On PBS's Web site today, ombudsman Michael Getler writes of complaints over an incident during last Sunday's pledge drive.  He describes the cheap shot taken by actor Mike Farrell against vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin:

According to Joseph Campbell, vice president of fundraising programs, here's what happened:

 On CNN's American Morning today, White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux reported on Barack Obama's campaigning in Virginia.  Afterwards, anchor Kiran Chetry had a question:

CHETRY: All right. And Suzanne, what's on tap for the campaign today? And please tell me it's not lipstick again.

MALVEAUX: Let's hope not. He's going to be in Norfolk, Virginia. That is in southeast Virginia, and it's home to the world's largest Naval base. It's one of the most competitive areas that the Democrats and Republicans are fighting over. It's a critical piece of property, piece of land there with folks in Virginia, and they want those voters.

Microsoft is taking all of that unnecessary thinking out of the process by pre-chewing your news and spitting it on your plate.

The software giant is developing a new kind of news-aggregator that doesn't just collect news; it determines news stories' ideological bias and “emotional charge.” No longer will you need to wonder if Maureen Dowd has a liberal bias or if NPR injects “emotional charge” into a story about gun control. BLEWS figures it out, so you don't have to!

Microsoft explains “what the blogosphere tells you about news” (all bold mine):

While typical news-aggregation sites do a good job of clustering news stories according to topic, they leave the reader without information about which stories figure prominently in political discourse. BLEWS uses political blogs to categorize news stories according to their reception in the conservative and liberal blogospheres.

The Digg community is notorious for instantly burying stories by conservatives or about conservative-themed issues. Digg seems to be doing something that might help a little; they are banning users who bury stories (as well as those who Digg) without taking the time to read them.  (hat tip Hot Air)

An Australian tech blogger named Dan posted a letter on his blog TheWrongAdvices.com from Digg notifying him that his account had been banned for Digging or burying too quickly. Strangely, Dan’s blog account has been suspended and his site is inaccessible, and so, the Righty blogger Weasel Zippers now seems to be the only source to read the email.  

Here is the email as posted on Weasel Zippers:

Yesterday, the computer geek world was abuzz with news that someone had managed to break the encryption code on the next-generation DVD system, HD-DVD.

The code was posted all over the internet (a Google search for "09 F9," the first four digits of the code turns up 62,000 results). One site it was posted on was digg.com, a popular and somewhat left-leaning news community. Digg, however, was contacted by Hollywood lawyers who warned them to delete the post or face legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Digg deleted the post and in the process set off a firestorm of user protest within its community. Immediately, everyone started posting the code into non-related entries and denouncing Digg for being a censor. It got so bad that the site shut down entirely.

From time to time, we receive suggestions about adding a link on articles to submit NB stories to the community bookmarking site Digg.com. It's something we've thought about, however, I've always been skeptical of the non-partisanship of Digg.

LGF and Ace have some interesting posts on how leftist readers of the site consistently vote stories with conservative messages off the front page.

IMO this is yet another example of the left better using technology than the right. <