The Most Important Event of the Summer is finally here! Our beloved Chelsea Clinton is marrying some dude up in picturesque Rhinebeck, New York, and the media is frothing with excitement: Celebrities! Guest lists! Bubba! Rich people! Wedding! [USAT, TVNewser]
Politico's Roger Simon is depressed, for journalism has been destroyed. Not by his own Politico, though! By the fact that some liberal bloggers and professors had an off-the-record listserve, Journolist, where they would talk about politics. How will America survive?
Wikileaks' Julian Assange is still alive. And he's sifting through "several million more" documents following yesterday's dump of 92,000 war diaries. Even by magical white rabbit standards, he's a busy one, and his operation is going to get larger.
British author Alan Shadrake was released on bail in Singapore today and his passport is being held over government worries about his new book, Once a Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock, which details the country's death penalty.
Sen. Scott Brown's not-really-famous daughter, Ayla, recently got a job as a CBS Early Show correspondent. Flush with possible stories, she settled on "interviewing her dad" for her most recent segment, pretty much exhausting her entire long-term usefulness to CBS.
Nahua Indians armed with machetes kidnapped 13 reporters in southwestern Mexico, but released them and instead grabbed the film crew from Grupo Modelo that was shooting a beer commercial on their land without permission. All were eventually released unharmed. [AP]
89-year-old White House correspondent Helen Thomas, when asked about the Middle East last week outside the Jewish Heritage Celebration, said Jews should "Get the hell out of Palestine." Ex-Bush propaganda minister Ari Fleischer wants her fired. She has since apologized.
When the GQ iPad app launched, a measly 365 people bought it. Probably by accident. Sister magazine Wired, however, sold 24,000 in their first 24 hours. Maybe because theirs is, you know, good and stuff. [NYT]
An unsung hero has found an outpouring of support from concerned residents for a project in which he went through over 20,000 newspaper articles looking for the worst cliches. Here's what he found at the end of the day.
Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander makes a the case for the continued flourishing of the paper edition of the Washington Post today. He outlines a few plans to increase the money coming in.
James Fallows has a truly excellent analysis of why journalism is not dying (just paper and ink) and how Google sees the industry changing. Read it if you're bored with the usual doom and gloom. [Atlantic]
On Friday Palin lied — she took a quote from an Obama speech out of context and used it to imply that the President doesn't like America as much as real Americans. Now the AP have lent her their credence.
One of Bobby Jindal's aides, and her boyfriend, got beaten up last Friday. There was a rumor that the attack occurred because the pair were wearing Sarah Palin pins. It seemed to have been confirmed by the police. Except not.
The Tea Partiers had a magazine for sale, at their Tea Party in Boston today. It cost $20 a copy! So... print isn't dead? And Teabaggers are adopting the Dave Eggers model for newspapers.
"Hacker Croll," the hacker who leaked a bunch of not-so-sexxxy internal Twitter documents to TechCrunch, has been arrested in France. If Croll had leaked those documents to us, we'd totally fly over and bust him out. Too bad. [Business Insider]
Here's a totally friendly memo from the New York Times that went out to all their freelancers, apropos of nothing in particular, reminding them to please not accept free stuff. Looks like someone is in trouble!
Howell Raines hit out at Fox News for ruining political debate. But it's not just Fox. By softballing and coddling interviewees, all of television news has helped politicians get away with appalling lies, distortions and… being Sarah Palin.
Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons claimed he couldn't have sexually assaulted a cocktail waitress because he hasn't had sex since 1995. He didn't mention "riding planes and getting into cars with women"—which the local news caught him doing yesterday.
Why won't Mark Halperin and John Heilemann tell us who Bill Clinton was sleeping with? This may sound like a plea from a shameless scandal-merchant for more grist, but it is actually an honest question: what makes that information privileged?