Erin Burnett really tried, bless her heart, to imagine a reason why it might be inappropriate to refer to protesting black Baltimore teenagers as thugs.

Today, the New York Times named, against the CIA’s wishes, Michael D’Andrea, the former chief of the agency’s counterterrorism center, in a story about support in Washington for the lethal drone program. The Washington Post reported on D’Andrea’s reassignment last month without using his name, which Gawker then published.

An internal NBC News investigation into the dissembler Brian Williams has identified a half-dozen cases in which the anchor is believed to have misrepresented his account of events, including at least one previously unreported episode involving Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the New York Times reports.

Ben Affleck really didn’t want people to know that one of his distant ancestors owned slaves—going so far as to lobby celebrity genealogy TV show Finding Your Roots to suppress the segment in which that ancestor is discussed. But we got our hands on a copy of the script—and now you can read the mild interview that terrified the actor.

Have you heard the latest absolutely scandalous DC media gossip? It seems that some less than upstanding publicity hounds attempted to sully the august White House Correspondents Dinner event with corporate whoredom. Can you imagine?

One of today’s Pulitzer winners for local reporting isn’t actually a reporter anymore.

“It so happens that I have been ganged up on online, and I have also been beaten up by actual gangs of men on the street,” writes ancestral Gawker editor Choire Sicha in the New York Times Book Review, locating the true shame in Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

The president. Sitting atop a white rock—America, pure as snow, a monument. Lincoln. The ballot box—a throne of our nation. Shall the free press poop atop it? Undulating, in the wind.

As the 2016 presidential election draws closer, America's political press corps is warming up for what they do best: drone on about nothing of consequence.

If the just-released, 12,000-word Columbia School of Journalism investigation into Rolling Stone’s deeply flawed rape story makes one point crystal clear, it is this: Rolling Stone screwed up in basically every way possible.

"How many times you should be having sex each week." As A) an unanswerable question B) about sex C) that people will argue about, this constitutes a story that will never stop being written despite its nonsensical premise, because all of you are too insecure to resist checking. So—how many times???

Can we please find a 29-year-old to reveal the 29 Things They've Learned in 29 Years?

Robert Durst is one of the more sympathetic alleged serial killers I've seen interviewed on television. He's not folksily unhinged, like Charles Manson, or flatly terrifying, like Jeffrey Dahmer. He seems like any other New York eccentric. He carries a backpack, wears little sneakers and toddles around New York City, Starbucks Americano in hand. He speaks in a nasal drawl, his voice steady, never rising or falling above a certain pitch (except for some stray whispers).

Woozy 80s icon Peggy Noonan is, despite all rational reasoning, a professional political expert, paid real American money to deliver her thoughts on the public affairs issues of the day. Is Peggy Noonan a psychic psychologist super-detective? Maybe...

Local news has been speaking "truth to power" since the invention of towns, and there's no better example of why we need regional newscasters than today's LaGuardia plane accident. It's unclear if a fictional villain from the Mario franchise is responsible, but watchdogs at Atlanta's CBS 46 are on it.

Jill Abramson, who was unceremoniously ousted last year as editor of the New York Times, has signed a $1 million book deal. Her book's topic will be "the future of media in a rapidly changing world." This development can be interpreted as folly, or farce.

Disgraceful—though not yet disgraced—Fox News loudmouth Bill O'Reilly's reputation-burnishing lies have taken another hit as CBS journalists who were in Buenos Aires with him contradict his description of events there, CNN reports.

There are hundreds and hundreds of people out there who believe that, secretly, they were David Carr's favorite. And maybe we all were. He had the rare emotional capacity to make each of us his favorite, one by one by one.

NBC News has suspended Nightly News anchor Brian Williams for six months without pay, effective immediately. The punishment follows revelations that, over the past decade, Williams misrepresented several details about his experience reporting in Baghdad, Iraq. Most significantly, Williams said a formation of helicopters in which he was flying encountered enemy fire and was eventually forced to land—a story that eyewitnesses have strongly challenged. Under his new contract, Williams would have been paid $10 million per year.

After straight-out lying about a Baghdad helicopter attack for over a decade, Brian Williams is employing the old out of sight out of mind strategy, which reportedly includes canceling his Thursday appearance on Letterman—the show he once used to promote his bogus heroic tale.