In the wake of Wednesday’s news that Poynter’s Jim Romenesko is semi-retiring and Slate’s Jack Shafer has been laid off, Gawker has declared this the twilight of media critics. They’ve compiled a list of those critics of note still standing, and it’s a short one, with David Carr of the New York Times at the top. The LA Times‘ media writer James Rainey was also named, though without much enthusiasm:

Rainey’s not a particularly memorable writer, but he does a fair job. He also has the West Coast pretty much to himself now.

Rainey, for whom FishbowlLA has considerably more affection, tweets in response:

It’s the little things…

Michael Kinsley, who spent just more than a year as the LA Times‘ editorial-page editor back in 2004, has a new job–columnist at the soon-to-be-launched Bloomberg View. Kinsley was most recently at Politico, where he stayed for about 30 seconds or so. As Jack Shafer notes in Slate, Kinsley has a habit of leaving jobs almost as fast as he lands a new one.

Just last September, he took a columnist job with Politico. One year before that, he joined the Atlantic crew. For a brief moment in 2006, he worked for the Guardian, and before that he spent a year and some change as the editorial-page editor of the Los Angeles Times. And, from 1996 to 2002, he edited the website you just clicked on and was also its founding editor. I won’t delineate his prehistoric career path but will only mention that it included positions at CNN and Harper’s and several stints at the New Republic, not to mention his freelance positions.

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Looks like James O’Keefe‘s latest prank has not only gotten NPR‘s president to resign, it’s gotten Andrew Breitbart back in the national spotlight. Breitbart was on Piers Morgan‘s show last night talking about his protege’s capers, and the left wing bias that prevents them from being properly acknowledged. We thought the Shirley Sherrod incident would finally send Breitbart to the media glue factory, but now he’s back galloping around like nothing happened–saying calculated, counterintuitive things like “the best coverage on this incident has been NPR. It’s been impeccable…I respect NPR more than you would actually think.” And he’s actually right about the bias against this latest O’Keefe prank.

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Excuse us while we cringe over our coffee. Ugh. This story is like eating a rotten peanut while watching a lemon and paper cut contest. Gerald Posner, journalist, “writer” of 11 books including one that was a Pulitzer finalist was busted for plagiarism earlier this year by Slate.com’s Jack Shafer. He was fired from the Daily Beast because of the offense.

Now he’s hired a lawyer and is claiming the Miami New Times “interfered” with Posner’s relationship with his publishers.

Anyway, more and more episodes of outright plagiarism are coming to light.

New Times reports:

Now a new review of Posner’s work shows much more. A 48-year-old Wisconsin doctoral student named Greg Gelembiuk has discovered Posner lifted 35 passages in two books: his 2003 take on the 9-11 attacks, Why America Slept, and Secrets of the Kingdom, a 2005 tome about Saudi Arabia.

To make this all worse there is an indication Posner has been trying to delete the scandal from his Wikipedia page. Geez – is there nothing sacred?!

Photo credit Bill Cooke

Previously on FBLA:

Gerald Posner was canned from his position of Chief Investigative Reporter for the Daily Beast last month for plagiarism. Now new reports of even more instances are coming in.

New Times Miami reports:

Back on March 16, Riptide broke the news that South Beach-based author Gerald Posner’s latest book, Miami Babylon, had stolen eight passages from Frank Owen’s 2003 work Clubland.

New Times and a doctoral student have found more than a dozen new instances of plagiarism in Gerald Posner’s latest book.

Posner had already resigned as chief investigative reporter at the Daily Beast after Slate’s Jack Shafer busted him for lifting sentences from the Miami Herald, Texas Lawyer and others in his work for Tina Brown’s website.

After Shafer exposed his Daily Beast thefts, Posner blamed the “warp speed of the Net.” When New Times published his Miami Babylon thievery, he pointed toward a new system of “trailing end-notes.”

It just makes us cringe and cringe.

Previously on FBLA:

LAT’s Ken Bensinger and Ralph Vartabedian were browbeaten by Toyota’s PR machine (also equipped with faulty breaks) while investigating the large number of accidents in certain models. Eventually the story became unstoppable and it was followed by a huge recall. But the life-saving fixes started with the investigative chops of Bensinger and Vartabedian.

Anyway, they are nominated for the the Michael Kelly award. We predict its the first of many. Congrats!

Release in full:

ATLANTIC MEDIA ANNOUNCES FINALISTS FOR

2010 MICHAEL KELLY AWARD

Los Angeles Times, ProPublica and New York Times Writers Lauded for Pursuit of Truth in Journalism

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It was Slate’s Jack Shafer‘s story that brought attention to the chief investigative reporter for Daily Beast Gerald Posner‘s lifting from other sources. See the piece here.

Look, if you goof up once and end up with a sentence or a phrase identical to someone else, then you should keep your job and your reputation. But if this is the type of thing you do all the time and there are multiple examples of the exact same lifting over and over again…then you should lose your job and the public should know the truth about your work.

Posner writes on his own website:

This afternoon I received a call from Edward Felsenthal, the excellent managing editor of The Daily Beast. He informed me that as part of the Beast’s internal investigation, they had uncovered more instances in earlier articles of mine in which there the same problems of apparent plagiarism as the ones originally brought to life last Friday by Shafer. I instantly offered my resignation and Edward accepted.

What was clear was that the excellent reputation established by The Daily Beast in the last year should not be tarnished by any controversy swirling around me.

The thing we find…the word…odd? Is that he got caught via the Internet but blames the Internet for his folly too:

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This got caught in a classic Friday news dump because we missed the first article by Jack Shafer at Slate.com interviewing chief investigative reporter for Daily Beast Gerald Posner about lifting sentences from the Miami Herald. Read the piece here. In that article it was reported that Posner will continue to write for the Daily Beast.

But then Slate readers caught more instances of copying without attribution from Texas Lawyer, cementing that Slate readers are all nerds. Look at the examples of the plagiarism here.

And today Shafer posted this note from editor Edward Felsenthal:

Asked for a comment about the new findings, the Daily Beast’s Felsenthal e-mailed this statement: “We obviously take what’s happened very seriously. We will be suspending Gerald Posner while we review his articles, to return if we are satisfied that he has taken the necessary steps to avoid this in the future.”

Shafer also got a statement from Posner himself:

I now realize that a method of compiling information that I have used successfully since 1984 on book research, obviously does not work in a failsafe manner at the warp speed of the net.

Read: Jeepers! Foiled by Google AGAIN!

As of this posting his page at The Daily Beast is mum.

Jack Shafer writes in his column “Bring Back Yellow Journalism” in Slate:

But every now and again, I wish the newspapers landing on my doorstep contained a little more blood, took a position without being partisan, yelled a tad more, and brushed some yellow from the palette while painting their stories.

There. I’ve said it. I wish our better newspapers availed themselves of some of the techniques of yellow journalism and a little less of the solemnity we associate with the Committee of Concerned Journalists. Yes, the yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World from the 1890s.

Now before you storm the U.S. Congress’ Periodical Press Galleries, demanding that they deny my latest application for a press card, hear me out. Being rambunctious to the extreme, yellow journalism is misunderstood. At its best, yellow journalism was terrific, and at its worst, it really wasn’t all that bad.

Uhm. Yeah.

Isn’t yellow journalism the gold standard of cable news?

Get Back in That Room lists those who’ve lost their jobs due to the strike.

Slate’s Jack Shafer thinks the press is all soft on the writers. And there’s too many stories, too, which must mean that the LA Times is finally doing some local coverage.

Strike Swag. Can’t be a real writer without a collection of swag.

Robbie Baitz is right, but does he have to sound so sappy? He’s sickened, he’s soulful, he’s scripted.

Masterpiece Theatre returns on PBS with The Complete Jane Austen, none written by American writers.

Fox’s Bill McCuddy thinks he’s so cute. Scab once, scab forever.

Neal Pollack is certainly using the strike to his advantage, if not his child’s.

IATSE honcho Tom Short pens a sternly-worded letter to Patric Verrone.