Charlie "was a hip-hop artist, very 'street.' ... He started a blog, alliwantforxmasisapsp.com, where he mused in urban patois about how his cousin Pete really, really wanted a Sony PSP for Christmas." The website was a "flog," or fake blog, launched by Sony to market the game system. "Sony's admission ... comes less than two months after it was revealed that Wal-Mart's public relations firm, Edelman, had been behind the blog 'Wal-Marting Across America,'" notes Sam McManis. "Flogs aren't rampant -- yet," but "marketers often turn to alternative forms of advertising. ... For several years now, marketers have paid 'real people' to talk up products ranging from cell phones to hair gel on city buses, at sporting events or in bars. Procter & Gamble, for instance, has 'sponsored' more than 200,000 teenagers to use products and recommend them to friends." The company PayPerPost offers companies a "network of bloggers" to promote their goods. Following the Wal-Mart / Edelman incident, PayPerPost "developed a disclosure policy for bloggers to 'accelerate transparency.'"

After reviewing "two University of Chicago economists' findings about the political slant of American newspapers," reporter Chris Adams concludes that the study "has structural flaws." For instance, the study counted the Washington Post's mentions of "real estate tax" as "estate tax," a phrase identified as Democratic (as opposed to its Republican counterpart, "death tax"). Many of the Democratic-leaning phrases the study found in the New York Times, such as "bring our troops home" and "tax cuts for the rich," appeared not in news reports, but in opinion pieces or letters to the editor. Moreover, the "partisan phrases" used the most by the New York Times -- which the study gave a partisan score similar to "a fairly liberal congressperson" like Senator Barbara Boxer -- were "credit card" and "Justice Department." The study's supposedly-Republican phrases include "assistant secretary" and "urge support." Adams further cautions, "Among the most liberal newspapers in the study: the Times-Picayune of New Orleans. Among the most Democratic phrases: 'Hurricane Katrina.'"

"Here is the redacted version of a draft Op-Ed article we wrote for The [New York] Times, as blacked out by the Central Intelligence Agency's Publication Review Board after the White House intervened in the normal prepublication review process," write Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann. Leverett, a former CIA analyst and National Security Council official, has accused the White House of using the CIA vetting process "to silence an established critic of the administration's foreign policy incompetence." The column accompanying the redacted op-ed includes citations of previous news articles, "to demonstrate that all of the material the White House objected to is already in the public domain. Unfortunately, to make sense of much of our Op-Ed article, readers will have to read the citations for themselves." Leverett and Mann vow to "continue to press for the release of the article without the material deleted," adding that "national security must be above politics."