You Can Dance If You Want To: Future scholars of social movements may well look back on May 2011 as the month it became safe to dance. Because up to now, the U.S. Park Police arrests of dancers at the Jefferson Memorial was merely a funny story; all of a sudden, it's a political protest. More than 1,500 people have signed up on Facebook for a public dance-in next weekend, protesting the original arrests and this weekend's second round, which was also a protest of the first one and the court ruling upholding it. We just hope the jail storage facility has room for all those toe shoes. +2

Melt With You: Free advice for the White House or any Democrats hoping to put climate change deniers on the defensive: Schedule some hearings for this week. Record high temperatures swept the D.C. area today and are expected to stick around. Last summer, which broke all kinds of heat records, there weren't consecutive 95-degree days until late June; if this keeps up, going outside at all in August will be seriously ill-advised. Of course, the weather on any individual day doesn't have anything to do with climate. But since that point seems lost on the likes of James Inhofe, no reason not to take advantage of the confusion. -3

Stop the Presses: Along with mayoral advice on keeping pets cool, the heat wave managed to break the media. Power outages rolled around the vicinity of North Capitol Street, shutting down the CNN Washington bureau and Roll Call, where staffers were unable to edit or lay out the next issue of the paper. If such mighty news organizations can be brought down so easily, we fear for Howard Kurtz. -1

Think Different: The stereotype of the BlackBerry-addicted Hill staffer checking email from the bar late at night (mostly in a misguided attempt to impress fellow bar patrons with how important the staffer is) may soon have to change. Not too much, though; mobile email is still as popular as ever in D.C. It's just now it's increasingly likely to be Gmail, read from an iPhone. Don't expect to see Apple using images of federal bureaucrats in its marketing any time soon, but if footage of President Barack Obama using an iPad surfaces in Cupertino, Calif.-led ad campaign, it'll be a sure sign that his reelection bid is going pretty well. +1

Friday's Needle rating: 62 Today's score: -1 Today's Needle rating: 61

As of 1:24 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time... We don't know! No update on the electricity situation at the Kurtz homestead in more than five hours. (Though there is a new link to some Playboy photos!) But surely, Pepco is on the case.

Remember, at City Desk, our motto is: "Your number one source for all Kurtz electricity-related news." (Our secondary motto: "No limit on exclamation marks allowed per post.") Refresh the page early and often!

Photo via CNN

Apparently he'll need to work his magic again today; this morning's storms brought bad news to the Kurtz household once again. A plaintive cry issued forth from the Postie on Twitter once again: "No power for 5 days, go on vacation, come back, it rains, no power again. Thanks, Pepco."

Keep checking back here throughout the day for more updates on City Desk—your number one source for all Kurtz electricity-related news!

Photo via CNN

On U St, the snowball fight surged
The Hummer came; people converged
What started out jolly
Soon turned to pure folly
When gun-toting lawman emerged

Then CNN picked up the feud
(Click here if you haven't yet viewed)
An anarchist protest?
Was more of a snow-fest
Their coverage seems just a bit skewed

So the snowball incident has made it to CNN which links to WJLA's scare story hatchet job. DCist notes that the coverage was a wee bit on the paranoid side:

"As if the negative coverage doesn’t threaten to be embarrassing enough for the District, the story — headlined 'Snowball Fight Takes a Turn for the Worse' — paints a misguided picture of the day to say the least. According to WJLA and thus CNN, there was a “snowball fight-turned-unruly protest’ with 'anti-war protesters dressed in anarchist garb' crashing the fight in their all black clothes, masks, and anti-war signs."

Before the off-duty detective whipped out his gun, these "anti-war protesters dressed in anarchist garb" helped a cop get his car out of the snow. Talk about anarchy!

*photo courtesy of Matthew Bradley.

The fallout that ensued was tremendous. A few web-only writers went after Gawker, but even more argued that at least Gawker gave credit, whereas newspapers, television stations, and other old media frequently don't when they re-report a story.

Well, CNN recently did to criminal justice reporter Radley Balko, who lives in Northern Virginia, what Gawker supposedly did to Shapira, except it failed to give any credit where much credit was due.

As Techdirt wrote early this morning, Balko (who I worked with at Reason) has spent several years reporting on Steven Hayne, the Mississippi medical examiner whose shoddy work has led to the incarceration of several known innocents. Over the last three years, Balko has cultivated sources, reads hundreds–if not thousands–of pages of documentation incriminating Hayne, and, as a result, has broken every single piece of major news about the medical examiner.

But you wouldn't know any of that if all you had for reference was the AC360 special about Hayne, which piggy-backs almost exclusively on Balko's reporting without every hat-tipping or acknowledging his work. (Techdirt reported that "sources quoted by CNN told Balko that CNN claims it found them via his articles.")

In a post at his site The Agitator, Balko writes

I guess the important thing here is that CNN is giving the Steven Hayne story national attention.

That’s great.

And I guess I shouldn’t dwell too much on the fact that CNN piggybacked on my three years of reporting without giving me even the slightest acknowledgment. Journalists who have been in the game far longer than I tell me this kind of thing happens all the time. Bigger outlets don’t really feel obligated to credit smaller ones for breaking stories.

Most bloggers and reporters, old media and new, have made the same point: Piggy-backing happens a lot, it's how news dissemination works, and it shouldn't be looked down on if it's done right. But few people, especially in old media, are willing to concede that when a story moves upward, from web to print, or from small outlet to national outlet, the big dogs don't feel the need to reciprocate credit.

This is especially egregious when a story blows up in the hands of a larger outlet, because there's an opportunity to easily boost a smaller paper's profile with a hat-tip. The Wall Street Journal could (and should) have done this in August of last year, when it piggybacked on months of reporting by the Brownsville Herald on a story about Mexican-Americans being denied citizenship because they were delivered by midwives instead of in obstetric wards.

In an email, Balko elaborated on CNN's failure to credit his reporting:

"With my story, it wasn't just CNN. The Gannet-owned Jackson Clarion-Ledger has run with two of my big scoops about Dr. Hayne in just the last six months. Neither acknowleded I broke the original story. Here you have a paper with a fairly large staff and budget continually getting scooped on a story that's beeing going on in its own backyard for 20 years by a journalist with a small magazine who lives 600 miles away. Seems to me that's a good indication that the traditional media's problems go well beyond having their content excerpted by blogs and websites."

UPDATE: A savvy reader points out that CNN closed the comments on the ANC360 Hayne article immediately after this post pinged back in the comments section:

While we're on the topic of elevating abusive cops above world leaders, I've got two more candidates for future beer summits–and one of 'em's local!

In Mobile, Alabama, cops tazed and pepper-sprayed a deaf man with a mental age of 10 because he spent too much time in a dollar store bathroom:

Love...says he was not feeling well and was in the bathroom for about a half-hour before the police "throw poison under the door." Soon they broke into the bathroom, he recalled in an account he wrote for his family, and "the police get the tazz three strings in my stomach, chest and hand and hit my head." Later, he says, "I saw police laugh at me."

According to Jacob Sullum at Reason, the cops arrested Love even after they learned he wasn't the average vagrant.

And according to HuffPo's Arthur Delaney, D.C. cops recently pulled a Gates-like stunt on U Street:

[Tuma] told the Huffington Post that in a loud sing-song voice, he then chanted, "I hate the police, I hate the police."

One officer reacted strongly to Tuma's song. "Hey! Hey! Who do you think you're talking to?" Tuma recalled the officer shouting as he strode across an intersection to where Tuma was standing. "Who do you think you are to think you can talk to a police officer like that?" the police officer said, according to Luke Platzer, 30, one of Tuma's companions.

Tuma said he responded, "It is not illegal to say I hate the police. It's not illegal to express my opinion walking down the street."

According to Tuma and Platzer, the officer pushed Tuma against an electric utility box, continuing to ask who he thought he was and to say he couldn't talk to police like that.

Tuma was arrested for disorderly conduct.

In fact, all three men–Gates, Love, Tuma–we’re charged with disorderly conduct. How many of them are going to sip beers in the garden behind the White House? The mentally disabled deaf man? He wouldn't have much to say. The loud-mouth gay guy? He had it coming. And Gates? Well duh! He’s already famous!

And a little side note to Warren Goldstein at HuffPo, who frames white privilege by talking about how he almost house-sat the wrong house but wasn't arrested when a patrol car showed up because he is white: You were spared arrest, Mr. Goldstein, not just because of your skin color, but also because you were polite. Authority demands respect, and when you give it, authority rewards you by not arresting your ass on bullshit charges.

More beer summits!

Key line: "In those instances where you call it 'trouble,' it’s been other people who have done that."

Here's one commenter from the washingtonpost.com on the matter:

How is the Washington Post being scooped about a potentially serious metro rail collision? This happened about 45 minutes ago, and it's still in little print at the bottom of the Post web page. Come on guys. Surely you haven't all taken the buy out?