In your wacky Wednesday media column: Janice Min is already rich so what does she care, Daily News buyouts, bad news for True/ Slant writers, a college newspaper gets unrestrained, and Tribune Co execs think they deserve big money.
Facebook has a rap sheet sheet when it comes to silencing critics. In addition to shutting down the account of a critical commenter as mentioned yesterday, the social network banned the team behind a critical book in Argentina.
Aasif Mandvi is a funny guy. He is also The Daily Show's "Senior Islamic Correspondent." So why would the show ask him not to talk about Muslim extremist threats after the Times Square bombing attempt?
A British fashion magazine has reportedly dubbed its iPad issue "the Iran edition" due to the requirement to remove nipples and other body parts to get content on Apple's tablet computer. Call this the "Apple chilling effect."
Apple believes it has a "moral responsibility" to patrol content on the iPhone. That apparently includes heavily watering down a guide to New York's gay culture, as one author just learned.
Apple banned a third prominent cartoonist from its app store, citing mockery of Tiger Woods and a policy against "ridiculing a public figure." If we're to let Apple censor our news, we should familiarize ourselves with the company's whims.
The Russian prosecutor general's office has found that Scientology texts undermine "the traditional spiritual values of the citizens of the Russian Federation." Probably the prosector general just needs a FREE STRESS TEST. [The Moscow Times]
Want to know how paranoid you should be? Google's new toy lets you see how many times your government asked Google for private information. Citizens of Brazil, Germany and India: Fetch your tinfoil hats (chapéus de papel laminado)!
Hollywood blog impresaria Nikki Finke is infallible, because she rewrites her copy to suit the facts as they emerge. It's a neat trick. Today we can prove that she also spikes comments that dispute her site's reporting.
Video producer Kate Bohner has re-published her autobiographical blog, just two weeks after taking it offline amid threats from Eric Schmidt's lawyers. There's been one especially noticeable change: the character "Dr. Strangelove" is gone.
Click to viewApple has been trying to keep scantily-clad women out of the iPhone app store. It's a hypocritical crackdown, with apps from Playboy and Sports Illustrated given a free pass. And it's going to ruin the iPad for magazine content.
Conservative Australian politicians are waging a War on Smut via pornography censor laws. Their latest uphill battle: A proposed ban on small boobs (which attract pedophiles) and squirting (which grosses them out).
Google, and then Hillary Clinton, called on China to stop censoring the web and open a transparent investigation into all the hacking that's been emanating from the country. They responded this morning, in a way that was not entirely warm.
China is to start monitoring text messages for inappropriate key words. The government has told cellphone providers to suspend users whose messages contain "illegal or unhealthy content" as part of what it calls a campaign against pornography. [NYT]
Google announced it will stop filtering its China search engine — or shut the site. And already, once-suppressed results are showing up on Google.cn (see screenshot; top is current, bottom from June). That's the good news. The bad news?
In an extraordinary blog posting, Google has all but accused the Chinese government of coordinating hack attacks on its servers, not just in China but in the U.S. and globally. And it's decided to finally push back against the regime.
A college humor magazine has written a satirical story on the subject of race, and they are refusing calls to take that story off their website, thereby bucking the important American college traditions of censorship and terrified racial silence. Outrageous!
A reader sent in the attached screenshot, showing his fruitless attempt to post our guide to enhancing the privacy of your Facebook account. Apparently Facebook found that content to be "abusive."
In your tricky Tuesday media column: Ski Resorts are the Stasi of Colorado journalism, the White House press corps exercises its shit-eating grin, The New Yorker cuts its fiction, and a dead magazine overview.