Lyons likes the idea put forward by billionaire Ayn Rand fan Mark Cuban:

Cuban's advice: declare war on the "aggregator" Web sites that get a free ride on content. These aggregators--sites like Drudge Report, Newser and countless others--don't create much original material. They mostly just synopsize stuff from mainstream newspapers and magazines, and provide a link to the original....

He says the media companies should kill off these parasites by using a little piece of software that blocks incoming links from aggregators. If the aggregators can't link to other people's stories, they die. With a few lines of code, the old-media guys could snuff them out.

Great idea--except that aggregator sites don't actually have to link to the original articles--they could just synopsize the news they find and leave searching for the original article as an exercise for the reader.  As Cuban himself notes, "very few readers actually click through to the original story," so they can't be the main attraction of the aggregators. Apparently, people go to them because they are a quick way to learn the news of the day--and they're going to keep being that, unless you make it a crime to tell people what the news is. I don't think we want to do that.

The links are mainly there as a courtesy to the content-producer, and they ought to appreciate that courtesy, because more important than the traffic that such links generate directly (though this can be quite attractive, as evidenced by outlets' relentless pursuit of Drudge links) is the fact that they boost your search-engine visibility, particularly on Google. If you stopped people from linking to you, you'd be basically invisible online. And this would be good for corporate media how?

Rather than coming up with a scheme for how to get back at Google, Huffington Post or whomever, corporate media would be better off thinking about why people use aggregator sites. When people are looking for a roundup of all the news in the world, why don't they turn to a newspaper?  And when they do click on your sites, why doesn't that make you more money? Corporate media is, after all, the business of selling audiences to advertisers--if they can't do that as well as Google does, then they just aren't very good at their jobs.

Being "the person who first hired Van Jones," Paterson finds herself "in a unique position to know the truth." And falling squarely in the fabulously unsurprising category is that "the truth is: Beck is fabricating his facts":

For instance: several times on his show, Beck has said or implied that Van went to prison for taking part in the Rodney King riots....

This is what really happened. On May 8, 1992, the week after the Rodney King disturbances, I sent a staff attorney and Van out to be legal monitors at a peaceful march in San Francisco. The local police...stopped the march and arrested hundreds of people--including all the legal monitors.

The matter was quickly sorted out; Van and my staff attorney were released within a few hours. All charges against them were dropped. Van was part of a successful class action lawsuit later; the City of San Francisco ultimately compensated him financially for his unjust arrest (a rare outcome).

So the unwarranted arrest at a peaceful march--for which the charges were dropped and for which Van was financially compensated--is the sole basis for the smear that he is some kind of dangerous criminal.

Paterson reminds you that "you don't have to take my word for it," since "arrests and convictions are all a matter of public record." And of course, FAIR followers know all too well that "Beck is at best relying on Internet rumors or even inventing claims to boost his ratings."

Read a recent article from FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Glenn Beck Is No Howard Beale: He's Mad Like a Fox, and Wants to Take Us In" (6/09) by Steve Rendall.

One of Osnos' key examples of the unfairness of Google involves Sports Illustrated's website, SI.com, and a story it ran (2/7/09) on pitcher Alex Rodriguez testing positive for steroids. Osnos relates SI.com's grievance: Though it broke the story, other websites got as much or more traffic from it:

Most galling was that the Huffington Post's use of an Associated Press version of SI's report was initially tops on Google, which meant that it, and not SI.com, tended to be the place readers clicking through to get the gist of the breaking scandal would land.

From a journalist's perspective, this is patently unfair: SI.com got the scoop, and ought to get the reward. But is that the right perspective to look at what Google does?  Journalists are not, after all, in the business of creating information; they're in the business of conveying information.  Sports Illustrated's reporters did not create Rodriguez's failing steroid test results; Major League Baseball did that. People with access to the test information passed it on to SI, and SI put it up on the Web.

But that's not where the process of information transmission stops. People can't check every website that might break a news story of interest to them every day, so they rely on news gathering institutions to bring information together for them--that's what newspapers do, that's what AP does, and, yes, that's what Huffington Post does too.

Osnos attributes the Google results to the fact that "Huffington is effective at implementing search optimization techniques, which means that its manipulation of keywords, search terms, and the dynamics of Web protocol give it an advantage over others scrambling to be the place readers are sent by search engines." And it may well be that the folks at HuffPo are better at that stuff than SI is--though you'd think with the $84 billion entity of Time Warner behind them, the sports mag could afford to figure it out.

More important for HuffPo's search results, however, is the fact that people who use the Web have gotten used to looking for breaking news there, and so when they link to a story they find interesting they link to it there. Google's methodology, looking for links as a surrogate for how people use the Web, finds more of them going to Huffington Post than to SI.com--and that's why HuffPo came out on top.

Osnos says that "human help" needs to be incorporated into Google's algorithm--given that the search engine last year announced that it had indexed more than 1 trillion urls, this suggestion would seem to be rather impractical. But it's not clear that the human-free algorithm is making the wrong choice by directing Web surfers to the sites people most often go to when looking for information.

That's right, it slammed the door in the face of new media--and offered traditional reporters a front-row seat.

China's leaders realized that it's one thing to try to spin the on-the-ground views of bussed-in reporters ("To help foreign media to do more objective, fair and friendly reports," in the words of the government's PR agency), but quite another to try to spin the accounts and uploaded images of tens of thousands of Twittering and cell-phone camera-wielding citizens.

The Chinese have clearly learned the lessons of Iran.

As Huffington reminds us, "the truth is, you don't have to 'be there' to bear witness. And you can be there and fail to bear witness."

Driving home the point that "the conclusions drawn by eyewitnesses are greatly influenced by the eyes doing the witnessing," Huffington then excerpts one of the most damaging journalistic examples of this in our time:

Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, [a scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade] pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried. This reporter also accompanied MET Alpha on the search for him and was permitted to examine a letter written in Arabic that he slipped to American soldiers offering them information about the program and seeking their protection.

So wrote an embedded Judith Miller, "bearing witness" to the "silver bullet" proof of Iraqi WMD in the New York Times in April 2003.