With obvious indignation, the New York Times ran an item on its political blog Wednesday afternoon headlined “Asked About Gay Marriage, Romney Doesn’t Answer.”

Romney, having just finished a campaign event in Colorado, was working the rope line — political jargon for the candidate shaking hands with members of the crowd — when reporters “pressed” him, according to the Times, for a statement on gay marriage.

“Not on the rope line,” Romney told the media. The Times reported this as Romney “refusing” to answer questions.

Keep scrolling down to the bottom of the blog post, though, and you discover Romney had answered a question about his (well known) position earlier in the morning during an interview with a local television station.

Here are the final two paragraphs of the post:

Asked by Fox News’s KDVR-TV about a bill that would have allowed civil unions for same-sex couples in Colorado, which died late Tuesday night, Mr. Romney reiterated his belief that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

“Well, when these issues were raised in my state of Massachusetts,” he said, “I indicated my view, which is I do not favor marriage between people of the same gender, and I do not favor civil unions if they are identical to marriage other than by name. My view is the domestic partnership benefits, hospital visitation rights and the like are appropriate, but that the others are not.”

The Times isn’t peeved that Romney refused to answer a question about his position on gay marriage — it's that he refused to answer it at that time, at that place, to those reporters. For this, the blogger slaps him with a “refused” when “declined” would have been as accurate, along with a headline that suggests Romney wouldn’t answer a question on the day’s hot topic.

The Times reporter does deserve credit, though, for reporting that Romney had answered the question about gay marriage earlier in the day — which only makes it more irritating that the reporter should give Romney an electronic slap for not answering a similar question a few hours later.

Writing as someone who spent much of his adult life asking politicians questions, I understand a reporter’s irritation at a candidate who blows you off. You’ve got a story to write or a blog entry to post.

But nothing requires a candidate to answer every question pose by every reporter ever time the candidate appears in public. Let’s be reasonable.

The candidate does have a responsibility to the public to answer questions on every topic relevant to the campaign. But the candidate has no obligation to respond every time a reporter pipes up with a question. Each and every reporter is not the one and only proxy for the people.

Follow @mleccese on Twitter.

There are a handful of facts — provable facts — we know about the death last week of former National Football League star linebacker Junior Seau. We know that the San Diego County medical examiner’s office ruled his death a suicide on Thursday, the day after he was found dead in his home. We know that he played 20 seasons in the NFL.

We do not know why Seau killed himself, but that did not stop the media from speculation — and, in some stories, assuming — traumatic brain injury caused by his years of football led to his suicide.

The Boston Globe’s front page story on Thursday, “Seau’s apparent suicide stuns Patriots, league,” featured a smaller headline under the main headline: “Follows deaths of other athletes with brain trauma.” Strictly speaking, this is accurate. It is also accurate to say that Seau’s death followed by just a week the death of former Boston Patriot Billy Neighbors, who died April 30 at the age of 72.

Like so many media stories about Seau’s suicide, the Globe story never states that traumatic bring injury led Seau to suicide but does offer the implication.

The NFL and its fans have become accustomed to dealing with the early deaths of its former heroes.

Former Falcons safety Ray Easterling, a plaintiff in a high-profile lawsuit against the NFL concerning concussion-related issues, died last month at the age of 62 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

In February 2011, former Bears star safety Dave Duerson, 50, committed suicide — a gunshot wound to the chest — and left a note asking that his brain be donated for the study of brain trauma in athletes. Recent research has focused on the long-term effects of concussions in sports.

Seau’s similar method of suicide has sparked speculation about brain preservation. Seau, a violent tackler and physical player, was never listed on an NFL injury report with a concussion, according to ESPN. But during the earlier years of his career, awareness of brain injury and concussion was far less than today.

Although the “are bloggers journalists?” argument was declared over seven years ago in a lengthy essay by academic and media writer Jay Rosen (the answer: well … sometimes), it isn’t over — and it’s going to be a long time before it is.

A couple of weeks ago, an Oregon judge took a side in the argument: Bloggers aren't journalists.
Seattle Weekly reported on the decision, a case in which blogger Crystal Cox was “sued by investment firm Obsidian Finance Group in January for defamation, to the tune of $10 million, for writing several blog posts that were highly critical of the firm and its co-founder Kevin Padrick.” The court ruled she was not protected by the Oregon shield law, which shields reporters and editors from having to reveal confidential sources in court.

Boy, did she ever defame this Padrick fellow. Any respectable journalist (and many disrespectable ones) would deny Crystal Cox three times, and then three times again, just to make sure.

The court ruled on a blog post written by Cox that contained the following paragraphs.

There are Many Reasons Why I Claim that Kevin Padrick, Obsidian Finance LLC is a Thug, Thief and a Liar.

That was the first sentence.

Who Was Kevin Padrick of Obsidian Finance Group really working for when he illegally, unethically, corruptly got this financial information and used it to make himself TONS of money?

You get the idea.

When Judge Marco A. Hernandez of the U.S. District Court in Portland, Oregon issued his decision stating bloggers aren’t journalists on Nov. 30, bloggers and journalists raced to their keyboards and WordPress accounts to set Judge Hernandez straight.

I’m no lawyer, and I have only an interested journalist’s grasp of Internet law, but I’ve seen legislatures — over and over again — try to fix a problem with a law that causes far more harm than it prevents. The latest example: the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Congress has again produced a piece of legislation with good intentions written so loosely and imprecisely that it has the potential, opponents argue, to “break the Internet.”

On Oct. 26, House Judiciary Committee member Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, introduced the bill, which is intended to protect copyrights and trademarks. The bill would give the attorney general the power to issue “cease and desist” orders against websites selling counterfeit medicine or counterfeit military goods. So far, so good.

But it would also allow the attorney general to issue “cease and desist” orders to (and make it much easier for any copyright or trademark owner to sue) any online communications platform posting, distributing, or, it appears, linking to copyrighted or trademarked materials on a website.

That means Internet service providers like Verizon, search engines like Google, payment networks like PayPal, and ad networks would be legally liable for the content of websites.

We journalists had a little dust-up in our world last week. Our favorite blogger, Jim Romenesko of the Poynter Institute, a journalism school in St. Petersburg, Fla., ended up resigning his position at Poynter just a few weeks short of his retirement date.

Here’s what happened: An assistant editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, in working on a story about Romenesko, noticed the summaries of news stories and columns that comprised Romenesko’s blog often contained phrases and sentences copied verbatim from the original.

The assistant editor talked it over with Julie Moos, the director of Poynter Online. Moos looked into it. On Thursday she posted a carefully worded essay saying “Jim Romenesko’s posts exhibit a pattern of incomplete attribution.” (Click on the link in that last sentence and to see an example.) Moos wrote:

Though information sources have always been displayed prominently in Jim’s posts and are always linked at least once (often multiple times), too many of those posts also included the original author’s verbatim language without containing his or her words in quotation marks, as they should have.

This style represents Jim’s deliberate choice to be transparent about the information’s origins while using the source’s own words to represent his or her work. If only for quotation marks, it would be exactly right. Without those quotation marks, it is incomplete and inconsistent with our publishing practices and standards on Poynter.org.

Moos concluded by telling the world that, from then on, Romenesko would work under new rules: all of his blog entries would be edited before they were posted (he had been posting straight to the web), and he would be required to use quotation marks around whatever he copied from original sources into his posts. Romenesko offered his resignation. Moos declined it. Romenesko insisted and resigned.

The reasons Mayor Thomas Menino and the Boston Police Department arrested protestors at the Occupy Boston movement late last night — after days of peaceful coexistence — depends on which newspaper website you read this morning.

The 2:53 a.m. version of Boston Globe’s website story says the police were trying to protect the Greenway, and that the space on the Greenway protestors moved to is private property. Here are two paragraphs from the Globe story:

Officials do not want the protesters, who originally settled in Dewey Square, to occupy the space across Congress Street on the Greenway because it recently underwent a renovation project where expensive improvements were added, according to Elaine Driscoll, police spokeswoman.

The notice informed the group of laws against trespassing on a new patch of the Greenway — bordered by Congress Street, Atlantic Avenue, Pearl Street, and Purchase Street — where tents have sprung up since about 4 p.m, and is also private property.

According to the Boston Herald website, in a story the website says was updated at 8 a.m., Boston Police were moving against a new, more dangerous contingent of protestors: anarchists.

Davis acknowledged that the arrests marked a shift in the once harmonious relations between the group and the police.

“The group that was here for the first ten days was working very closely with us,” Davis said, “but they warned us yesterday morning that a new group, the anarchists, wanted to take control.”

If I read that quote right, Commissioner Davis says the police moved in and made arrest because the Occupy Boston people told the police “anarchists” were moving in with plans to “take control.”

But BPD spokeswomen Driscoll says it was because the protestors had moved onto newly renovated private property on the Greeneway.

In an interview with WBUR this morning, Menino said the police were called in to make arrests because “the protestors exceeded the boundaries we set up for them for the original encampment. They took on property that was not part of the agreement they had.”

The mayor made it clear in in the interview that more police action is coming.

“There is a time and place at which we have to end the encampment, and that time and place will come in the near future, but we have to continue to listen to some of the issues they talk about,” Menino told WBUR. “They have some right issues, but the way they went about it – civil disobedience doesn’t work for Boston and it doesn’t work for anyone.”

Stay tuned. This is about to get even more confrontational, and it is unsettling that the Boston Police Department cannot coherently explain the reasons for its actions.

Follow @mleccese on Twitter.

Here in New England, not only does everyone complain about the weather, everyone complains about the local media’s forecasts and coverage of the weather.

At 9 this morning, the Boston.com story “Hurricane forces a change in plans: Boats pulled, concert reset, Sox weigh schedule change” brought out the rage in commenters.

Bloomy wrote:

Oh noes! A hurricane! It’s not like us New Englanders haven’t been through one. You media people are just vultures...

Years ago I played on a softball team made up of State House reporters. Our name, of course, was The Vultures.

CrystalPhoenix wrote:

For pity’s sake. We’re NOT going to get a hurricane. We’re going to get some rain. When are we going to turn the clocks back thirty years and accept that WEATHER HAPPENS, and we don’t need to scream and flail our arms every time it threatens to do so??

And so on. You’ve heard the complaints before — usually loudest in the winter as a snowstorm approaches — that the local media is sensationalizing weather forecasts, just trying to scare us, seeking higher ratings, making a big deal out of nothing but a few snowflakes, or, in this case, a little wind and rain.

I stand up today in defense of the editors and the meteorologists.

At its annual conference last month, members of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies voted unanimously to change the organization’s name to the Association of Alternative Newsmedia.

“Times change, and so does our name,” said Colorado Springs Independent CEO Fran Zankowski, the AAN’s new president, in what sounds suspiciously like press release-ese. “This year, a 100 percent web-only news network became a member of our association. And, with the increasing number of apps, digital, mobile, and web platforms our companies use, it was time to reflect those changes in our name.”

I have two questions:

• Alternative to what?
• What took so long?

What are known as alternative newspapers (for example, The Boston Phoenix and The Dig) are big business now. The average circulation of the 130 members of what used to be known as the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies is 50,000. Seven of those papers — including the Boston Phoenix — claim circulation of more than 100,000 copies a week.

This is a long way from the badly printed, unevenly written and snarky underground newspapers of the 1960s and 1970s. The Village Voice, founded in 1955, is considered the first alternative newspaper. Now it is part of Village Voice Media Holdings, LLC, which owns a dozen other alternatives papers around the country.

I’ve been an avid and respectful reader of Globe editorials since not long after I learned to read, and the Globe has one of the most thoughtful, persuasive and distinguished teams of editorials writers in the country. When the Globe talks, people listen.

But the editorial writers should stick to matters of public policy and not give the newspaper’s opinion on internal Catholic Church matters, as it did in a Saturday editorial urging parishioners of six area Catholic Churches to give up their fight against the scheduled closing of their parishes.

In this country, the decisions of the Catholic Church are not matters of public policy by definition. Advising the Church or its members on Church business is inappropriate for editorial boards.

You probably remember the word “disestablishmentarianism” from a U.S. History or Civics class. If you do, you know the argument carried the day during the founding of the United States, and no church is recognized by the U.S. government as the nation’s official church (like the Church of England in England, for example). That means internal debates in any church or organized religion are not matters for the government or for public policy discussion. They are matters only for the church or religion itself.

The company that owns Philadelphia’s two daily newspapers, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, last week announced a pilot program that looks to me like a peek at the future of newspapers: buy a digital subscription and get an Android tablet computer at half price.

Here’s what you get: An inexpensive tablet computer (for about, say, $200) already loaded with the newspapers’ apps and links to the website of the two papers, Philly.com.

Here’s what the newspapers hope they get: more revenue from digital subscriptions priced at less than $100 a year, an opportunity to keep readers as even readers abandon their ink-on-paper subscriptions, and a whole lot of data on what consumers are clicking on and reading on the tablet.

At some point in the next few years, tablet prices will come down far enough — you know they will — that it will make economic sense for newspapers to give away tablet computers to anyone who buys a digital subscription.

In fact, it may be imperative. A survey by Cambridge’s Forrester Research in 2010 found that almost a full one-third of tablet owners read print newspapers less often. (Sixty percent reported no change in their newspaper reading habits, while 8 percent — this is odd and interesting — said they read print newspapers more often since they bought their tablet.)

Two days ago I wrote in this space that the local media overplayed the story of the FBI’s announcement it would air TV commercials as part of its efforts to capture the fugitive Whitey Bulger and his girlfriend, Catherine Greig.

“Enough already,” I wrote. “When they catch him, then I’ll be happy to see it leading newscasts and blown out on the front page. Until then, it's not page-one material."

If I was wrong — and a couple of commenters forcefully said so — I have never been more happy to be wrong.

The Los Angeles Times broke the story shortly before midnight in Boston last night. I have the Associated Press app on my iPhone set to chime with a notification when an urgent story breaks, and I was sitting quietly reading when “ding” went my phone. I picked it up, took a look, and had to look again. And again.

Opening the AP app, I found nothing but a banner headline scrolling across the screen — no story yet — so I typed “Bulger” into a Google News search and came up with just seven hits. The main one was from the LA Times.

I want Whitey Bulger caught. I want him to be tried for the cruel and sickening crimes of which he is accused. I want — if this is even possible — Bulger’s apprehension and trial to bring some comfort and closure to the hundreds and hundreds of victims and the families of the victims of his crimes.

I just don’t want to read a bunch of old news about him. More than half of today’s Globe front page above the fold was taken up with photos of Bulger, his presumed girlfriend Catherine Greig, and a timeline of various unsuccessful FBI strategies reaching out to the public for assistance in capturing Bulger.

Oh, there was real news about the hunt for Bulger yesterday, and the actual news of the FBI’s announcement that it will run ads on daytime TV in the hope someone will have seen Greig ran on the front of the Globe’s Metro sections.

That’s where it belongs — not dominating page one. Or leading WBZ’s radio newscasts. Or as the second story on NECN’s nightly news (following a fire in Haverhill).

The estimable hockey analyst Bob McKenzie of TSN (the Canadian version of ESPN) this morning called the Bruins-Canucks Stanley Cup finals “bizarre.”

We’ve had biting, we’ve had taunting, we’ve had embellishment, we’ve had a major suspension and a player being knocked out of the series, and there have been a lot of comments on and off the ice.

I’m a little surprised at how unruly things have been and how the animosity level for this series got cranked up as quickly as it did.

I had a casual chat with some of the officials who do the games and they were a little surprised that the players have been out this far on the edge.

McKenzie goes for understatement when he says he is a “little” surprised at how nasty this series has become and how the referees have been a “little” surprised at the on-ice venom. I am sure he and the referees find themselves plenty surprised.

I have been not in the least surprised — I’ve been delighted, actually — at the verbal biting, taunting, and embellishments published by sportswriters and columnists for Canada’s leading newspapers during the series.

The Toronto Globe and Mail’s Matthew Sekeres, after the third game of the series, wrote a column headlined “Canucks have become NHL’s most-hated team.” It’s nasty stuff, and great fun to read if you’re a Bruins fan.

The odd part is that Vancouver’s two best players — the Sedin twins — are the most mild mannered, polite gentlemen you’d ever want to meet, but the rest of the roster is pushing their pleasant personalities to the background. From Alex Burrows’s bite to Aaron Rome’s hit, the Canucks have won few fans outside of British Columbia with their comportment on hockey’s biggest stage.

“It does get pretty painful watching and seeing that team in it. ... It sucks seeing them there,” Blackhawks forward Dave Bolland told the Chicago Tribune this week. “Typical, pulling hair and biting people. Sort of like a girl ... stuff like that isn’t meant for hockey.”

In Game 3, centre Maxim Lapierre drew fire. Prior to the game, Bruins head coach Claude Julien said his antics were probably why he played for three teams this season, while during the contest, Dallas Stars forward Krys Barch took to Twitter with his thoughts.

“I don’t know if he has an ounce of man in him,” Barch wrote. “I’d be embarrassed to be his father.”

Talk about handing your opponents a club to beat you with.

This morning’s Boston Herald could barely contain its glee that the White House press office did not select a Herald reporter for the media pool — the small group of reporters who stick close to the President and share their notes with the rest of the media — for President Barack Obama’s fund-raiser this afternoon at the Boston Center for the Arts in the South End.

“Prez’s Mitt Snit,” the Herald's front page bellowed. “Peeved Obama Bans Herald Reporter … Because We Ran This Page 1 Article,” with an arrow pointing to the front page of the March 8 edition, which touted a Mitt Romney op-ed on the day, not coincidentally, that Obama made his last visit to Boston. (Here’s the complete version.)

The Boston Herald, of course, tries very hard to be Boston’s print version of FoxNews, and if that is what you want to be, nothing could better than a snooty brush-off from a White House press aide.

The most dynamic business in American journalism continues to be Patch, AOL’s network of more than 800 local news websites (which it plans to expand to 1,000 by the end of the year). There is not another media company in the U.S. whose help wanted ads are this extensive.

AOL Inc. last week announced it invested another $40 million in Patch in the first three months of 2011 — on top of the $75 million it invested in last year.

The company made another announcement, reported by Jeff Bercovici of Forbes reported on April 26:

Patch, AOL’s network of hyperlocal news sites, is trying to recruit as many as 8,000 bloggers in the next eight days, according to editor in chief Brian Farnham.

On Friday, Patch editors were told to start recruiting bloggers in preparation for the launch of its blog platform on May 4. Yesterday, Farnham issued a memo with concrete targets: Each editor is expected to sign up five to 10 new bloggers by then.

On May 4, the launch date, Bercovici wrote:

No wonder AOL is so eager to get folks writing for free for Patch. The internet giant pumped $40 million into its network of hyperlocal news sites in the first quarter of 2011, and it will almost certainly lose well in excess of $100 million on the venture this year.

Not a dollar of those millions will go to the local bloggers. If Patch recruits 10,000 bloggers, it won’t cut a check to any of them.

What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with writing for free? If you decide you have the time and the inclination and something to say and you’re willing to put in the work for free, that’s your look-out.

They don’t like Harvard in Canada either.

A story in this morning’s Globe, headlined “Harvard connection plays in Canadian’s loss,” reported how incumbent Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s campaign used a statement Liberal Party candidate Michael Ignatieff had made to the Harvard Crimson in its ads attacking Ignatieff.

The ad shows a clip of Ignatieff on CSPAN in 2004 saying, “You have to decide what kind of American you want. It’s your country just as much as it is mine.” Then: a CBC audio clip from 2001 in which Ignatieff says, “I love the republic I live in.”

“No wonder he’ll ask Harvard to let him back,” the voice says, with malevolent sarcasm, while on the screen appears this November 30, 2005 quote from the Crimson: “If I am not elected, I imagine I will ask Harvard to let me back.”

The ad ends: “Ignatieff: He didn’t come back for you.”

The Globe headline was careful to say the Harvard connection “plays in” — and did not cause — Ignatieff’s loss. Most of the story was the reaction of Ignatieff’s former Harvard colleagues to his defeat.

Ignatieff lived outside Canada for more than 30 years, in the U.K. and the U.S., before returning in 2005, and that is what Harper’s ads hammered home.

But ponder this: If Ignatieff had been a professor at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, would the ad have been as powerful?

I learned of Osama Bin Laden’s killing from Twitter. So did millions of others around the world.

Idly picking up my mobile phone and checking Twitter while I watched a hockey game, I saw this tweet from an official White House account:

@pfeiffer44: POTUS to address the nation tonight at 10:30 PM Eastern Time.

I flipped the channel to CNN. Don Lemon was interviewing Donald Trump. But Twitter was starting to spark and burn.

There were a few tweets wondering what the president might say and a few lame jokes of the “maybe there’s an asteroid headed for Earth” variety. Then, at 10:27, my friend Dan Kennedy of Northeastern University tweeted:

A couple of tweeps are speculating that bin Laden has been caught.

On CNN Don Lemon handed it over the Wolf Blitzer at 10:30, who began marking time until the president’s speech. No news there.

A few minutes later, Kailani Koenig-Muenster, a former student who is a web producer at New England Cable News, retweeted a message posted by Jill Jackson, a CBS News Capitol Hill producer:

House Intelligence committee aide confirms that Osama Bin Laden is dead. U.S. has the body.

That is when I learned that Osama bin Laden was dead. I learned it from Twitter, not CNN.

For reasons beyond my grasp, every football beat reporter, every year, insists on publishing an NFL mock draft a day or two before the actual draft in which they predict the selections of all 32 NFL teams in the draft’s first round.

It strikes me as odd because no matter how good they are as reporters, no matter how much they know about college football and all the teams in the NFL, they cannot possibly come close to knowing what the leaders of pro football franchises know. Those guys have entire staffs working full-time just on this stuff.

As far as I know, only one person in the media works full-time on nothing but the NFL draft: ESPN’s Mel Kiper Jr. And he is a very strange guy.

Nevertheless, every year sportswriters spend hours that could be put to more productive use working up their mock drafts.

I put the 2011 mock drafts of five local sportswriters into a spreadsheet, entered the actual picks the NFL teams made, and calculated the journalists’ rate of success.

When I lived in a brownstone downtown near a subway stop a few years ago, somebody — I never caught him — would steal just the sports section from my morning Globe as it lay on the building’s front steps. I wanted to strangle the guy (I assume it was a guy, since was into sports and thievery).

Now? I wouldn’t hug him if I caught him inky-handed, but I might just let him have the sports section.

I’ve overdosed on the Boston media’s sports coverage.

The city’s two dailies (and their websites) run dozens of sports stories a day. All five local TV newscasts feature sports segments prominently, and have been known to lead their newscasts with sports.

And then there’s sportstalk radio — three different stations — and two around-the-clock sports TV networks for New England. There are amateur blogs (Boston Sports Journal, Joy of Sox, Toeing the Rubber and Zuri Berry, just to name four) and so many professional blogs I’m not even going to try to count. Boston.com alone has nineteen (scroll down) sports blogs.

There's even a (very good, actually) blog about the coverage: Boston Sports Media Watch.

When my wife and I moved from downtown to a house North Brookline, people laughed at us when we said we had “moved to the suburbs.” When people think of suburban living, it seems, they think of Lexington or Sherborn, not a house on a tenth of an acre of land just a few hundred yards from the Boston border.

If I’m living in the city, what are turkeys doing in my back yard, a coyote on the prowl down the street, and a fox sneaking around a few blocks away?

Like most suburbanites (I started out in Somerville and lived for many years in Kenmore Square and the West Fenway; Brookline is the suburbs to me) I make a leisurely perusal of the police log in my local paper, the Brookline Tab, every week.

I expect the usual break-ins, assault & batteries, traffic stops and warrant arrests. I do not expect townspeople sending Brookline Police on a safari.

April 5

• Two coyotes were spotted in the Lancaster Terrace area around 8:46 p.m., according to police reports.
• At 9:43 p.m., a Mason Terrace resident called police after reportedly seeing coyotes in their backyard.

Charlie Sheen’s “Violent Torpedo of Truth/Defeat Is Not an Option” tour has been taking a beating from critics as it trundles across the United States, pouring publicity upon Sheen like rain.

“Forgettable,” wrote the Associated Press. The Boston Globe called the show a “dreary debacle.” A Boston Herald columnist described Sheen’s show as “a pathetic little party.”

The New York Times, reviewing the first show of the tour, in Detroit, whacked Sheen upside the head with some classy writing: “The show — a ragged mix of video clips, ear-splitting music, profanity-laced monologues and clumsy attempts to encourage audience participation — did not so much end as collapse.”

What did these reviewers expect? That was Charlie Sheen up on stage.

You know, Charlie Sheen, the actor who has been in rehab at least three times, the bad boy who boasts about his substance abuse, the actor who has been successful in movies and on TV but never on stage.

“Mass. lawmakers to hold hearing on nuke plant safety” reads the headline on a five-paragraph story reported by Michael Levenson and posted on Boston.com yesterday.

Hmmm. I wonder why the folks on Beacon Hill decided they need to hold public hearings — which attract reporters and cameras — on nuclear power plan safety now, instead of, say, three months ago? Is there any reason to suspect the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth and the Seabrook Nuclear Power Station in Seabrook, N.H. are any less safe today than they were three months ago?

Not according to Senate President Therese Murray, who announced the hearing.

The two plants have extensive safety systems in place “but we want the public to know that,” Murray said. “Plus, we want more information from them on what else needs to be done.”

Perhaps (I’m rolling my eyes here) it has something to do with the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan.

The crisis at the Japanese nuclear plant has received 24/7 coverage in the papers, online and on TV. Our politicians want some of that publicity. There are few better ways to do this than by holding what the American Daniel J. Boorstin called a pseudo-event, an event held primarily for the purpose of being covered by the media.

I flipped on the TV yesterday ay 4:30 yesterday afternoon to catch the live coverage of President Barack Obama’s visit to Boston.

Any news outlet can put together solid packages for the 11 o’clock news, but I wanted to see how the TV stations covered the hullabaloo of a presidential visit while it happened. We live in an age of instant journalism, right?

Turns out instant journalism can be a little, well, dull. Or maybe not so dull as formulaic. Do you recognize these ancient TV news formulas?

• A reporter doing a live stand-up from a place where the news ended a couple of hours ago.
• Sixty seconds of video from an event staged for cameras by opponents to the president’s polices.
• An exterior live shot of a building, inside of which something newsworthy may be happening.

The theatrical tussle between Wisconsin Republicans and Democrats over a bill that would end most collective bargain rights for state workers has led people not only in Wisconsin but across the country — including here in Massachusetts — to take to the streets waving placards and wielding bullhorns.

Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal, thanks to 24/7 media coverage, has pushed the issue of salaries and benefits for public employees to the top of the country’s fight card, and there has been an interesting — and enjoyable — debate on the matter knocking around on Massachusetts’ two leading political blogs, Blue Mass Group (Democratic) and Red Mass Group (Republican).

There's always an interesting and enjoyable debate going on over at Blue Mass Group and Red Mass Group.

Three folks from HP Labs in Palo Alto, California, and a physicist from Stanford University, wondering which authors on Twitter were most influential, designed an experiment: they examined a database of 16 million tweets on 3,361 topics in September and October of last year that appeared in Twitter’s “Trending Topics” spotlight.

Nick Bilton, the indispensible “Bits” blogger for The New York Times, summarized the scholars’ report in a post last week. If you want to read the study itself, titled “Trends in Social Media: Persistence and Decay,” you’ll find the most comprehensible stuff in the Introduction and Conclusion. The rest of the paper includes a lot of “huh?” math like this:

Only Twitter’s engineers and managers know the algorithm that causes a topic to appear in the trending lost. But, as the authors of the study write, it can be safely assumed topics that rise to the trending list “capture the attention of a large audience for a short time, thus contributing in some measure to the public agenda.”

The scholars found the authors who are retweeted the most and whose tweets become tending topics are primarily from traditional media sources.

We find that a large portion of these authors are popular news sources such as CNN, the New York Times, and ESPN. This illustrates that social media, far from being an alternative source of news, functions more as a filter and an amplifier for interesting news from traditional media.