The line that tech journalism should never have crossed? Mocking Napster co-founder and Facebook investor Sean Parker's $4.5 million wedding in a redwood grove on the Monterey Peninsula.

If you've been following this story, you are probably familiar with Alexis Madrigal's initial rant condemning the wedding, based on a report by the California Coastal Commission, and the undeniable fact that Parker will shell out an additional $2.5 million from his own pocket to deal with permit violations and excise the ghost of any possible impropriety. You may also have found time to wade through Sean Parker's 10,000 word defense, in TechCrunch, of the sacredness of weddings, his own credentials as an environmentalist, and the pitiable state of Internet journalism.

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A few years ago I realized my favourite answer -- not journalism -- was depressing for someone who had already reserved a seat for himself or his child at one of Canada's more than 50 journalism programs.

That's right: 50. According to J-Source, the journalism website, there are 1,600 J-students at any given time preparing to work in an industry that has lost anywhere from one-third to half of its jobs in the last decade. The U.S. is always slightly ahead of us in trends, and in June the Chicago Sun-Times fired its entire photography staff, replacing it with iPhones for the remaining reporters. Since most reporters shoot about as well as most photogs spell, I'm breathlessly awaiting the next report of their declining circulation.

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On Sunday, Gregory asked Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who published Edward Snowden's NSA leak, "Why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?" New York magazine points out that Gregory's question "all but accused the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald of aiding and abetting Edward Snowden's fugitive travels."

But Rich rebuts: "Is David Gregory a journalist?"

"As a thought experiment, name one piece of news he has broken, one beat he’s covered with distinction, and any memorable interviews he’s conducted that were not with John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Dick Durbin or Chuck Schumer."

"Presumably if Gregory had been around 40 years ago," Rich adds snidely, "he also would have accused the Times of aiding and abetting the enemy when it published Daniel Ellsberg’s massive leak of the Pentagon Papers."

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Galant is thinking of something even better, or at least more quantifiable: social media pickup.

It's hard to understate [Ed.: Um, overstate?] how much this is changing the game of online content. Publishers no longer control some of the most important analytic data. Writers know how well their work is performing in realtime. Competitors can analyze which articles are successful or duds in rival publications. As I wrote in a prior column, public relations executives can gauge the impact of a story about their clients. Even governments can monitor (without a FISA request) the resonance a muckraking story has.

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The best way to see these double standards is to ponder 10 simple questions.

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Hastings' widow, Elise Jordan, and others in the media, criticized the Times obituary; in a letter to editor Jill Abramson, Jordan wrote that the obituary formed a "blatant mischaracterization" of Hastings. She cited a passage in the obituary that cast doubt on the Hastings' reporting in the Rolling Stone story that had led to the ousting of General Stanley McChrystal:

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Not surprisingly, Fox has often come in for a drubbing from media watchdogs for its often conservative, narrative-driven news coverage. But Kurtz, while occasionally willing to call foul on Fox, is generally pretty credulous of the cable news channel, defending it during controversies, favorably profiling its personalities, and seemingly overlooking its lapses.

John Cook at Gawker pointed this out, suggesting that Kurtz may have scooped him in 2004 at the behest of a News Corp. PR agent, and pointing to some other examples:

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Kurtz, who was fired by the Daily Beast and let go by CNN after a string of controversies and errors last month, joins Juan Williams, who was fired by NPR and caught in a research assistant plagiarism scandal, and Judith Miller, who was pushed out of the New York Times after carrying water for the Bush White House.

All three journalists followed a similar arc. They each had talent and promise, which led to meteoric success, which led to hubris that turned into laziness (Williams), complacency (Kurtz), and co-option (Miller). That was followed by flame out, disgrace, and finally refuge in the bosom of Roger Ailes.

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Michael is probably best known as the Rolling Stone reporter who had the guts to challenge the military establishment by publishing a piece that ended up getting Gen. Stanley McChrystal removed from his post. Even a brief perusal of the headlines of his reporting for Rolling Stone and BuzzFeed show that such a truth-to-power attitude defined his professional career.

I knew Michael through crossing paths with him in our respective work (most recently in one of the best TV experiences I've ever had -- a Young Turks panel with him, Glenn Greenwald and Cenk Uygur).

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JON WIENER: When you started, did you have a time frame in mind? Did you think you could do this for 50 years?

ROBERT SILVERS: No. [laughs] What happened was this: there was a great newspaper strike in New York in the autumn of 1962, and my friend Jason Epstein, an editor at Random House, had the inspiration — which he imparted to the poet Robert Lowell and his wife Elizabeth Hardwick — that this was the one time in history that you could start a book review without a penny, since all the publishing houses had no place to advertise their new books. No New York Times Book Review. Jason and I knew that, if we started a plausible book review, then all the publishers would simply have to take a page. They had to show their authors that they were publishing books.

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[T]here is a lack of skepticism on a whole in the media on the issue of national security." In the U.S., she said, there can be "a sense that it is unpatriotic to question the role that the security services play."

Indeed, Gibson's comments are supported by certain facts that emerged in Bradley Manning's pretrial hearing. The private noted in a statement that he had attempted to approach the New York Times, the Washington Post and Politico with his document trove -- all of whom turned him away -- before he provided WikiLeaks with the classified information.

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Stewart, who also wrote the screenplay for the film, has a special tie to Bahari's story: Bahari landed in Iranian jail a week after his participation in a 2009 "Daily Show" segment on Iran.

Stewart replayed "Minarets of Menace," a segment for which "we actually tried to get a correspondent into Iran because they had been nicknamed the axis of evil," Stewart explained. "We wanted to see who these evil people were," he said in jest. In the segment, correspondent Jason Jones interviewed Bahari about life in Iran:

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However, the New York Times, the AP and the Huffington Post have declined to attend Holder's meeting on the grounds that the A.G. had proposed an off-the-record session. Jill Abramson, the Times executive editor, summed up the problem aptly: "It isn't appropriate for us to attend an off the record meeting with the attorney general. Our Washington bureau is aggressively covering the department's handling of leak investigations at this time."

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Rosen, who has not been charged in the case, was nonetheless the target of a search warrant that enabled Justice Department investigators to secretly seized his private emails after an FBI agent said he had "asked, solicited and encouraged … (a source) to disclose sensitive United States internal documents and intelligence information."

The affidavit supporting that search warrant even listed Rosen as a “possible co-conspirator” in violations of the Espionage Act. Most reporters caught in leak investigations are never accused of breaking the law. No charges have been filed currently in Rosen's case yet either.

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What they did not say is this: I was his close friend. He walked me home before it happened. Kevin Schaeffer liked pizza and history and music, and most especially the band Dr. Dog. He wanted to move away — to Nashville, to San Francisco — and in every memory I have of him, he wears a purple sweat shirt, one I’m not certain he even owned. He was president of the college radio station, a Dean’s Honors student, and a history major who also liked writing. He could draw a very convincing Rastafarian. The year prior, he’d attempted suicide by lining a bathtub with electronics, but returned to our college campus just five days later, where we assumed he was receiving treatment. He was not receiving treatment. He had been suffering from long-term, severe depression and suicidal ideation for over a year on the night he killed her, and yet our conversation was pleasant: We talked that night about the Badlands, canine rain boots, an upcoming potluck, a tie-dyed cake. I’d learned how to do it online, I told him — it just involved food dye and a little patience.

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"I do not want to appear on another program or climb another mountain," she explained in a weekend statement. "I want instead to sit on a sunny field and admire the very gifted women — and OK, some men too — who will be taking my place." But Barbara Walters, if nobody's managed to take your place yet, what makes you think it'll happen now?

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The problem they seem to have with the incident is not that Kurtz falsely accused openly gay NBA player Jason Collins of concealing his engagement to a woman, or that he spread himself too thin and let the quality of his work suffer, but that the Daily Beast fired Kurtz for it. Here's popular conservative blogger Ace of Spades, spelling out what many saw as a double standard:

Clearly Kurtz erred, and rather dumbly. But he does this a lot, and no one's had a problem with it in the past. Why now? I think it's pretty obvious -- Jason Collins is now the Gay Black Sandra Fluke, and therefore now An Hero, and the Left protects its heroes.

And John Nolte of Breitbart News:

Kurtz's sin was making this error with a sacred cow. Had he made EXACT same error with a Palin or Bachmann, media & Beast woulda shrugged.

— John Nolte(@NolteNC) May 2, 2013

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The Wrap reports:

Bearman's article has not been published yet so details remain thin, but those familiar with the story say it involves a group of teenagers who are used to smuggle drugs in Coronado, which is an affluent resort city near San Diego, California.

Clooney and Heslov will produce with David Klawans, who executive produced "Argo." He's also producing an adaptation of Bearman's 2010 Wired magazine article "Art of the Steal."

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Becker filed a request for records last month through Florida’s Public Records Act, asking the school to turn over communications between Wright and other scholars and reviewers regarding the publication of the study.

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