A lot of times, media stories we find funny, touching, or just plain interesting don't make it onto the show. Instead, they end up on our twitter feed. We're collecting some of our favorite stories every sunday in a blog post we call "Our Week in Tweets." To read the stories, just click on the links that appear within the tweets. Feel free to comment below, and follow us on Twitter to see all the stories we've been talking about!

Brian Horne assesses the complicated relationship that iPhone users have with "personal assistant" Siri and what she (it?) hearkens back to.

I had been avoiding watching the inflammatory video posted on YouTube that has sparked anger and violence in Egypt and Libya this week (I had no interest in giving the nonsensical film any more attention than it has already been getting). But we are a media analysis show, and here at OTM we started doing some of our own digging into how this little known movie by a guy in California managed to get the attention of people on the other side of the world. As part of that research, one of my colleagues asked me to compare the original English trailer with a version dubbed in Arabic. Clips of the Arabic version had been shown on Egyptian television, and we were trying to see if the translation was accurate. From the clips that I saw, the translations seemed fine, but what I discovered was far more interesting than an inaccurate translation.

OTM's weekly round up of our favorite things. Add some of your own down in the comment section!

This seems to be the election of the fact-checker, with the media becoming more emboldened to hold politicians accountable for their misleading statements. But we've also seen some fact-check-creep. Brooke went on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show to discuss what exactly a "fact" is, and why some organizations feel pressure to label traditional news analysis fact-checking. Take a listen below, and listen to the OTM segment on fact-checking here.

A lot of times, media stories we find funny, touching, or just plain interesting don't make it onto the show. Instead, they end up on our twitter feed. We're collecting some of our favorite stories every sunday in a blog post we call "Our Week in Tweets." To read the stories, just click on the links that appear within the tweets. Feel free to comment below, and follow us on Twitter to see all the stories we've been talking about!

In 2011, On the Media and the Government Accountability Project teamed up for a project called "Blow the Whistle," meant to ferret out a Senator that had used a particularly undemocratic device called a "secret hold" to kill an bill that would have protected government whistleblowers. The response was overwhelming, and hundreds of listeners helped us narrow down the Senators that worked together to kill the bill. Since the project ended, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act has been reintroduced in congress, but is now in danger once again of being gutted to remove key provisions. In this guest editorial, a trio of government transparency advocates lay out what's at stake with this latest salvo against the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act.

This election season has everyone dwelling on the untrue, the misleading, and the tedious. Here are our staff picks, a palate cleansing cocktail of uncomplicated goodness sure to brighten your day.

A lot of times, media stories we find funny, touching, or just plain interesting don't make it onto the show. Instead, they end up on our twitter feed. We're collecting some of our favorite stories every sunday in a blog post we call "Our Week in Tweets." To read the stories, just click on the links that appear within the tweets. Feel free to comment below, and follow us on Twitter to see all the stories we've been talking about!

In December of last year, we spoke to lawyer Mark Lemley, who was representing a Spanish sports website called Rojadirecta, which had it's domain names seized by the US Government. Rojadirecta, a Spanish website, was accused of knowingly allowing users to post links to infringing content. But according to Wired, yesterday, the U.S. Government quietly dropped their case against Rojadirecta.

Here's our interview with Lemley:

We have lives outside media/tech/first-amendment/privacy coverage. We hope these staff picks provide some proof of that.

A lot of times, media stories we find funny, touching, or just plain interesting don't make it onto the show. Instead, they end up on our twitter feed. We're collecting some of our favorite stories every sunday in a blog post we call "Our Week in Tweets." To read the stories, just click on the links that appear within the tweets. Feel free to comment below, and follow us on Twitter to see all the stories we've been talking about!

WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGE BELOW

If you went on the New York Times' site Friday morning to read about news of the Empire State building shooting, you might have seen this haunting photo of one of the victims of the shooting, Steve Ercolino. Mr. Ercolino, who was apparently the boss of the alleged shooter, Jeffrey Johnson, reportedly fired Mr. Johnson a year ago.

Here's a hyper-linked version of those note card recommendations at little independent bookstores. You know the ones.

In January, two Reuters reporters, Andy Sullivan and Greg Roumeliotis published a piece about Bain’s takeover and subsequent management of GS Technologies – a steel mill in Kansas City. The piece is a long, nuanced piece of business journalism. The plant failed under Bain’s stewardship, but the piece points out that, overall, Bain has an excellent track record and that larger economic forces were at work in the plant's failure. It also points out that despite that failure, which was probably caused at least in part by the debt Bain loaded unto the company, Bain made $12 million on their $8 million dollar investment and at least $4.5 million in consulting fees.

Interest in Romney’s time at Bain made the piece notable when it was published (it was cited by Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry) but it didn’t really start making its way in the world until Priorities USA Action (a SuperPac closely, really closely, aligned with President Obama) made it the backbone of a series of ads against Romney.

A lot of times, media stories we find funny, touching, or just plain interesting don't make it onto the show. Instead, they end up on our twitter feed. We're collecting some of our favorite stories every sunday in a blog post we call "Our Week in Tweets." To read the stories, just click on the links that appear within the tweets. Feel free to comment below, and follow us on Twitter to see all the stories we've been talking about!

Old and new media cultures clashed this week when a New York Times editor decided not to print the name of a blog referred to in this story about the app UnBaby.me.  The site in question is STFU, Parents, a popular source for tongue-in-cheek mockery of parents who are over-enthusiastic about sharing pictures of their children online.

Here are some of our favorites things. (For this week, at least).

This week, I did a piece assessing the risk of "cyberwar," and the concern about so-called “kinetic” cyber attacks - cyber attacks that would cause real-world damage. One of the people I talked to was Eireann Leverett, a security researcher at IO Active. He told me that in spite of the danger it posed, he found more than 12,000 industrial control systems, the kind of systems that control critical infrastructure, connected to the public internet. But how, exactly, did he do it?