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    Jack Mirkinson

    Jack Mirkinson

    Senior Media Editor, The Huffington Post

  • CNN's Chris Cuomo Says Reza Aslan's 'Tone' Shows Why People Are 'Fearful' Of Islam

    Recently, author Reza Aslan got a little heated on CNN over some rather sweepingly hostile generalizations Bill Maher made about Islam, as well as some questions about Islam's supposed propensity towards violence. On Thursday, CNN's Chris Cuomo said Aslan's "tone" was an example of why people are scared of Muslims in the first place. "The Muslim world is responsible for a really big part of religious extremism right now," Cuomo continued.

  • Mother Of NBC Freelancer With Ebola Voices Her Worst Fear About Disease

    The 33-year-old NBC News freelancer who contracted Ebola has been identified as Ashoka Mukpo. Mukpo was working with NBC's Dr. Nancy Snyderman and her crew when he began showing symptoms of the virus. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

  • The NY Times Has Had A Really Bad Year

    The announcement on Wednesday that the paper was slashing hundreds of jobs and retooling its troubled digital products was just the latest in a string of bad news for the Times in 2014. First and foremost, of course, was the highly messy and controversial firing of editor Jill Abramson, which opened up a bitter row over her legacy, the paper's general treatment of women, and the way publisher Arthur Sulzberger handled all of it. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

  • NY Times Announces Huge Staff Cuts

    In a sign of the persistent challenges facing the newspaper industry, the New York Times is planning to make deep cuts in its newsroom staff, executives announced Wednesday. More troublingly for the paper, its attempts to gain new sources of revenue through digital products appear to be stalling badly. The Times said it would seek to eliminate roughly 100 jobs in the newsroom, through either buyouts or layoffs.

  • Rosie O'Donnell And Whoopi Goldberg Get Into A HUGE Fight On 'The View'

    It used to be that fights on "The View" happened while the cameras were rolling. Goldberg and O'Donnell are unquestionably the big dogs on "The View," but apparently, O'Donnell doesn't like wearing an earpiece and so doesn't hear the producers shouting that they need to cut to commercial.

  • Glenn Greenwald: Media Way Overhyped Khorasan Group Threat

    When the United States suddenly announced last week that it had attacked a militant group called Khorasan, many observers wondered where, exactly, these people had come from. "Extraordinary - military strikes against a group no WH official had ever publicly mentioned by name," ABC's Jon Karl noted. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

  • Rosie O'Donnell Slams American Bombing Of Syria

    Speaking just as President Obama was telling the United Nations about his plans to extend American military involvement in the Middle East, O'Donnell said she was troubled by the situation. "We went to war yesterday in America against another country in the Mideast. O'Donnell also hinted that she thinks Syria's oil reserves have something to do with American involvement there.

  • The White House Finds Another Way To Irk The Journalists Who Cover It

    Sometimes, it seems as if the White House is finding every way it can to annoy the reporters who cover the Obama administration. White House journalists have complained over and over and over and over and over again about the ways the Obama press office has tried to restrict or hinder their activity — and that's before you even get to those Justice Department surveillance scandals. Wednesday found yet another scuffle emerging — this time over the White House pool report, the daily chronicling of the president's activity which is compiled by reporters every day but distributed by the White House itself.

  • Fox News Pundit Winds Up On Terrorism Watch List

    The Department Of Homeland Security is known for being somewhat overzealous with its terrorist watch list—Nelson Mandela was infamously on the list as late as 2008, for instance. Hundreds of thousands of people are routinely placed on the list, often for very minimal reasons. On Tuesday, the world got another glimpse into the baffling choices the federal government sometimes makes when conservative writer and Fox News pundit Stephen Hayes revealed that he had been placed on the list.

  • Iranian President Says He Can't Do Anything About Detained Reporter

    Iranian president Hassan Rouhani addressed his country's continued detention of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaiain in a meeting with American editors and journalists in New York on Friday. Poynter's Andrew Beaujon reported that Post editor Martin Baron was among the group which met with Rouhani. New York Times editor Dean Baquet, who was also present, told Beaujon that there were "a couple dozen editors and reporters from most major news outlets" in attendance.

  • Bill O'Reilly Gets Told His Plan To Defeat ISIS Is A 'Terrible Idea'

    Bill O'Reilly outlined his personal plan to defeat ISIS on Monday night. The plan consisted of the United States funding and training a huge mercenary army to take on the Islamic State militants. O'Reilly then brought on Tom Nichols, a professor at the US Naval War College.

  • Shonda Rhimes Takes Down NY Times Critic Over Offensive Article

    Shonda Rhimes had little patience on Friday for the way the television critic of the New York Times wrote about her and her shows. On Thursday, Ms. Rhimes will introduce “How to Get Away With Murder,” yet another network series from her production company to showcase a powerful, intimidating black woman.

  • Steven Sotloff Friend Levels Grave Charges At White House

    A friend and spokesman for the family of murdered journalist Steven Sotloff told CBS News on Wednesday that the Obama administration did very little to help free Sotloff from the ISIS militants who ultimately beheaded him. Speaking to "CBS This Morning," Barak Barfi said that the Sotloffs received a cold shoulder from the White House after Steven's capture in 2013. Co-host Gayle King asked if the family had tried raising money for ransom.

  • Meredith Vieira Shares Harrowing Domestic Abuse Story

    With so many stories about domestic violence being shared in the wake of the Ray Rice scandal, Meredith Vieira decided to tell her talk show audience about her own abusive relationship, and about why it took her so long to leave her abuser. Part of it was guilt because every time we would have a fight he would then start crying and say, ‘I promise I won’t do it again’ and I would feel like maybe I contributed somehow to this and they are saying this about Ray Rice’s wife, that it takes two to tango.

  • Huge Edward Snowden Documentary Is Being Released

    The video is part of a new documentary called "CITIZENFOUR," by Laura Poitras, one of the journalists who met Snowden on that fateful day in 2013. On Tuesday, the New York Film Festival made a surprise announcement that the film will be a part of its 2014 lineup. The documentary will doubtless be eagerly anticipated, not least because it marks the most high-profile intervention by Poitras into the ongoing Snowden journalism.

  • Large Racial Gap In Poll Of The Media's Ferguson Coverage

    A new poll found that residents of St. Louis County had starkly divergent views about the media's conduct in Ferguson depending on their race. Nearly 75 percent of all respondents told pollsters the media contributed to making the situation in Ferguson worse. Of those criticizing the media coverage in Ferguson, 50 percent were African-American and 81 percent were white.

  • Rosie O'Donnell Makes Provocative Ray Rice Comments As 'The View' Returns

    "The View" looked very different as it returned for a new season on Monday, but some things don't change, like Rosie O'Donnell making controversial comments about the news. It had to introduce a new set and three new co-hosts (O'Donnell, Rosie Perez and Nicolle Wallace), get them to discuss some Hot Topics, test out the chemistry, maybe throw in a celebrity or two. There was a feeling that not everyone had completely figured out their roles—especially O'Donnell, who sometimes seemed to take on a co-moderator role with Whoopi Goldberg before pulling back.

  • NY Times Hammers Congress, Obama Over ISIS War

    The New York Times editorial board sharply criticized President Obama on Friday for attempting to wage a new military campaign in the Middle East without Congressional approval—and Congress for allowing him to do so. Obama's assertion that the 2002 Congressional authorization to attack Al Qaeda covers his campaign against ISIS has been met with deep skepticism, but Congress appears more than willing to allow the president to bomb Iraq and Syria without further approval for some time. The cowardice in Congress, never to be underestimated, is outrageous.

  • Some Skeptical Notes Break Through In Coverage Of Obama's New War

    As President Obama prepares to take America into another open-ended conflict in the Middle East, some notes of media skepticism are starting to interrupt what has thus far seemed like a chorus of cries for increased escalation against the militant Islamic State group. The calls for war have been so loud that some mainstream pundits like CNN's Brian Stelter have worried that the media is pushing the U.S. into battle. On Wednesday and Thursday, though, several major outlets published very skeptical takes on Obama's plans for widening his military intervention in Iraq and Syria.

  • You Will Never, Ever, Ever Be Able To Escape John McCain On TV

    Sometimes it seems that at any time of day, anywhere, John McCain will be on a news show, and he'll probably be grumpy. McCain's endless appearances on TV are so well-known by now that they've become a clichéd shorthand for the media's tendency to turn to the same rotating cast of pundit-politicians over and over again. Anyone looking to avoid McCain was doomed.