We don’t usually write about behind-the-scenes FishbowlLA stuff, but this instance was too funny (and also, potentially, reflective of the central tricked-media dynamic) not to.

Daniel Barkeley, founder and editor of parody news website The Daily Currant, has enjoyed a number of moments in the spotlight since launching his site last spring. In 2012 for example, he scored coverage after made-up jests about Todd Akin, Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachman and George W. Bush each got picked up by the mainstream media.

This week’s Washington Post slip-up is arguably the site’s biggest coup yet, albeit entirely self-inflicted by WaPo contributor Suzi Parker. Sarah Palin joke-tweeted about it; thousands more gleefully mocked WaPo on Twitter; and Barkeley spoke to imediaethics.org about just how faux this faux Palin-to-Al-Jazeera item is.

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Canadian journo Bill Brioux is not alone. Although TV critics have taken in some odd sights over the years at the TCA Winter and Summer sessions, last night’s poolside NBC party at the Beverly Hilton had them buzzing on Twitter about a possible new watershed.

Blogs Brioux this morning:

These bleary eyes have seen strange sights but the strangest I ever did see, was the night Sarah Palin stole the show from a monkey and NBC.

And I’ve seen some strange sights. I’ve seen grown men struggle to get a usable quote from Ozzy Osbourne. I’ve seen Jay Leno, disguised as a reporter, gooning the head of his own network. I’ve seen Lifetime attempt to impose a cash bar. Tuesday night’s NBC cocktail reception may go down as the oddest press tour sight of them all.

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Obviously, The Daily Show had a few things to say about Sarah Palin‘s protracted Today appearance yesterday. Jon Stewart had a pretty good rant, but we prefer John Oliver‘s shenanigans.

Hoo boy! The National Enquirer just got a hold of an incredibly juicy–although admittedly petty–tidbit from Joe McGinniss’ upcoming book The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin. McGinniss’ new book will apparently report that Sarah Palin had a one-night stand with former Laker Glen Rice when he was still in college.

Sarah hooked up with the NBA great, then a 6-foot-8 junior at the University of Michigan, when he was playing in a college basketball tournament in Alaska in 1987, the book says. At the time, Sarah, just out of college, was working as a sports reporter for the Anchorage TV station KTUU.

A publishing source told The Enquirer that McGinniss claims Sarah had a “fetish” for black men at the time and he quotes a friend as saying Sarah had “hauled (Rice’s) ass down.”

Rice goes on the record as confirming the affair in McGinniss’ book.

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Echoing the majority of reader comments at press time to Meghan Daum‘s latest LA Times column, we don’t buy into her stand-alone concept of “hiker hate.”

Daum suggests that the disapproval articulated by the American populace over the actions of Iranian imprisoned hikers Sarah Shourd (since released), Shane Bauer, and Josh Fatal is “so vehement that it lends itself to its own coinage and category.” That’s a stretch. The same kind of reaction framed the 2009 North Korean detainment of Current TV journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, and in fact the amount of vitriol that has slammed the hikers is on par with just about any other Berkeley-Biloxi dividing topic (Sarah Palin, abortion, take your pick).

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On his Rolling Stone blog, infamous rhetorical bomb-thrower Matt Taibbi seems to be feeling a tad guilty over his journalistic methods, in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords assassination attempt in Tuscon.

As a member of the political media, and a vitriol-spewing one at that, the Tucson shooting immediately made me ask myself the question: do I personally do anything to add to this obvious problem of a hypercharged, rhetorically overheated political atmosphere? And the unfortunate answer I came up with was, maybe. I’ve always told myself that what I do is different from what someone like Rush does, because I don’t target classes of people and try not to exempt anyone (even myself) from criticism, or favor either party.

I’ve also counted on the belief that anyone who’s willing to devote the mental energy to even follow whatever wild rhetoric I’m using is probably also smart enough to tell the difference between reality and hyperbole. I also hope that anyone reading my articles will get the underlying message that I’m pretty sure — I hope I’m sure, anyway — I’m conveying at all times, i.e. that violence is irresponsible, that we should use our brains instead of baseball bats to solve problems, etc.

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U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords spoke with MSNBC last March after her office was vandalized shortly after her vote for health care reform. Gifford’s office was one of several Democratic offices that were targeted with harassment, death threats, and vandalism in the period following the vote to pass health care reform.

I think it’s important for all leaders … to say look, we can’t stand for this … They really need to realize that the rhetoric, and firing people up … for example, we’re on Sarah Palin’s ‘Targeted’ list, but the thing is that the way she has it depicted, we’re in the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they’ve got to realize that there are consequences to that action.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Cenk Uygur and your favorite FBLA editor Tina Dupuy talked about Julian Assange of Wikileaks last night on The Young Turks. Sarah Palin and others have called for his assassination. Such a measured and reasonable response…

So Sarah Palin shot a caribou on her lousy reality show. Killed it, butchered it, and stuck it in her freezer. This is one of the least offensive things Palin has done during the course of her political career. And yet it has Hollywood screenwriter Aaron Sorkin up in arms. In a hilarious and widely read rant on Huffington Post, he tears into Palin for making a critter snuff film:

Like 95% of the people I know, I don’t have a visceral (look it up) problem eating meat or wearing a belt. But like absolutely everybody I know, I don’t relish the idea of torturing animals. I don’t enjoy the fact that they’re dead and I certainly don’t want to volunteer to be the one to kill them and if I were picked to be the one to kill them in some kind of Lottery-from-Hell, I wouldn’t do a little dance of joy while I was slicing the animal apart.

Well, bully for you, Mr. Sorkin. But it doesn’t much matter to a dead animal how you felt about butchering it. It’s just as dead.

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The Australian who Sarah Palin keeps on unironically calling “un-American,” WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange penned an op-ed describing what his passion for disclosure and truth.

In it he coins what he calls “Scientific journalism:”

WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately?

Democratic societies need a strong media and WikiLeaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest. WikiLeaks has revealed some hard truths about the Iraq and Afghan wars, and broken stories about corporate corruption.

We think “scientific journalism” sounds a lot like crowdsourcing and citizen journalism.

Discuss.

Read the whole piece here.