Despicable gutter tabloid columnist and human embodiment of the emotion of hate Andrea Peyser today uses her column today to piss on the memory of Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Let's say your job is to make fun of David Brooks. Not your whole job, God forbid. Part of it, though. People expect you to make fun of David Brooks, and they ask you to do it, and you have been doing it for years, because the smugness and wrongness of David Brooks has seemed like an inexhaustible resource.

New York Observer editor Ken Kurson recently decided to solicit “more than two-dozen” New York Times staffers, past and present, for their opinions of the paper of record’s disastrous editorial page—the misty realm where Tom Friedman is considered an intellectual heavyweight and David Brooks knows exactly what it’s like to be poor. The results are in!

The thing about Dylan Farrow's open letter accusing her father, Woody Allen, of sexual abuse is: There was not much really new about it. It was new that Dylan Farrow herself was signing her name to the accusations, but Vanity Fair had covered the case, in grim detail, more than two decades ago.

The Wall Street Journal, which combines some of the world's finest news reporting with an opinion section run by C. Montgomery Burns, continues to steadily whip a dead horse by the name of "Progressives Are Like Hitler."

Last week, Medium editor Arikia Millikan published a bizarre essay about an “important war correspondent” who gave her a “red-blooded introduction to journalism” by drinking with her, seducing her, maybe sleeping with her, and telling her all of his secrets—including marital infidelity and a suicide attempt involving a shotgun. It’s supposedly a story of how “Tom Random,” the name she gives her famous mentor, exploited Millikan’s naiveté. Turns out that most or all of it is horseshit, and its author won’t say what—if anything—actually happened.

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, concerned about the one-sidedness of Nicholas Kristof's handling of Dylan Farrow's abuse allegations against Woody Allen, refers readers to an even more one-sided take on the story ("illuminating ... essential context").

The New York Times has used "nondescript" to describe 76 different office spaces in recent years, according to this thoroughgoing analysis by a grumpy anti-cliché grammarian.

"LICKING COUNTY, Ohio" reads the dateline on today's top news story. What sexy things are happening in Licking County, this week?

After wealthy venture capitalist Tom Perkins wrote a letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal comparing Nazi Germany's war on Jews to America's "war" on the rich, he could only find one media outlet extreme enough to voice its support: the Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

Patch, the hyperlocal news experiment that launched in 2007, laid off as many as two thirds of its staff on Wednesday, reports Jim Romenesko. The venture, which was bought by Hale Global earlier this month, has been plagued with problems for nearly its entire existence.

In a definitive work of media criticism, the California Supreme Court unanimously today ruled that Stephen Glass, notorious for fabricating stories for the New Republic and other magazines as a young writer in the '90s, is unfit for admission to the state bar. The court's 33-page decision is a comprehensive and pitiless accounting of not only Glass's initial misdeeds, but of the dozen years of obfuscation and evasion that followed, as he tried to work his way from journalistic disgrace to lawyerly respectability.

The New York Times has appended a 114-word correction to Janet Maslin’s viciously obtuse review of Gabriel Sherman’s biography of Fox News boss Roger Ailes. It’s almost as if someone else read the book for her.

It wasn't even a well-executed story about a golf club. Most people agree now, broadly, about Grantland's failings toward transgender people in its telling of—and creation of—the tragic story of the golf-club inventor Essay Anne Vanderbilt. Bill Simmons, the founder and editor-in-chief of the prestige-sportswriting website, signed off on that agreement Monday with a long note of apology.

On Monday, New York Times book critic Janet Maslin issued an inexplicably hostile takedown of Gabriel Sherman’s new biography of Fox News boss Roger Ailes, declaring the book “tepid” and “disingenuous” while suggesting its author is a liar. The paper’s coverage, which had until that point been quite positive, immediately earned fresh attention from conservative figures like Lou Dobbs and Matt Drudge. Omitted from Maslin’s review, however, was an important disclosure: The critic has maintained a 30-year friendship with Fox News’s editor-at-large, Peter J. Boyer, who plays a prominent role in one of the book’s chapters, and who was personally recruited to the channel in 2012 by Ailes.

The publisher of the St. Augustine (FL) Record is asking readers to gather in the paper's offices each night to help proofread pages. "A nice dinner for two to the person who helps us catch the most typos and errors," she writes. God, that is humiliating. Related.

Self-loathing New York Times thought-leader David Brooks has an admonition for everyone today: You do not understand this "income inequality" you are all talking about. People assume that just because the very richest people have ever more money, and the much greater numbers of poor people have less money, this constitutes a systemic problem:

Today, the New York Times published an article about Israeli journalist Itay Hod outing “an unnamed Republican congressman” in a Facebook post “that might be described as the world’s most obvious blind item.”

The Poynter Institute describes itself as "a school dedicated to teaching and inspiring of journalists and media leaders." Teaching media leaders how to lose money, presumably.