• Kevin Drum's must-read piece defending the newspaper. One thing I think he ignores, however, is that the left and the right do indeed have a vision for the way reporting will be done in a post-newspaper era. Think blogs. Assuming the newspapers either did dry up or, worse yet, became partisan, Washington Times-like outlets, what you'd see wouldn't be the end of reporting but the beginning of a new sort of news gathering, wherein partisan groups deploy "journalists" to all places and stories in order to have them return with the sort of news rundown that benefits their side. Imagine, basically, a media populated by a million Powerline's on one side and a million Daily Kos's on the other (and no I'm not claiming equivalence between the two, they're just both examples of folks who do, or direct, original reporting in order to find stories that fit their world-views); pretty dystopian, huh? The newspapers, for their faults, attempt to hew to a flawed but predictable standard of objectivity, and if we lose that, we're gonna miss it.
• S.L catching CNN in a gaffe that says more about the modern media than Rathergate, Flushgate, and Eason Jordan combined.
• Brian Montopoli's superb rundown of the facts surrounding the Newsweek controversy.
