This day an eerie silence fell on American journalism's attic.

— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) July 20, 2013

Now, it’s all designed to blow our minds
But our minds won’t really be blown
Like the blow that’ll get ya when you get your picture
On the cover of the Rolling Stone *

He’d look like schadenfreude.

A CBS2/KCAL9 photographer and reporter were assaulted Monday night while covering a George Zimmerman protest in Crenshaw.
Reporter Dave Bryan was conducting an interview around 10 p.m. when the suspect tackled him and his photographer, the station confirmed.
“All of the sudden, this guy came up from behind, he had a hood, and he knocked David on the head and he pushed the camera guy down. The camera guy went down, the camera went down, David went down,” witness Joseph Deguerre, said. “I was in shock.”

In Oakland;

Several journalists, however, including photographers for The San Francisco Chronicle and the Bay Area News Group, were accosted by protesters late in the night near Dogwood, suffering minor injuries.

The media created the monster. May it feed on them first.

“While it has become increasingly clear for some time that younger individuals are more inclined than their elders to use digital sources to keep up with the news, publishers generally were confident that they continued to enjoy the loyalty of middle-aged and older readers.

Via The Blaze;

“Two systems went against George Zimmerman that he can’t understand: you guys, the media. He was like a patient in an operating table where a mad scientists were committing experiments on him and he he had no anesthesia,” an agitated O’Mara said after a reporter asked if Zimmerman ever showed emotion. “He didn’t know why he was turned into this monster, but quite honestly you guys had a lot to do with it. You just did. Because you took a story that was fed to you and you ran with it, and you ran right over him. And that was horrid to him.
“Then he comes into a system that he trusts — let’s not forget, six voluntary statements, voluntary surrender — and he believes in a system that he really wanted to be a part of, right? And then he gets prosecutors that charge him with a crime that they could never, ever, prove. … So those two systems failed him.”

The Zimmerman trial by media: a timeline.
Update: Zimmerman Will Move ‘ASAP’ on Lawsuit Against NBC for Fraudulent Audio Editing

Layers of fact checkers.

.@glen_mcgregor Look! Up in the sky.. It's a WalMart bag! It's a balloon losing air! No, it's Robocall Man!

— katewerk (@katewerk) July 11, 2013

Hollywood actress sun “worshipping” suggestion;

“We’re human beings and the sun is the sun — how can it be bad for you? I think we should all get sun and fresh air. I don’t think anything that is natural can be bad for you — it’s really good to have at least 15 minutes of sun a day.”

Underworked journalist pounces!

We’re not doctors here at the National Post, but we suspected there was something wrong with the Goop mogul’s sun-worshipping suggestion. To back up our suspicions, we asked a few real doctors what they thought about Paltrow’s comments. Here’s what they said… [snip]

Dr. Richard Bendor-Samuel, Cosmetic Surgeon at The Landings Surgical Centre, Halifax;

Fifteen minutes a day of sunlight in the morning or late afternoon is likely okay for most of us.

But let’s not focus on the fact that one of the experts quoted largely agrees with Paltrow. Let’s ask the World Health Organization…

… excessive UVR exposure accounts for only 0.1% of the total global burden of disease in disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), according to the 2006 World Health Organization (WHO) report The Global Burden of Disease Due to Ultraviolet Radiation. DALYs measure how much a person’s expectancy of healthy life is reduced by premature death or disability caused by disease. Coauthor Robyn Lucas, an epidemiologist at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health in Canberra, Australia, explains that many diseases linked to excessive UVR exposure tend to be relatively benign–apart from malignant melanoma–and occur in older age groups, due mainly to the long lag between exposure and manifestation, the requirement of cumulative exposures, or both. Therefore, when measuring by DALYs, these diseases incur a relatively low disease burden despite their high prevalence.
In contrast, the same WHO report noted that a markedly larger annual disease burden of 3.3 billion DALYs worldwide might result from very low levels of UVR exposure. This burden subsumes major disorders of the musculoskeletal system and possibly an increased risk of various autoimmune diseases and life-threatening cancers.

She may not be a doctor, but she’s a damned sight better Googler.

SCHIEFFER: “How many lawsuits have been filed on that? Because I must say this is under my radar. I haven’t heard this.”
(link fixed)

If CNN is typical of mainstream American news coverage, no freakin’ wonder George Zimmerman was doing his Neighborhood Watch with a Glock. (*)

As of this writing, I had received no answer. The CAJ-list, having posted Pinto’s monstrous falsehoods, has gone dark and silent. The moderator is no doubt feverishly considering the right of a defamed person to challenge the defamation on the very site where it appeared.

A satirical example of what the US media would write, if the US was another country.
Via, NewsWatch Canada

Gallup: Less Than One Fourth of Americans Trust Newspapers

No word on the number of virgins.

CBC pixillates video of mating cicadas

Journalism as suicide pact: “… the fact that half of Toronto does not believe the video exists, by extension, means that half the city believes Toronto Star journalists are liars.”
Indeed.

.@thekeenanwire @acoyne There’s nothing that reverses media decline quite like journos sneering at the audience.

— katewerk (@katewerk) June 2, 2013