The staff of On the Media pick a few of our favorite things.

It's time for a few of OTM's favorite things.

Your weekly dose of recommendations from the staff of OTM.  Give us some of your own down in the comments section and enjoy!

Your weekly dose of recommendations from the staff of OTM.  Give us some of your own down in the comments section and enjoy!

Thinking about cracking down on 'stolen' copyrighted material but worried you might be a hypocrite? Know thyself. The site, youhavedownloaded.com, has given SOPA opponents a new way to see which lobbyists and media companies have been attached to downloads of copyrighted material - an uncomfortable and contradicting situation for some of the very people who support SOPA. As the New York Times reports, "Users of the site have said they found connections between purloined content and major Hollywood studios as well as to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who has supported similar legislation in his country."

This is a small but insane story. Classified interviews conducted by the US military into what happened during the massacre in Haditha, Iraq were supposed to be destroyed as the last US troops leave Iraq. Instead they wound up in a kind of junk yard and The New York Times found them. I think it's the best story of classified documents exposed I've ever heard.

An attendant was burning them as fuel to cook a dinner of smoked carp.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/world/middleeast/united-states-marines-haditha-interviews-found-in-iraq-junkyard.html?hp

Your weekly dose of recommendations from the staff of OTM.  Give us some of your own down in the comments section and enjoy!

When the diplomatic cables leaked online last year via Wikileaks, the world saw thousands and thousands of behind-the-scenes conversations that are ordinarily classified.  The American Civil Liberties Union saw an opportunity.  They filed a freedom of information request with the State Department and requested 23 of the cables that discussed particularly controversial topics, including torture, rendition, Guantánamo, and targeted killings by drones.  When the State Department refused, the ACLU sued and now 11 of the cables have been released (albeit heavily redacted).  Compare the two and you get an amazing glimpse of what the U.S. government chooses to censor and why. 

This week Brooke speaks with Ben Wizner of the ACLU’s National Security Project about the redacted and unredacted versions.  But you know what they say about pictures and words and equivalency; the ACLU have created a webpage that shows the cables with redactions – but when you move your mouse over the blacked out sections, the text underneath is revealed.  It’s great fun and we encourage you to check it out: http://www.aclu.org/wikileaksFOIA

Your weekly dose of recommendations from the staff of OTM.  Give us some of your own down in the comments section and enjoy!

Your weekly dose of recommendations from the staff of OTM.  Give us some of your own down in the comments section and enjoy!

Your weekly dose of recommendations from the staff of OTM.  Give us some of your own down in the comments section and enjoy!

Your weekly dose of recommendations from the staff of OTM.  Give us some of your own down in the comments section and enjoy!

Every week the staff of On the Media pick a few of our favorite things.  Feel free to offer us feedback in the comments section, and enjoy!

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

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. 

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.

Every Monday, the staff of On the Media is going to pick a few things to share with our listeners. They may be new, they may be old, in fact they may or may not be media related in any way. We're all very excited to share our staff picks with you. Feel free to offer us feedback in the comments section, and enjoy!

The Rupert Murdoch phone hacking scandal that continues to reverberate this week has put all of Murdoch's sundry news outlets in kind of a reporting pickle.  How do you cover your own boss?  Well, the most direct response yet came this morning from the Wall Street Journal where the editorial board published their official take on the scandal. 

The editorial contained such paragraphs as this one: We also trust that readers can see through the commercial and ideological motives of our competitor-critics. The Schadenfreude is so thick you can't cut it with a chainsaw. Especially redolent are lectures about journalistic standards from publications that give Julian Assange and WikiLeaks their moral imprimatur. They want their readers to believe, based on no evidence, that the tabloid excesses of one publication somehow tarnish thousands of other News Corp. journalists across the world.

And it invoked this: The last time the liberal press demanded a media prosecutor, it was to probe the late conservative columnist Robert Novak in pursuit of White House aide Scooter Libby. But the effort soon engulfed a reporter for the New York Times, which had led the posse to hang Novak and his sources. Do our media brethren really want to invite Congress and prosecutors to regulate how journalists gather the news?

We wondered what you thought.  Was the WSJ editorial board right to weigh in?  Are they right that this is much ado about nothing?  Do non-journalists care about this story?  Does the position of the editorial board put the WSJ reporters in a strange situation?  Please use the comment button below to weigh in.  Thanks.