A clip of Christine O’Donnell, former US Senate candidate and Tea Partier, walking out during an interview with Piers Morgan has been making the rounds online. Who wins when a guest walks out?

In the wake of Ron Paul's narrow loss to Michele Bachmann in last weekend's Ames Iowa Republican straw poll, a media meta-narrative has emerged: why is the media deliberately ignoring Ron Paul? We took a look at reaction from around the web for some insight.

It's Monday.  Time for OTM staff picks. Feel free to offer us feedback in the comments section, and enjoy!

This week's uproar over Newsweek's Michele Bachmann cover reminded us of a piece we originally aired in 2008 about the ethical rules that govern journalistic portrait photography. As Bob puts it so eloquently in the piece "Where is the distinction between artistic prerogative and photo 'gotcha'? If a picture is worth a thousand words, who protects the subject - and the audience - from a thousand words manipulated or taken out of context?" Have a listen!

Despite their bad reputation, it’s hard to imagine an internet without cookies. The small, suspicious looking files sitting in the bowels of your browser are what allow you to have a shopping cart when visiting Amazon, save your passwords on frequently visited websites and receive the kind of targeted advertising that helps underwrite much of the internet’s free content. Handled responsibly, cookies can be useful tools that respect your anonymity while offering you great services. And if you really don’t like them, well, that’s what your browser’s privacy settings are for.

A lot of our producers are on vacation this week, so the staff picks are only going to be the stragglers who are hanging around. But what we lack in quantity, we make up for in quality! As always, feel free to tell us what you have been into lately in the comments section!

A few weeks ago, WNYC’s own John Keefe appeared on our program and wrote a blog about how easily he hacked into the voicemails of AT&T and Sprint cell phones. Now it appears that AT&T is changing the default setting on new phones, so that users will automatically have password protection on their voicemails unless they turn the feature off.

It would appear that The Wall Street Journal isn’t the only news organization that's struggling with how to revise web content after getting its facts wrong.  Reuters recently suffered an embarrassment when, after publicly acknowledging a serious error in a column by David Johnston, they deleted the original URL altogether.

After British comedian ‘Jonnie Marbles’ threw a pie in Rupert Murdoch’s face about two weeks ago, Brooke talked with Yes Men member Andy Bichlbaum about what he thought it meant to throw a pie in someone’s face.

We now know that throwing a pie in Rupert Murdoch’s face means ...

It's Monday.  Time for OTM staff picks. Feel free to offer us feedback in the comments section, and enjoy!

Apparently the reason regular people don’t look like the models and celebrities in cosmetics ads is because cosmetics ads are photoshopped. Who knew? Well, actually, everyone knew. But still, there is something alluring about the possibility that the product advertised could work for you. Perhaps that’s why the Advertising Standards Authority, which regulates advertising in the UK, has banned two makeup ads from future publication in Britain.

On the most recent episode of This American Life, NPR's Laura Sydell and Planet Money co-host and This American Life producer Alex Blumberg spent the entire hour exploring the lucrative practice of "patent trolling." While On the Media has discussed "copyright trolling," a much less successful analogue of patent trolling, we were fascinated by this story, and how this practice could potentially be stifling the creation of new technologies. We asked Alex a couple questions about what patent trolling is, and the difficulties of reporting a story that had the potential to be...well, incredibly boring.

In case you missed it last night, you can watch our intrepid host Brooke Gladstone on last night's The Colbert Report right here!

It's Monday.  Time for OTM staff picks. Feel free to offer us feedback in the comments section, and enjoy!

On Tuesday a federal appeals court reached an interesting and important decision about free speech online. Split 2-1, the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a racist and violent online screed threatening then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008 was ‘repugnant’ but not criminal. 

As a Brit sitting here in New York watching News International implode I found myself reliving a bit of my youth. Murdoch’s influence was so pervasive, and so intertwined with my memories of growing up in London in the 80’s. In those days the nightly news was all IRA bombings, the miners’ strike and of course, Wapping.

Last week, a team of scientists at Columbia University published a study that said thanks to our instant access to nearly unlimited information via the internet, the way that we remember is changing. And almost immediately, the blogosphere lost its mind (pun intended), posting articles with titles like "Is Google Ruining Your Memory?," "Poor Memory? Blame Google," and the Pièce de résistance,"Google Turning us Into Forgetful Morons."  But is the story really that cut and dry?

The front page of the New York Times today has a picture of swimmers trying to keep cool, in news coverage descriptors including ‘blistering’ ‘punishing’ and ‘sweltering’ are being used to covey the heat wave affecting the Central and Eastern United States and on Tuesday at least 17 states reached temperatures of 100 degrees.  Heat waves are uncomfortable and they inspire frantic metaphor searching on the part of reporters forced to cover the weather - but they’re also deadly.  And estimated 22 people have already died in this most recent heat wave and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. 

 But who are those people exactly?  And how should reporters cover the heat so that they don’t just describe the temperature but actually help keep people safe?  Six years ago we talked to New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg, author of Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.  Klinenberg looked at a particularly deadly 1995 Chicago heat wave to see precisely what went wrong and how the press helped and hurt the problem.  He arrived at some particularly important lessons for journalists and I’m reminded of them every summer when a heat wave strikes.