Twitter

Scott Pelley deserves grudging credit for recognizing something obvious at a Friday luncheon in New York. Readers tempted to go beyond that point would be advised to visit the archive of Pelley-related posts at NewsBusters on his brand of so-called journalism, a few of which will be identified later in this post.

At said luncheon, Pelley received the 20th annual Fred Friendly First Amendment Award from the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University. In his acceptance speech (full YouTube; excerpt here; HT Weekly Standard), Pelley spoke of journalistic failures during the past few months. He wants to believe that the past few months have been extraordinarily bad to a supposedly unprecedented extent.

NBC's Chuck Todd told an inconvenient truth about Barack Obama on Sunday's Meet the Press.

"The rise of the internet media and social media and all that stuff - he hates it" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In a puzzling choice, New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani filed a front-page "news analysis" knitting together the social media patterns of the terrorist brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon: "Unraveling Brothers' Online Lives, Link by Link -- Connecting Dots, From Banal and Funny to Darkly Ominous."

Besides the paper's usual off-putting tone suggesting the terrorist brothers were just normal kids (..."Holden Caulfield-like adolescent alienation....Sometimes, Dzhokhar sounds downright sentimental"), Kakutani, whose liberal views are clear from her book reviews, managed to discuss Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's Twitter postings without mentioning his pro-Obama and 9-11 Truther tweets.

"The more we learn of Boston bombers the more they seem like bumblers. And there's the rub: any idiot can terrorize, doesn't require genius."

Thus tweeted The Atlantic's Garance Franke-Ruta earlier this morning. While some followers agreed, others shot back that it was a woefully inaccurate take, to say the least.

The Twitter accounts of CBS's 60 Minutes and 48 Hours have been hacked and suspended.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, before the suspension, anti-Obama messages were sent:

One is so dreadfully boring she makes watching paint dry seem fascinating. Another once got arrested for defacing a poster in a New York subway station. A third has this nasty habit of showing way too much flesh on her HBO program. So what do Chelsea Clinton, Mona Eltahawy, and Lena Dunham, respectively, have in common, besides their liberal political leanings? Well, at least as far as Time magazine is concerned, theirs are just three of "The 140 Best Twitter Feeds of 2013."  The magazine charged its section editors with finding feeds that "stand out for their humor, knowledge and personality."

Clinton and Eltahawy made the list under the "activist" category, while Dunham made the "celebrities" list. While there are plenty of relatively apolitical Tweeps in the mix, Time made sure to make Pete Souza, the president's photographer, one of the 10 honored in the arts and photography list. Below the page break you'll see the Souza tweet they chose, along with the picture of President Obama that accompanied it, as well as the magazine's state reason for why they like Souza's feed:

Actor Jim Carrey attracted a lot of attention last month when he said, “[Anyone] who would run out to buy an assault rifle after the Newtown massacre has very little left in their body or soul worth protecting."

He was back at it Sunday when he promoted a new satirical song to appear at the website Funny or Die with a tweet that read, "'Cold Dead Hand' is abt u heartless motherf%ckers unwilling 2 bend 4 the safety of our kids.Sorry if you're offended":

At the Hill on Monday, Pete Kasperowicz, employing the establishment press's usual "mean Republicans attack" spin, is packaging something first aggregated on Friday at Michelle Malkin's Twitchy.com exclusively as an accusation coming from GOP Congressman Steve Stockman of Texas.

Malkin's credit-denied crew, with the help of citizen activists who did much of the dirty work, detected what I will call "Astro-Tweets," a Twitter-driven variant of the campaign tactic known as "astroturfing," which aims, using a variety of means, to create the illusion of public support for a cause where little or none exists (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Update (15:50 EST, Feb. 22): Twitchy reports Amanpour deleted the tweet and subsequently insisted her birthday wish was ironic.

"[W]hat do you get for the serial human rights abuser who has everything?" the folks at Twitchy snarked today reacting to this tweet by CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour: "Happy Birthday, President Mugabe: http://on.cnn.com/VQ4kTK #Zimbabwe"

But wait, it gets better. The link in the tweet takes viewers to a short video [embedded below the page break] narrated by the CNN anchor, which opens with a strange comparison to Pope Benedict XVI:

Liz Sidoti's offering this morning at the Associated Press, which is clearly a serious competitor for Worst AP Item Ever, carries the "column" label. As such, I suppose we're expected to accept the idea that the "analysis" offered is hers alone.

But you would think that the self-described "essential global news network" would have enough business judgment to review a reporter's work to make sure it doesn't talk down to the general public and indict its own reporting on the economy at the same time. You would be wrong, as will be seen after the jump.

On Tuesday, CBS's Sharyl Attkisson broke on Twitter that the Obama administration "has indicated that it will not be answering Benghazi question we've been asking since Oct." Attkisson, who has provided hard-hitting reporting on the September 11, 2012 Islamist attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya, listed many of the questions that the executive branch has yet to answer about the story.

The journalist noted in a later Tweet that "CBS News FOI'd Benghazi info from State Dept, CIA, FBI and Defense Dept. None has been provided." Attkisson also pointed out a false claim by the administration:

NBC News correspondent Luke Russert marveled at Code Pink's disruption of the National Rifle Association's press conference in a Friday post on Twitter: "That was probably the most effective code pink protestor I've ever seen."

BuzzFeed's Ben Smith, formerly of the liberal website Politico, joined in with his own praise of the far-left organization in a Tweet six minutes later: "Those protesters did great advance work."

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch took to Twitter Saturday to criticize the press's reporting of hostilities in Israel.

One tweet in particular raised eyebrows on both sides of the aisle:

During an exchange on NBC's Press Pass on Sunday, Meet the Press moderator David Gregory and BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith wrung their hands over political divisiveness on social media sites like Twitter, but only managed to cite a list of Obama critics as the worst offenders.

Gregory lamented: "We talk about how polarized the country is....we see this reflected in particularly nasty ways....Donald Trump on election night tweeting....Jack Welch talking about a jobless report....Tone, tenor, and message, really polarizing on Twitter." Smith added: "We did a post on election night of people, you know, demanding Obama's assassination....We got a lot of emails from folks on that list saying, 'Hey, could you please take me off that, I certainly didn't really mean to say that in public.'"

Bloomberg Business never lets an opportunity to push global warming pass by. On the Nov. 1 edition of BusinessWeek, the cover story was titled “It’s Global Warming, Stupid” which appeared in huge black letters with a red background on the cover. Underneath the title was a picture of flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy.

The article, written by assistant managing editor and senior writer Paul Barrett, outlined how Sandy was, of course, made worse by man-made global warming. Eric Pooley, senior vice president of the lefty Environmental Defense Fund and former Bloomberg Business deputy editor, was quoted in the story saying that while we can’t assume Hurricane Sandy was directly caused by global warming, it is likely it was made worse. “Now we have weather on steroids,” he stated.

It didn't take long for the Luddites at Occupy Wall Street to go loony in the wake of Hurricane Sandy's damage.

Michelle Malkin's Twitchy.com web site captured tweets about how showing reactions in the midst of all the death and destruction at OWS's official Twitter account you won't see in the establishment press. The most egregious examples follow the jump.

Martha Raddatz boosted President Obama on ABC after the final presidential debate on Monday evening, just as she did during the earlier vice presidential debate that she moderated. Raddatz asserted that Obama "humanized what he was talking about. He talked a lot about the troops; he talked about the survivors from 9/11; he talked about the people in Israel. So if, in fact, he was going towards the female vote, he probably got their attention with that sort of approach." [audio available here; video below the jump]

ABC's post-debate coverage also spotlighted a Tweet from Nightline's Bill Weir, who channeled something that Al Gore had whined about just minutes earlier on Twitter: "Four #debates come and go without a single question on climate change."

Running for president isn't just a long, arduous struggle anymore, it's downright dangerous! Proof of this can be found in hundreds of online death threats made against GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney that are receiving far less coverage in "mainstream" news outlets than when Barack Obama faced similar hostility while campaigning for the White House in 2008.

One example of the disparity between the coverage of the 2008 and 2012 campaigns is the multitude of death threats posted on the Twitter social website against the former Massachusetts governor since the second presidential debate on Tuesday.

As NewsBusters reported Monday, African-American actress Stacey Dash was thoroughly lambasted on Twitter for expressing her support for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

During an interview with CNN's Piers Morgan Tuesday, a defiant Dash marvelously said, "I chose him not by the color of his skin but the content of his character" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

It's becoming incredibly clear since Barack Obama's horrible performance in last week's debate that his fans in the media are more and more desperate.

On Sunday, HBO's Bill Maher said to his followers on Twitter, "John Sununu is a racist fat f--k" (serious vulgarity warning):

"Actually, one of the best presidential debate moderators would be David Letterman."

So astonishingly wrote movie critic Roger Ebert on Twitter Thursday (vulgarity warning):

On Thursday's CBS This Morning, just hours after Mitt Romney's "crisp" debate performance, Norah O'Donnell stuck to her fixation on playing up the Republican's supposed negatives. O'Donnell maligned how Romney phrased his opposition to the federal government's subsidization of PBS: "This may have been the first time in a presidential debate that Big Bird was mentioned. It seems kind of like a silly thing to bring up."

Gayle King, an admitted friend of Michelle Obama and donor to the President's reelection campaign, also spotlighted a Tweet that referenced a decades-old anecdote about Romney placing his dog, Seamus, in a carrier on top of his car: "This wasn't a debate so much as Mitt Romney just took Obama for a cross-country drive strapped to the roof of his car."