David Roberts tweets: Every ‘winger-driven faux story now has two phases. First headline: “Faux story!” Second: “Faux story becomes huge story!” Pathetic. This is actually a bit truncated.  The steps are: Faux Story Why is the Em-Ess-Em ignoring this huge Faux Story? After days or weeks of flood-the-zone coverage across multiple conservative media outlets, some [...]

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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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So, I’m not only struck by how profoundly screwed up Jonah Goldberg’s reaction to the recently released audiotapes of Mel Gibson threatening his ex seems—I’m astonished that, having had these thoughts pass through his head, he’s oblivious enough to this that he’d publish them: I think Gibson is clearly troubled and despite his well-documented paranoia, [...]

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With NYU’s Jay Rosen about the curious customs of American political journalists:

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I’m going to have to side with (my friend) Ezra Klein against (our mutual friend) Conor Friedersdorf on the question of whether D.C. is somehow toxic for journalists and thinkers. Here’s the nub of his concern: But inside the world of many ideological magazines, think tanks, foundations, and other intellectual movement operations, a different dynamic [...]

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I know some of my friends are upset about Dave Weigel’s account of last weeks’ Milton Friedman dinner, which focused on the audience reaction to Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji’s Friedman Award acceptance speech. Now, I was seated a table or two down from Dave, and his description matches my recollection, as far as it goes. [...]

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They’re both a little sick of the term—and believe me, at this point, I empathize—but this is as good a summary of what I was trying to talk about as I’ve seen. The whole discussion is pretty interesting and on point. Greenwald is right, incidentally, that technology hasn’t cloistered partisans—research shows online news consumers are [...]

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At Balloon Juice, we find a common complaint about The Village expressed: I don’t mean to pick on Sullivan, who probably just meant this as nothing more than to compliment to a decent lady. But there are plenty of members of the journalistic elite who justify their shitty journalism by saying that some monster is [...]

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Scan the last paragraph of George Will’s column on Arizona’s round-up-the-darkies law while I take a deep breath: Non-Hispanic Arizonans of all sorts live congenially with all sorts of persons of Hispanic descent. These include some whose ancestors got to Arizona before statehood — some even before it was a territory. They were in America [...]

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Over the past couple of weeks, a pair of posts I wrote about what I dubbed “epistemic closure” on the right kicked off a surprisingly broad set of conversations and debates—mostly, I suspect, because it slapped a name on a phenomenon that a lot of people already recognized, and which many conservatives were themselves feeling [...]

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