We have completed a thorough review of each of Fareed Zakaria’s columns for TIME, and we are entirely satisfied that the language in question in his recent column was an unintentional error and an isolated incident for which he has apologized. We look forward to having Fareed's thoughtful and important voice back in the magazine with his next column in the issue that comes out on September 7.

Wonder what his status is over at the Washington Post, where Paul Farhi accused Zakaria of journalistic misgivings, and then was forced to redact his piece after Farhi turned out to be wrong.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Some Blogger, as Forgotten By History.

It's raining me...dia items. Hallelujah. With so much to get through today, rather than act out the pretense that people are ever going to click on media news roundups from a landing page, we're just going to skip the obligatory formalities of teasing anything out and just get right into them. Starting now. 

As such, here are your Wednesday Evening Media Briefs. 

TBD's Fate is Now "D." Hyperlocal DC news site TBD.com—which, by all accounts, was halfway decent until it was shut down—has now been shut down for what's likely the last time. Watching former TBD editor Erik Wemple have to eulogize it at the Washington Post is bittersweet, especially since the kind folks at the Post (namely, Paul Farhi) were once so welcoming of their new competition (then again, Wemple, a fine journalist himself, is employed as he should be). [Washington Post]

Snake Eats Own Tail: Speaking of schadenfreude and Paul Farhi—who ESPN's Tony Kornheiser once called a "duplicitous snake"—today, Paul Farhi is being corrected...for his attempt at putting the paddle to currently embattled Washington Post contributor Fareed Zakaria. Farhi wrote a piece on Monday in which he raked Zakaria over the coals, and accused Zakaria of journalistic malfeasance by way of quoting a source without mentioning that the quote appeared somewhere else years earlier. As Politico's Dylan Byers put it: "Farhi apparently did not consult the passages in question." A few hours later, this correction is printed:

The Post should have examined copies of the books and should not have published the article. We regret the error and apologize to Fareed Zakaria.

Paul Farhi, as far as we can tell, still works at the Washington Post. [Politico]

Jodie Foster, Faithful Daily Beast Reader and Writer. The Daily Beast sure loves itself some big-name contributors. Take, for example, today's essay by Jodie Foster, in which she laments the frenzied celebrity media culture that surrounds people like Kristen Stewart, whose recent breakup with Robert Pattinson has been extensively documented by what Jodie Foster calls the "gladiator sport of celebrity culture." Thankfully, she is writing for a news outlet that would never stoop that low. [The Daily Beast]

Donald Trump Writes Off Evil Hack Blogger, Who Is Now Obviously Irrelevant: It was suggested that—due to some relation among higher-ups—The Observer wouldn't touch this thing involving Loser Salon™'s own news terrorist, pathological liar, and North Korean-born teenage vampire Alex Pareene attacking the good and unsullied name of thrice-over gajillionare and macro-economic powerhouse/pending MacArthur Genius Grant for Money recipient Donald Trump, chairman and CEO of The Trump Corporation LLC, creative mastermind behind NBC's hit television ratings behemoth The Apprentice, a renowned sportsman-cum-environmentalist who cares about the economic state of all Americans just as much as he does the fact that they take their vitamins. For whom anything from a historic neighborhood that once saw the sun to beautiful rural Scottish moorlands that have been untouched for generations to outer space represents nothing but opportunity for monumentally prosperous, important, and occasionally profitable human endeavor? The Donald Trump who bravely dared question the authenticity of a (in all likelihood, treasonous) anti-American American president's birth certificate in the face of the countless experts who contradicted that claim and The President of the United States presenting the birth certificate himself on national television, not just before all of that, but after it, too? The same Donald Trump appearing at this year's Republican National Convention, where they will salivate for him to run for High Office again, but are obviously unworthy of such refined leadership, so they'll have to settle with simply having their minds blown and hearts won over? That Donald Trump? The fact is, a journalist being smashed off the face of the planet by the withering, blistering, face-melting parenthetical wit that is Donald Trump's is, in fact, news, and worthy of being covered. As such: Alex Pareene wrote a bunch of lies and terrible things about Donald Trump, and—as he's already done to Vanity Fair's Juli Weiner and ProPublica's Justin Elliot before him—Donald Trump wrote him out of history. Forever. The entire thing was pretty funny. [Loser Salon™, @RealDonaldTrump, Loser Salon™]

It's Like His Girl Friday Meets The Departed: Speaking of honorable types, the staunch ethicists at the top of News Corp are taking further action to root out any unsavory journalism practices tainting the high standards to which they hold their profession, and sacred strictures by which they abide. They're launching an "Anti-Corruption Review" which, according to Rupert Murdoch himself, "not based on any suspicion of wrongdoing by any particular business unit or its personnel" and called it a "forward-looking review."  [Guardian UK]

More Like 'State of Lame': On that note, here are newspaper films, ranked by popularity via Netflix. [Romenesko]

Daisey and Confused: Former This American Life contributor Mike Daisey thinks tech writers don't do their jobs, and implores them to not just swallow Apple's press lines. He also recognizes that he's had his own journalism problems, but isn't the entire problem that he tried to pass it off as journalism and that he's not in much of a place to speak to journalism ethics to begin with? You decide. Either way, he's right about at least part of this. [Mike Daisey]

Conde Nast Does Not Have a Company-Wide Policy Regarding Jonah Lehrer: Well, he may not work at The New Yorker anymore, but Jonah Lehrer will possibly continue to write for Wired, reported Buzzfeed's Ben Smith. Wired later posted a statement saying they haven't fully made the decision yet, though the outlook isn't so grim. We're not the gambling types, but we will take odds that if it goes through, Lehrer's next Wired piece written post-Lehrergate will be about what it's like to be at the center of an Internet "Snarkstorm" or somesuch business. [Buzzfeed, Wired]

On The Matter of Piers Morgan's Waning Influence. Well...

[@BBCSporf]

No Sweet Home: Finally, to end on a depressing note, this writer's hometown newspaper just laid off five more staffers. Here's hoping they don't go on to become "International Bestsellers" in their next career. [Romenesko]

Tips, scandal, or effusive praise of great American capitalists? Send it right this way.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

"The Romney post is going viral!" (via the Kheel Center/Flickr)

Blogging for the Washington Post probably isn't that bad. Still, the Post's ombudsman, Patrick Pexton, felt the paper deserved a spanking after the recent resignation of BlogPost blogger Elizabeth Flock. In his opinion piece regarding Ms. Flock's resignation following what amounted to a (minor and perhaps unintended) plagiarism scandal, Mr. Pexton detailed the unrealistic demands made on young journalists who find themselves fielding blogging duties at a major newspaper. He noted BlogPost was expected to garner up to 2 million hits a month, with Ms. Flock publishing 5-6 posts a day. She wasn't writing simple paragraphs hitting major points in a story either, but full-on 500-word pieces aggregated from multiple sources.

Traffic expectations and heavy workload contributed to Ms. Flock's two mistakes, which included re-writing a Discovery News post without crediting the source, the incident that led to her resignation. "[Ms. Flock] said it was only a matter of time before she made a third one; the pressures were just too great," wrote Mr. Pexton.

Mr. Pexton feels Ms. Flock bears only some of the blame:

But The Post failed her as much as she failed The Post. I spoke with several young bloggers at The Post this week, and some who have left in recent months, and they had the same critique.

They said that they felt as if they were out there alone in digital land, under high pressure to get Web hits, with no training, little guidance or mentoring and sparse editing. Guidelines for aggregating stories are almost nonexistent, they said. And they believe that, even if they do a good job, there is no path forward. Will they one day graduate to a beat, covering a crime scene, a city council or a school board? They didn’t know. So some left; others are thinking of quitting.

The Post's director of digital news, Katharine Zaleski, pointed out to Mr. Pexton that Post bloggers know what's expected of them. She also said executives are "deeply conscious of the imperatives our bloggers face" and do everything they can to support them, (like demanding they summon those Magic Traffic Faeries to the tune of millions per month).

In the end things may improve, however, as the paper plans to start cross-training reporters: "digital journalists will learn the ways of street reporters, and reporters will learn the ways of digital and social media."

As Mr. Pexton notes, the cross-training will come too late for Ms. Flock.

However, because veteran street reporters are often such big fans of blogging and social media, we're sure everything will work out great.

The death of Mr. Shadid, an American of Lebanese descent who had a wife and two children, abruptly ended one of the most storied resumes in modern American journalism. Fluent in Arabic, with a gifted eye for detail and contextual writing, Mr. Shadid captured dimensions of life in the Middle East that many others failed to see. Those talents won him a Pulitzer Price for international reporting in 2004 for his coverage of the American invasion of Iraq and the occupation that followed, and a second Pulitzer in 2010, also for his Iraq reporting. He also was a finalist in 2007 for his coverage of Lebanon, and has been nominated by the Times for his coverage of the Arab Spring uprisings that have transfixed the Middle East for the past year.

Anthony Shadid's 2004 Pulitzer article was "A Boy Who Was 'Like a Flower,'" written for the Post. It was a powerful piece about the death a 14-year-old Baghdad boy, Arkhan Daif:

With a cotton swab dipped in water, he ran his hand across Daif's olive corpse, dead for three hours but still glowing with life. He blotted the rose-red shrapnel wounds on the soft skin of Daif's right arm and right ankle with the poise of practice. Then he scrubbed his face scabbed with blood, left by a cavity torn in the back of Daif's skull.

The men in the Imam Ali mosque stood somberly waiting to bury a boy who, in the words of his father, was "like a flower." Haider Kathim, the caretaker, asked: "What's the sin of the children? What have they done?"

Mr. Shadid was also an author. His most recent book, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East, will be released at the end of March.

[NYT]

But they're not laying off any reporters, according to an internal memo obtained by Politico.

"This decision is about office space, not personnel," editor Marcus Baruchli wrote.

Happy Labor Day!

"[Vernon Loeb] said he will also do everything in his power to use some of the savings from the closure of the bureaus to invest in better mobile technology for reporters," Guild rep Fredrick Kunkle wrote.

The Slate model, if you will.

The CIA has started a group to determine the impact of Cablegate, the leak of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and military files by WikiLeaks, which is known as the Wikileaks Task Force, or WTF, reports The Washington Post.

WTF is Internet slang for an expression of simultaneous surprise and vexation, appropos of the government's reaction to the rogue journalism outfit.

Urban Dictionary notes the acronym has become "the universal interrogative particle," and the Post didn't feel the need to explain it either, so we imagine the CIA was aware of the entendre. If not, they might want to get online.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

The obvious concern is that if journalists work for the companies they report on they can no longer be trusted to do so neutrally. PFC Opinion Research has their own ethical complaints.

"It's ironic that journalists depend on people to give them their opinions but aren't as forthcoming with their own," PFC director David Leonard said. "It's easier to get a congressman to participate." 

Big Oil should just bait the journalists on Twitter! They'll retweet anything on their beat with some free, transparent, and concise expertise.

Check out the Year's Most Memorable Magazine Covers.>>

kstoeffel [at] observer.com | @kstoeffel

WaPo reporter David Montgomery's article on the Olbermann suspension gave credit to Politico, but other Washington Post stories about the situation did not mention Politico's role in the story at all.

Rothstein contacted the Washington Post about its coverage about the situation at TBD. She received a response from media reporter Paul Farhi who apologized and blamed his editor for removing references to FishbowlDC breaking the story of Brady's departure.

"I saw the news on Fishbowl and wrote in my story that Fishbowl had broken the story (because I assumed you had). The credit, however, was removed at the desk; my editor wasn’t sure that you HAD broken the news, and I couldn’t really say I knew for sure. Since there was no time on deadline to investigate the matter, we decided to take the mention of Fishbowl out. Sorry," Farhi said.

Though he apologized for the incident, Farhi also told Rothstein that he thinks crediting the original source of a scoop isn't "a requirement or even important" because "all news originates from somewhere" and "unless one is taking someone else’s work without attribution (that is, plagiarizing it) any news story should stand on its own and speaks for itself as an original piece of work."

Rothstein's answered Farhi in her FishbowlDC post about the incident. 

"Farhi is a media reporter. He and his editors had an obligation to say where the story originated whether it was the NYT, the GW Hatchet, or SodaHead.com," Rothstein wrote.

There are two lessons here. Firstly, reporters should always credit the original source on a story. Finally, don't mess with Betsy Rothstein or you'll almost certainly find yourself staring down the wrong end of a strongly worded blog post.

The end came quietly on Aug. 21 on the letters page of The Washington Post. A reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha Obama was the "youngest" daughter of the president and first lady, rather than their "younger" daughter. In so doing, however, the letter writer called the first couple the "Obama's." This, too, was published, constituting an illiterate proofreading of an illiterate criticism of an illiteracy. Moments later, already severely weakened, English died of shame.

A few examples from Weingarten's litany of shame are worth mention.

- "Pronounciation" has recently made it into reports in the Boston Globe, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Deseret Morning News and Washington Jewish Week, just to name three.

- The same error also appeared in the Contra Costa Times. In that paper it actually appeared in a correction to another error.

- The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star reported on football as a "doggy dog world."

- The Vallejo Times-Herald and (according to Weingarten) dozens of others published articles discussing treatment of "prostrate cancer."

- Weingarten managed a dig at the New York Times, noting that the paper has frequently used the phrase "reach out to," which he colorfully termed a "vomitous verbal construction."

A Google search restricted to NYTimes.com for the phrase "reach out to" actually yielded more than 60,000 results.

Weingarten's pronouncement, however, is nothing new. He can probably chillax, since scholars have been declaring English dead for years, but the language marches on like a dutiful zombie, gathering new and terrible words as it goes.

[Washington Post]

In an interview with Politico last week, Mr. Sullivan described his new position as advocate for the Style section and weekend magazine — to make sure the light stuff is also the good stuff. He also noted that the Sunday paper is the "anchor" of the Post franchise."There’s still a lot of life in our Sunday paper,” he said, emphasizing that the weekend is one of the best battlegrounds for the Post to keep and win readers.

The Post is not the only paper worrying about the weekend.

Mr. Sullivan and his wife Mary Jordan, also a former Post foreign correspondent, returned to America last year after more than a decade reporting overseas so their children could experience American high school. Dave Kindred's recently published book about the Post notes that foreign correspondent The New York Times Anthony Shadid left the Post because it had shifted its emphasis away from daily reporting on stories overseas.