You see, class, the placement of "Baretta" over "Burn In Hell," indicates that the Post sees our judicial system's glass as half full. They're focusing on the positive; Robert Blake is free! Quite a contrast to the Daily News, which comes off as rather despondent. Lots of gloom and doom over there — get those kids some Zoloft, right?
This world is so confusing. We look to the "news" "media" to "clear it up" for "us," but sometimes competing outlets have what is known as "different spins." It's almost impossible to know whom to trust in a world of Points and Counterpoints.
There's a mysterious item from yesterday's Mediaweek about Lizz Winstead's departure from Air America Radio, the liberal station she helped build and for which she co-hosted Unfiltered with Chuck D and Rachel Maddow. (You also may have seen the open request for info posted on Romenesko's letters page.)
First Legs McNeil came out swinging at Martin Amis, and now Kurt Andersen is puffing his chest up at James Wolcott. The usually timid literary/journalism scene is starting to resemble the hip hop world with all these feuds. We haven't seen this much beef in lit land since Norman Mailer stopped advertising for himself. (And, no, that's not a shot at Mailer's weight: we don't want a feud of our own.)
Online community encyclopedia Wikipedia is nothing new, but because you can add any entry to the database or alter any information that appears in an existing entry (thus making it an unwise source for any would-be journos out there), it's a wonderful measure of who the people really care to know about and what, exactly, is worth knowing:
Lessons in publicity (taken ever-so-slightly out of context), courtesy of the Guardian:
This one really needs to be read in full to be believed: Newsweek's Jonathan Alter recounts how he and Hunter S. Thompson inadvertently prompted Tabitha Soren to urge a gullible college kid to ask Bill Clinton if he wore boxers or briefs on MTV in 1992.
In honor of last night's Academy Awards ceremony, Harper's digs deep into its archive for this article from February 1851, the same year as the first Oscar broadcast. (Clint Eastwood won that year, too.) Apparently actors were always overpaid. They were also always mocked by envious journalists (who were probably writing screenplays—or whatever the hell people wrote back in the day to make millions quickly):
