Wednesday's Daily Brief

Wednesday, July 20, 2011 Arianna Huffington: From DSK to BSkyB: Media Takeaways From the Latest Round of Scandals Arianna Huffington: My first reaction to the ever-widening UK scandal was disgust. My second was amazement, as the sophisticated country where I went to college has increasingly taken on the trappings of a seedy banana republic, where Policeman A is investigating Suspect B, but also having dinner with him -- and Politician C hires Suspect B because he's good friends with Editor D, who was at Politician C's wedding. It's elite Britain modeled on an organized crime family. As for the details of the scandal itself, it's worth noting that the media organization at the center of it wasn't some new media upstart or unsupervised blogger of the sort the traditional media are always wringing their hands over -- worried that said upstarts haven't properly absorbed the ethics of their media elders. Instead it was a very traditional media elder -- one that was brought down with blinding speed, at least in part because of new media. POLITICS Debt Ceiling Fight Moves To Senate, Obama Wants To 'Start Talking Turkey' POLITICS Minnesota Shutdown Over MEDIA O'Reilly: Hacking Scandal Being Exploited By 'Vicious' Left-Wing Enemies TECHNOLOGY Apple Announces New MacBook Air SPORTS NFL Players Review Parts Of Proposed Deal To End Lockout, Say Sources BLOG POSTS Richard (RJ) Eskow: Could Wall Street Ever Face a "Murdoch Moment"? Could Its Empire Ever Fall? The Rupert Murdoch story holds a lesson for everyone who longs for justice against other seemingly invincible empires: Even when your opponents seem to hold overwhelming power, a change may be just around the corner. Jeff Jarvis: Murdoch's Public Relations -- Against the Public What was exposed in Parliament during the Murdochs' testimony this week wasn't necessarily News Corp., but instead the cozy, closed ties between institutional journalism and institutional government. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand: Momentum for DOMA Repeal Continues to Build Even as we in Congress work to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act legislatively, there are lawsuits challenging its constitutionality progressing through the courts around the country. The momentum in this fight is clearly on our side. Laura Schocker: Michele Bachmann's Migraines: Sexism And Stigma Rage On Roughly 36 million Americans suffer from migraines. Michele Bachmann is one of them. And now, her politics aside, critics are seriously questioning whether this one factor is enough to disqualify her from the pursuing the presidency. John R. Talbott: The New High Tech Bubble Facebook has been valued recently at $80 billion while Google has a current public market value of $195 billion and Apple has a market capitalization of $350 billion. Will any of these companies still be around in forty years?

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