Although Tina Brown beefed up her Newsweek/Daily Beast staff with the addition of two fresh voices yesterday, she did lose correspondent Benjy Sarlin to Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo.  Sarlin joins TPM as it prepares to launch its 2012 election coverage.  Marshall is eager to have Sarlin aboard at TPM.

Benjy is a great new addition to the DC reporting team we’re building at TPM.  Before making his name at the New York Sun and The Daily Beast, Benjy was an intern at TPM way back in 2007.  So we’re excited to welcome Benjy back into the TPM family.

In addition to The Daily Beast, Sarlin previously worked at the now defunct New York Sun.

Hey all you unemployed writers, reporters and editors, Josh Marshall‘s Talking Points Memo Web site has announced several openings that is it hiring for in its New York and Washington, D.C. offices — so get those resumes cleaned up and ready.

There are four open positions in New York, including a reporter/blogger post for the site’s Muckraker section, a news writer, a senior news writer and a night/weekend editor. They are also looking for interns.

Good luck!

Yesterday, a sharp-eyed blogger accused New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd of reprinting a sentence pulled from Josh Marshall‘s Talking Points Memo blog in her Sunday column without any attribution.

A few hours later, Dowd responded to the accusations through an email to the Huffington Post. She blamed the oversight on a friend, claimed it was inadvertent and promised to set things right with added attribution on the Web version of the story and a correction in the paper today.

Dowd acted fast to correct the problem after it was discovered, but the question remains: will this mistake effect Dowd’s credibility moving forward?

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Forbes.com has compiled a list of the 25 Most Influential Liberals in US Media, which depending on who you are includes most of the East Coast, or begins and ends with Arianna Huffington (who ranks second). A number of people on the list are bloggers: Ezra Klein, Josh Marshall, and our favorite addition, Andrew Sullivan, whose support of both Obama and Gay marriage has apparently forever excluded him from the GOP camp.

However the two entries we find most intriguing are the op-ed page editors of both the New York Times and the Washington Post. David Shipley of the Times comes in at nine, and Fred Hiatt of WaPo makes the top three. Says Forbes of Shipley: “Relatively unknown, compared with others on this list, he runs the most widely read op-ed page in America. The page is poised to challenge left-leaning shibboleths from within the fold while still remaining faithful to the Times’ core liberal values.” In case you’re wondering Paul Krugman occupies top spot. See the full list here.

Yesterday at the Time Politics Summit 2008 we chatted with Frank Rich about the fact the New York Times now allows comments on its op-ed pieces. (A side note: even though Rich has long been ahead of the game in terms of adding in links to his columns, something he initiated on his own, opening up a comments section was apparently not his idea, nor is he responsible for moderating it.) Rich’s Sunday column often tops out at over 500 comments (this week’s piece ‘The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama’ currently has 842). So we wanted to know, was it strange to suddenly be on the receiving end of so many opinions? Rich told us it actually wasn’t that much different than the slew of emails he normally receives each week, except that the responses were now public. And does he manages to read all of them? He doesn’t. (Who has the time? He said.) Rich also noted a phenomenon that anyone who has written for a heavily trafficked and commented-on blog (for example, HuffPo) will probably already have experienced: the comments are rarely about the piece itself, instead commenters tend to use the space as their own platform.

Early during the panel he was moderating, Rich queried panelists Peggy Noonan, Byron York, Josh Marshall, and Jeff Greenfield as to who might be this election year’s Walter Cronkite.

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Apparently John McCain missed the Barack Obama teflon memo. The latest, and now controversial, ad out of the McCain camp includes images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, that maybe are supposed to suggest…we’re not sure, that Barack doesn’t wear underwear? That he’s a bad parent, who dates his bodyguards? Maybe if the whole thing wasn’t so laughable we’d be offended (we mean, seriously, Britney and Paris? they don’t exactly inspire adulation). Some people are suggesting that the ad is racist because, in the words of Josh Marshall, it is “pushing the caricature of Obama as a uppity young black man whose presumptuousness is displayed not only in taking on airs above his station but also in a taste for young white women.” Many people are noting it was just this sort of imaging that the GOP used against Harold Ford Jr. back in 2006.

McCain says the interpretation is ridiculous. Obama responded with his own video saying McCain is taking the low road. Truthfully, we think it’s just one more instance of McCain demonstrating he actually has no idea whatsoever about anything that could remotely be called current. Watch both videos for yourself after the jump.

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