In Murgatroid, Ohio—a perfectly average small American town, in a perfectly average American state, where perfectly average Americans do not so average things—the day begins, as it does elsewhere, with alarm clocks, the cries of cuckoo birds, and the collective "Thshhh" sound of apple pies being thrust onto windowsills from North Snooker Street all the way down to South Shoobadoop Avenue. The sun's rays, golden in that way that rays are, peek over the horizon. It is morning in Murgatroid. Once again, a small town full of Americans bestirs itself for the unexpectedly inspiring day ahead.

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan has given a stern talking-to to Andrew Goldman, the freelance reporter who conducts front-of-the-book Q-and-A's for the New York Times Magazine. The ostensible occasion for the beat-down was a deeply misguided Twitter insult Goldman directed this week to the author Jennifer Weiner. But it was premised on the preposterous and malicious falsehood that Goldman routinely asks misogynistic questions of his female interview subjects. This is bullshit.

Today, New York Times staffers staged the golf clap of protests when about 300 staffers essentially took a smoke break at the same time. Now This News reports the walk out lasted about 10 minutes, which is understandable because oh my god why is it so cold in New York today?

Back in September, we thought Prefix magazine's freelancer rates of $6 per day were about as bad as it could get in a desiccated media landscape where writers are exploited like the railroad workers of old. Today, a company out of Portland, Oregon, is making Prefix's rates look downright extravagant.

Mitt Romney has received some backlash for his comments about cutting government funding for PBS, even though he likes Big Bird.

As expected, Fox News aired the 5-year-old video of Obama's speech at Hampton University that conservative bloggers—namely Tucker Carlson—tried (and failed) to make an issue of in 2008. Though there may have been a few previously unreleased segments in tonight's footage, the right-wing discussion was the same old thing: "He sure does talk funny," "But what about white people?," and "Why is he so angry?"

Is this the least interesting AP story of 2012? Christ, let's hope so.

Peggy Noonan. White. A white woman, yes, a Manhattanite, but a vital white woman, a woman of opinions, of breathing, of warbling on Sunday talk shows, about America—this America. This country. This great city, New York, where Peggy Noonan sips a gin fizz, contemplates that good American, Ronald Reagan (yes, a good man), and ventures forth—outwards, into the great bustling metropolis—to see what she can see. Lo! Peggy Noonan is surrounded by nonwhites. And what is that awful noise?

First off—there is no such thing as "the media." The people and entities who shape our political coverage represent a fractured, disaggregated, chaotic mass of divergent agendas and interests. While they often display pack behavior, they do not operate as a coordinated monolith. But that doesn't mean they're being fair to Mitt Romney. They're not.

It's no secret that the Washington Post Company, home to one of America's most important and revered newspapers, is floundering. The company's once booming education business, Kaplan, has cooled significantly in recent quarters, and ad revenues in both print and online are also down. Fighting to keep its head above water, the Post Co. has now done what many dying people do: turned to hospice care.

Imagine what it must be like to be the editor of globalism's Rain Man, Thomas Friedman. Your job, ostensibly, is to hammer this man's prose into some semblance of logical readability, and yet he has built a fabulously lucrative career on his total lack of logic, readability, or, really, variety of any kind. Clearly, his editors have now made the only sensible choice: "Eh, just put that shit right in the paper exactly how he typed it on his Blackberry." (*Big shot of heroin*)

So, Fox News has, excruciatingly, just broadcast live video of a man committing suicide after a car chase. Fox anchor Shep Smith said afterwards that the network was on a five-second delay, but that the video got through regardless. A network technician being too slow on the button is not the real issue here. The real issue is that car chases aren't worthy of live television (and this might be the thing that brings them to an end).

In a new Los Angeles Magazine story, writer Amy Wallace reaches out to embarrassed self-plagiarist and poet manque Jonah Lehrer to ask him what his future plans are. Lehrer doesn't reveal much outside of the fact that he is "writing something about the mistake and affair myself," but he adds that Wallace is only the third person to contact him for comment in the wake of his scandal. Almost instantly, Joe Coscarelli at Daily Intel was charging Lehrer with yet another mistruth:

Ah, the glamorous life of a professional writer. Polish up those J-school applications, kids.

Prefix magazine, a New York-based music and film publication, is hiring news writers for its website. But they can't just be any lame bloggers off the street, of course. Aware that this is a buyer's market when it comes to hiring writing talent, Prefix demands top candidates, noting in a Craigslist job posting that all writing applicants must have "an encyclopedic knowledge of music or film."

It's that special time of year again, where we remember troops and solemnify 9/11, instead of reducing the whole of our overseas conflicts and anti-terror policy to some D-grade Seinfeldism about airport check-ins, taking our shoes off and whaaaat is the deeeaal with mini-shampoo bottles.

Kurt Eichenwald, the disgraced former New York Times reporter whose career went up in flames after he got caught secretly paying thousands of dollars to a child pornographer he wrote about, is on the comeback trail. Today he published an op-ed in the New York Times claiming to have evidence that the Bush Administration is guilty of "significantly more negligence" in ignoring 9/11 warning signs "than has been disclosed." That may be true, but save for a few interesting details, the evidence he presents has been in the public record for nearly a decade.

We just came from the DNC's daily "blogger briefing," not to be confused with the Real Press briefing. There were 20 or so bloggers, various Democratic media reps and invited speakers.

The Democratic convention, like the Republican convention, and every political convention, is a television event. That is, it is designed and intended expressly to satisfy the audience watching at home, on the screen. The media, gathered here on-site, does not so much "cover" a convention as news as we hold it up, turn it over in our hands, and remark on its qualities, like a bunch of Home Shopping Network hosts talking up a new snow globe.

The privileged young people of Harvard College are not often recognized for their integrity and backbone. They made a whole movie about how Zuckerberg stole Facebook from the terrible Winklevoss twins, for instance. And just last week more than 100 Harvard students came under fire for a cheating scandal that reportedly found them plagiarizing and colluding with one another on the take-home final exam. But today, two editors at the Harvard Crimson are returning some credibility to the ivy-est of Ivy League schools.