When the Tallahassee Democrat combed the community in early 2007 for residents whose blogs and articles could fill out the paper's local coverage, Stacey N. Getz was happy to sign on. "Getz's Let's Talk Tallahassee blog is a paean to civic boosterism, inviting readers to submit ideas to help business leaders and developers improve the city," writes Adam Weinstein. But Getz didn't disclose that her PR firm, CoreMessage, had worked for Wal-Mart Stores when she wrote a blog post bashing the company's critics as "illogical lunatics." Weinstein argues that this exemplifies a problem with the news industry's growing embrace of citizen journalism. "As newspapers' circulation numbers and ad revenues free-fall, their executives have decided that publications must go 'hyper-local' and online, and they've enlisted the help of amateurs such as Getz to do it. But as her Wal-Mart plug shows, the newspaper industry's embrace of 'citizen journalism' has a downside. Reader-submitted content rarely gets vetted by editors. ... By forcing their beleaguered staffs to depend on outsiders for content, then running the content without much editorial oversight, newspapers may be taken in by crackpots and sly marketers who make Jayson Blair look like a grade-school plagiarist."

"Senior Pentagon officials, evidently reflecting a broader administration policy decision, used an off-the-record Pentagon briefing to turn the January 6 US-Iranian incident in the Strait of Hormuz into a sensational story demonstrating Iran's military aggressiveness," reports Gareth Porter. The incident, described by Pentagon officials as a "careless, reckless and potentially hostile" provocation by Iranian boats that nearly led to gunfire, was actually a nonthreatening, "almost routine" encounter that officials in Washington distorted. "The initial press stories on the incident, all of which can be traced to a briefing by deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs in charge of media operations, Bryan Whitman, contained similar information that has since been repudiated by the navy itself," Porter writes. "Then the navy disseminated a short video into which was spliced the audio of a phone call warning that US warships would 'explode' in 'a few seconds.'"

"Several of the leading presidential candidates have adopted 'change' as a campaign theme and have rushed to claim that they themselves are the candidates for change," notes Frank Newport of the Gallup polling organization. "But exactly what form that 'change' should take has been a little murky. Change is such a broad concept that -- like a Rorschach inkblot test -- an individual can read into it what he or she wants." To clarify things a bit, Gallup surveyed Americans to ask what type of change they wanted. The three most common answers were: end the war in Iraq/bring troops home (26 percent); healthcare reform (19 percent); and fix the economy/create more jobs (18 percent). Stopping illegal immigration came in fourth, at 10 percent.