On Monday, Erickson posted a photo from the reproductive rights rally happening outside the Texas Capitol in advance of the legislature's special session, and asked if what he was seeing was "Salon's editorial board."

While we're flattered by the comparison, many of Erickson's Twitter followers were quick to point out his mistake.

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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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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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After looking at nearly 500 news segments on gay marriage, researchers found stories with more statements supporting gay marriage outweighed those with more statements opposing it by a margin of roughly 5-to-1.

More from Pew:

Almost half (47%) of the nearly 500 stories studied from March 18 (a week prior to the Supreme Court hearings), through May 12, primarily focused on support for the measure, while 9% largely focused on opposition and 44% had a roughly equal mix of both viewpoints was neutral. In order for a story to be classified as supporting or opposing same sex marriage, statements expressing that position had to outnumber the opposite view by at least 2-to-1. Stories that did not meet that threshold were defined as neutral or mixed.

Many of the events themselves during the period studied, such as announcements by politicians and state legislation, reflected movement towards same-sex marriage. Polls show the nation's views have been shifting as well, though there remains significant opposition with 51% of the public in support of legalizing same-sex marriage versus 42% opposed, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.

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After his contract expired in April, the former anchorman left Fox 19 in Cincinnati, where he made a name for himself on the right with hard-hitting segments against gun control and a tough interview with President Obama on drone strikes.

He drew some heat for his dedicated boosterism of Ron Paul, but Swann built a national following out of the libertarian-leaning Paul movement, with his video clips shared widely on Tea Party forums and conservative blogs, as well as on some conspiracy theory sites. And his new project, dubbed "Liberty Is Rising," is getting a leg up from Ron Paul Forums, the popular webforum, which is hosting a Q&A with Swann on Thursday to raise money.

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Despite the customary competition between news sources -- heightened, in this case, by differing accounts of how the story was reported -- Poitras achieved the unusual distinction of sharing a byline both with Barton Gellman on the June 6 Washington Post story on PRISM and with Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill on the June 8 Guardian story naming Edward Snowden as a source. In the accompanying video interview of Snowden, Greenwald is credited as “interviewer” and Poitras as “filmmaker.” Greenwald wrote in a tweet this morning, “The reality is that Laura Poitras and I have been working with [Snowden] since February, long before anyone spoke to Bart Gellman.”

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At a recent editorial meeting, Salon’s staff went around naming our own professional white whales; all journalists have them. I said Ben Mezrich. A few weeks later, in the kind of coincidence that’s always happening in Mezrich’s books, I had the chance to interview him.

Ben Mezrich arrived on the nonfiction scene with his 2002 bestseller “Bringing Down the House,” which tells the story of an MIT card-counting team that won big at blackjack. In the quasi-sequel “Busting Vegas” the players use even more sophisticated techniques with similar results.

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To review, Karl erroneously reported that he'd personally seen emails that showed national security adviser Ben Rhodes seeming to intervene on behalf of the State Department in a turf battle with the CIA -- but the actual emails (uncovered by CNN's Jake Tapper) revealed Rhodes did not mention the State Department at all. It was later shown that Karl had not actually obtained or reviewed the emails, but he and the network stood by his reporting and story, anyway. Karl did not show up on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday to address the issue but instead released a terse statement to CNN doubling down on his contention that the story was solid.

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Like all talking points, these talking points were dumb and full of weird weaselly language and made worse by the fact that each claim was designed to be repeated by people on TV who presumably don't believe what they say or at least don't really care that much. "For those interested in pushing back against partisan attacks while the rest of us grapple with the larger questions, here is language to guide you," the memo said. The rest of us will be back here, grappling, while you engage in your semi-scripted verbal combat, with some guy who has different talking points.

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Despite sources close to Limbaugh that accuse Dickey of scapegoating the radio host for a bad quarter, Limbaugh himself has addressed his advertiser woes in the past. But Limbaugh doesn't see his offensive bloviating as the problem driving mainstream advertisers away; instead, he accuses media buyers who are "young women fresh out of college" and "liberal feminists who hate conservatism" of "trying to harm" him.

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This is how it works:

A chain-smoking former statistics professor named Vinny Bruzzese—“the reigning mad scientist of Hollywood,” in the words of one studio customer—has started to aggressively pitch a service he calls script evaluation. For as much as $20,000 per script, Mr. Bruzzese and a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success. His company, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, also digs into an extensive database of focus group results for similar films and surveys 1,500 potential moviegoers. What do you like? What should be changed?

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When local police descended, Page opened fire and shot one officer nearly ten times. When the authorities returned fire and shot Page in the stomach, he took his 9mm pistol, pointed it at his own head, and pulled the trigger.

According to acquaintances, the 40-year-old killer hated blacks, Indians, Native Americans and Hispanics (he called non-whites "dirt people"), and was interested in joining the Ku Klux Klan. Immersed in the world of white power music, Page's band rehearsed in front of a Nazi flag.

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Murdoch defended his paper on Twitter, because it is 2013 and stuff is weird:

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Hm. Here's how Col Allan defended his story to Salon: "The image was emailed to law enforcement agencies yesterday afternoon seeking information about these men ..." So "distributed by the FBI" might be technically accurate (not that we have any way of knowing) but it is not a great defense. The photos were not distributed to the press or to the public, as the photos of the Tsarnaev brothers would be the same day that Post cover ran. The photo was never intended to be put on the front of a newspaper with copy asserting that the people pictured were responsible. There's also no way to "withdraw" a physical newspaper printed and distributed all over New York City. I saw copies of the paper at bodegas in Brooklyn well into the evening.

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The Times reports:

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What a week.

As events unfolded in Boston, and then in Texas, and as they continue to unfold at this very moment in both places, CNN has been there for our audience in every possible way – on television, online and on our mobile platforms. As Wolf would say, that was true for our audiences here in the United States and around the world. For journalists like each of us, these are the times that define what we do and why we do it. All of you, across every division of CNN Worldwide, have done exceptional work. And when we made a mistake, we moved quickly to acknowledge it and correct it. It was important to see CNN, CNN.com, HLN and CNNI all shine this week, often with different stories and different approaches that make each of their roles clear. It is a week that began with a whole new genre of programming for CNN, with the successful premiere of Parts Unknown. Now, as the week comes to a close, I wanted to express my deep gratitude and admiration. You have worked tirelessly, around the clock, to share these stories. And our audiences have responded, making it clear that they rely on us in ever increasing ways. In front of the cameras and behind the scenes, you have shown the world what makes us CNN.

With my thanks and appreciation,

JEFF

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“My theory is [Tamerlan Tsarnaev] was radicalized by 2009, 2010,” McCaul said. “Reports show the Russian Intelligence Service reach out to our law enforcement to interview this individual, which they did. He was on the radar, then he got off the radar. Then he travels overseas. I would assume the Russians would have some intelligence on this individual.”

Although he lacks direct evidence McCaul appeared to suggest that Tamerlan, who reportedly had a bomb strapped to his chest when he was shot, had ties to international terrorist networks. “I think another important point [is] the tools of trade craft used here,” McCaul said. “This pressure cooker device is very similar to what the Taliban in Pakistan use. The idea that they could make pipe bombs and then there are reports they had suicide vests, all point to the fact that this was…”

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We’ve seen the most famous TV network in the news business repeatedly botch basic facts, while one of the country’s largest-circulation newspapers misreported the number of people killed, launched a wave of hysteria over a “Saudi national” who turned out to have nothing to do with the crime, and then published a cover photo suggesting that two other guys (also innocent) might be the bombers. We’ve seen the vaunted crowd-sourcing capability of Reddit degenerate into self-reinforcing mass delusion, in which a bunch of people whose law-enforcement expertise consisted of massive doses of “CSI” convinced themselves that a missing college student was one of the bombing suspects. (He wasn’t – and with that young man’s fate still unknown, how does his family feel today?)

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Col Allan's statement reads:

We stand by our story. The image was emailed to law enforcement agencies yesterday afternoon seeking information about these men, as our story reported. We did not identify them as suspects.

Update, 2:28 p.m.: The New York Post has published a story indicating that the two young men are not suspects:

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In his diatribe, Morrissey singled out Prime Minister David Cameron for only caring about "his personal gain," the BBC for its censorship of "Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead," a song that rose in the U.K. charts upon Thatcher's death, and the government for using public funds to finance a lavish funeral, taking place today.

He compares the biased coverage to censorship normally associated with tyrannical governments, writing, "BBC News will scantily report on anti-Thatcher demonstrations as if those taking part aren't real people. Lordly scorn is shown towards North Korea and Syria, and any distant country ruled by tyrannical means, yet the British government employs similar dictatorship tactics in order to protect their own arrogant interests."

His note begins:

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Now a new data point from the liberal Media Matters, which tabulated the amount of time the three major cable news networks devoted to Gosnell's arrest in 2011. As it turns out, Fox News gave it the least coverage of the three. Liberal MSNBC gave the case about a third more time, while CNN put both networks to shame by covering the arrest almost five times more than Fox. Here's a chart showing the relative time devoted to coverage on each network:

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