A memo to WaPo: Next time you want to give credit to a paper for breaking a story, how about doing it in the first couple of graphs? How about doing it at all?

On Friday morning at 9:58 a.m., Paul Farhi wrote about the flap over Politico yanking a video on its “about” page because Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) office got its knickers in a twist about the potential lack of ethics involving a video of his staffer on a page where they’re selling Politico.

The story is well-written and cites Politico Chief Operating Officer Kim Kingsley. But why does it take Farhi eight flippin’ graphs to mention the story and publication that broke it in the first place, which was Roll Call on Thursday at 4:58 p.m.? He writes,

“Roll Call, a Politico competitor, reported Thursday that senate ethics rules prohibit senators and their staff from making endorsements. The publication reports Holmes said he didn’t realize that the video would be used as an ad. He received a written request for a video interview from Politico’s director of marketing, who said the video would be ‘a profile of you first — and how you use Politico second.’”

Farhi told FishbowlDC by email: “I was not aware that Roll Call had broken the story until I got your email (I’m assuming you’re correct, btw). I was first alerted to the story yesterday by a colleague, who didn’t mention where he’d seen or heard about it. I reported it out and filed something short about it late last night. I DID notice that Roll Call had done some fine reporting on this and credited them accordingly.”

Psst…Farhi! Google is your friend.

We also reached out to Roll Call‘s Meredith Shiner, who broke the story, for comment.

UPDATE: WaPo‘s Erik Wemple also writes about the Politico-McConnell debacle — because why shouldn’t two media reporters from the same publication delve into the same story? He cites Shiner by name five graphs into a pretty lengthy post.

The biggest stories this week have been about a trio of government scandals, one involving the IRS, another with the DOJ and a third with the September attack in Benghazi, Libya. But those aren’t the most of Bloomberg View‘s concerns. The 3-D printer is.

Over the last four days, the Bloomberg View daily morning newsletter blast was sent out with staff editorials on 3-D printing as their top story:

• “Your Future Will Be Manufactured on a 3-D Printer,” 5/13
• “That 3-D Printed Gun? It’s Just the Start,” 5/14
• “How 3-D Printing Could Disrupt the Economy of the Future,” 5/15
• “3-D Printing: the Ultimate Intellectual-Property Threat?” 5/16

To be fair, the Bloomberg publications are primarily financial news publications. Actually, never mind. That doesn’t explain why the dangers of 3-D printing being used to create handguns is more important to BV‘s readers than a conflict involving the IRS. Since that scandal broke last week, BV has published… Read more

The Weekly Standard‘s Senior Writer Stephen Hayes quotes NBC’s Lisa Myers in a shady turn of phrase.

NBC’s Lisa Myers says AP/leak story damages WH b/c it upsets the press – “one of the president’s most important constituencies.”

— Stephen Hayes (@stephenfhayes) May 15, 2013

Now 167 retweets later, clearly the comment struck a nerve. Politico White House Correspondent Glenn Thrush asks, “What does that even mean?” QGA Communications Exec. and columnist John Feehery replied, “You know what it mean, don’t play dumb with me.” IslandSnoopy also seemed to get the inherent problem here, writing, “Therein lies the problem. The Press should be objective. NOT ‘one of the president’s most important constituencies.’”

What, they don’t like beer? BuzzFeed Brews’ more serious event on Immigration is hitting a minor snag as Heritage drops out. Their loss. Daily Caller‘s Mickey Kaus is stepping in.

Editor Ben Smith announced the news last night on Twitter. The Immigration Summit is Tuesday.

Tough week for Heritage just got tougher—they’re dropping out of our immigration summit Tues. Pleased to say @kausmickey will step in (!)

— Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) May 13, 2013

See who was supposed to appear at the event here.

WaPo Book World Editor Ron Charles was having a pretty tough morning. Not only is it dark and dreary out there, but he couldn’t get onto WaPo‘s website. That’s right, before 8:28 a.m., he was locked out of his own paper’s website. Whoever the genius is that makes WaPo‘s technical calls deserves a prize, or at least a free meal at Chop’t with the restaurant’s favorite consumer, Ezra Klein, for achieving this. Although we’re guessing Ezzy may have been able to help Charles out had he been in the neighborhood.

The much reported death of website passwords can’t come too soon for me. Am locked out of the Wash Post site this morning…. ARGH.

— Ron Charles (@RonCharles) May 7, 2013

And then the day got worse.

Now that it’s definitely raining very hard, I will walk to work….(sigh)

— Ron Charles (@RonCharles) May 7, 2013

HuffPost media writer Michael Calderone investigated the writing habits of  Howard Kurtz and something curious has emerged. Some of Kurtz’ Daily Beast colleagues are baffled about why he’s spending so much time promoting another Daily site. This one, the Daily Download, where Kurtz sits on the board, instead of his other employers, Newsweek-The Daily Beast and CNN. Lauren Asburn is Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Download. She’s also a Daily Beast contributor and appears often on Kurtz’ CNN program. Are things getting just a tad incestuous?

In a story published Wednesday afternoon… Read more

Everyone knows handlers can be psychotic. They prevent, they block. They stumble all over themselves trying to barricade the star. In effect, they over handle. “He did the red carpet, he’s not doing any more interviews,” one of the handlers told us regarding Psy, of South Korean rapper, dancer Gangnam Style fame, who showed up to a CBS, The Atlantic and National Journal pre-party at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night.

Meanwhile, he’s standing there smoking a cigarette — not crack, mind you — but a simple, legal cigarette. The handlers insisted, “Psy doesn’t want his picture taken while smoking a cigarette.” To that end, they even had a tall, broad guy in a suit with a big back purposefully ruining attempted photographs.

A relatively polite female blonde handler told passersby, “I’m so sorry, he just wants to smoke a cigarette with no one taking pictures.” To her cohort, she remarked, “Scooter told me if this fucks up, I’m done.” Uh oh. (And who’s Scooter?) Update: Kate Spencer, a senior writer/producer for VH1 tweets us that, “Pssst – Scooter is his manager, who also manages Justin Bieber.”

Here’s the thing, Psy. You seem like a nice guy — what I could detect from your warm facial expressions a good 20 feet away. But TOUGH SHIT. You come to Washington for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and to the Washington Hilton for the town’s nerdy version of the Oscars and you expect members of the media to avoid you? We like you, Psy, but it’s not exactly the most astute press strategy to hide behind plants and four nasty-ass handlers and smoke cigs and think no one will figure out a way to snap your photo.

And who died and made your brunette female handler The Decider of who can walk where at the party? At one point a female Capitol Hill aide attempted to walk past Psy to get to where she wanted to go. She was ordered by the handler, not security for Psy we might add, to walk around the other way to get to the other side of the party.

Here’s the exchange that transpired between the brunette handler and FishbowlDC. Read more

URGENT question for The New York Observer‘s Matt Kassel: Why do you hate big butts? What did they ever do to you?

Late Thursday afternoon — STOP THE PRESSES — Kassel, clearly assigned to the Butt Patrol beat, wrote us an “urgent” email requesting information about whether our own Eddie Scarry‘s  planned to cover “big butts” at the upcoming White House Correspondents’ Dinner. There is no plan for Eddie to do that. But Kassel, being the ace reporter that he is, anticipated (good reporters do this by the way, they anticipate things BEFORE they MIGHT, MAYBE but HAVEN’T happened yet) that Eddie might have big butts on the brain. So here’s what he wrote (we’ve put it in bold):

Hi Betsy,

Hi Will,

I’m a staff writer at The New York Observer, and I’m writing an article about Eddie Scarry and the Washington correspondents dinner on Saturday. Specifically, I’m wondering if he plans to be taking any pictures of women’s butts again (I’m reaching to him as well). I’m wondering if you consider his prior coverage professional behavior, and if so, how you justify it. Why is appropriate for a media site to ridicule lumpy butts? Wose idea was it?

If you’d like to call, my number’s (609) 658-2650. As soon as possible is best, as we’d like to get this story up tomorrow morning.

Best,

Matt Kassel

He quickly followed up with this:

Actually, I don’t have Eddie’s email. Would you mind sending it my way?

First off, a quick note to Matty’s editor: Do you know that you have someone working for you who sends out emails as sloppy as this one? For starters, my name is Betsy, not Will. And why is Matt sending a note to us both? Could it possibly be because the “Will” he meant this for is Will Sommer, who writes for Washington City Paper, who is also outraged by the occasional “big butt” photograph we have run? These two are so dumb they might as well dress up in Hazmat suits and crash into each other just for fun.

Moving on. Let’s address the typos. This is — by far — my favorite sentence of Matty’s: “Wose idea was it?” Really, Matty, “Wose?” Please tell me where you went to J-School because I’d like to go there too!

Just for the hell of it, here’s some context since you’re clearly not adept at searching our website. Three years ago was the first time FBDC ever mentioned a big butt. It happened to be Kim Kardashian’s. She was attending the White House Correspondents’ Dinner as the date of Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren. One night at a party, the hot topic of conversation was Kardashian’s derriere. So we wrote about it. Van Susteren became incensed with our coverage, we had a spirited back and forth and Van Susteren apologized. She had no idea that Kardashian’s behind was actually a common conversation piece or that her big break was a sex tape. (At this point, I’ll refer you to an 11-picture slideshow of Kardashian’s butt on HuffPost here.) From there on out, it became a mild joke and we’d occasionally throw big butts into photo spreads.

And now, let’s address your dumbass questions one by one. Read more

“Capital Cooking: Around the Globe” is an original travel and food series hosted by Lauren DeSantis that airs each Friday on WETA. Most recently, DeSantis sent out a promotional email regarding a newsletter to presumed viewers of her TV show and readers of her “Capital Cooking” website. Accompanying the email is a picture of DeSantis lying on a bed in a revealing pose with a portion of her breast exposed. Look close: Her bedspread includes a logo of the show.

Huh?

The subject line: “Legally delicious.” It doesn’t appear to specifically refer to anything, but then again the picture is also a head scratcher.

She writes, “Thanks for reading the Capital Cooking Newsletter. We strive to create content that you want to read. Please shoot me an email if there is something of interest that you’d like us to cover. Happy Eating, Lauren.”

So… Read more

As we reported earlier, the Franklin Center, a conservative nonprofit that covers local governments across the country, was holding a conference call this afternoon at 1 p.m.

The topic: A lawsuit brought against them by Greentech, a company founded by Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe.

They dispatched emails to members of the media and included the proper access codes. But since our story ran, they’ve changed the access codes, saying the conference call is meant to be exclusive and not open to the public. This time around, they wrote, “Hi all! This invitation is non-transferrable. PLEASE do not share this. Since this is an exclusive list of folks, I can narrow down who gave the info away. ”

Oops.