's mag:

Dear Extra! writers:

We're having a serious budget-tightening at FAIR in response to the recession, and making some very difficult choices about how to save money to keep the organization going. I'm sorry to say that one of the things we're going to have to do is to reduce the rate we pay freelance writers—from 30 cents to 25 cents a word—starting with the November 2009 issue. Hopefully better times are ahead and this will turn out to be just a temporary measure, but in any case we hope this won't be too much of a burden on your own economic circumstances when you write for us. We are very grateful to the freelancers who make Extra! possible, and who put work into each article that is impossible for a small nonprofit magazine like Extra! to ever fully compensate.

Regards,

Jim Naureckas
Julie Hollar

In addition to having been considered morally wrong in any circumstance for the whole history of our nation, torture is also illegal. So it's pretty much a no-brainer, when you read the report about how the CIA tortured people, to say "well then they should probably look into prosecuting people." Unless you're Dick Cheney! Then what you do is demand that some other documents that will prove that torture worked get released. And once those documents are released and they just muddy the issue even further by saying over and over again that is impossible to know what interrogation techniques produced what intelligence let alone how much of that intelligence was actionable or even accurate, if you are the media, you write "well Dick Cheney has a very good point."

That is what The Washington Post did yesterday. According to the story, Khalid Sheik Mohammed was a difficult detainee who provided no worthwhile intelligence until he was waterboarded nearly 200 times and shackled and diapered and sleep-deprived for a week straight. Then he was suddenly a Chatty Cathy!

Of course, KSM has bragged about how he made up untrue intelligence while he was being tortured in order to make the torture stop, and the CIA inspector general who helmed the investigation into torture says there's been no analysis of which techniques produced what information or even how useful that information was, but hey, we tortured KSM and then he told us stuff, so torture works and no one should get in any trouble for it, ever.

The problem is probably that as soon as us shocked and appalled "civil rights extremists" who want to read al-Qaeda terrorists their rights said "torture is immoral and ineffective" it just opened the door for patriotic torturers to respond with "torture is effective and anyone who says otherwise has to prove it," which is not the best way for a moral debate to go, really.