CNBC.

Claiming that little journalism is original these days, UK investigative journalist Nick Davies

commissioned Cardiff University’s journalism department to do a study on the state of the industry.

The study looked at all domestic news stories over a two-week period from five British newspapers, including the quality papers–the Times of London, the Daily Telegraph, the Independent, the Guardian–and one mid-market paper, the Daily Mail.

The researchers looked at 2,207 stories.

They also had the Guardian news desk send along all of the material–such as press releases and wire stories–that the journalists had access to during that period.

The survey found that 80 percent of the stories in these papers–some of the most prestigious in the country–were wholly or mainly or partly based on information from pr departments or wire stories. The researchers weren’t sure on the origins of another 8 percent of the stories.

Only 12 percent were clearly original.

Further, the researchers found that when stories hinged on a specific fact, there was clear evidence that fact was checked in only 12 percent of stories.

The web is host to many miracles, small and large.

In chapter 153,479,934 of the web’s weird, wired wonderfulness, my buddy Tony Pierce helps teach one Kareem Abdul-Jabbar how to blog.

“Gore and Pelosi See Role as Honest Brokers in Tight Contest.”

The Onion?

No, front page, right column of the New York Times.

Patrick Ruffini, one of the tiny handful of GOP strategists who get online and social media, is gleefully pushing for Ron Paul’s primary defeat.

Here’s what Ron Paul says about TX-14: ‘If I were to lose the primary for my congressional seat, all our opponents would react with glee.’ Give what you can. Ron Paul is running scared ‘ using his Presidential campaign’s donors’ money to subsidize a desperate last-minute attempt to save his Congressional seat.

Ron Paul is, of course, the GOP presidential candidate who did not write the anti-Semitic, racists, paranoid bile that appeared in his eponymous newsletters for several decades.

Christopher Hitchens in the March Atlantic:

In his essay on Malinowski, Ernest Gellner wrote of how the borderline and marginal peoples of Austria-Hungary needed three things from their benign, whiskered old monarch. The required insurance against mutual fratricide, protection of local and eccentric cultures and guarantees against the ambitions of Germany and Russia. By giving way first to micro and then to macro anti-Semitism, not only did this fair approximation of a civilization lose its best minds; it lost its collective min, and thus managed to invite the two worst possible fates by beckoning on first a German and then a Russian imperium.”

Oceana, one of the first causes to buy blogads way back in 2003, dreamed up this clever and, ultimately, sad spot…

Bill Gross, biggest bond fund manager in the world, is skeptical of bond insurer bailouts too:

That the monolines could shoulder this modern-day burden like a classical Greek Atlas was dubious from the start. How could Ambac, through the magic of its triple-A rating, with equity capital of less than $5bn (£2.5bn), insure the debt of the state of California, the world’s sixth-largest economy? How could an investor in California’s municipal bonds be comforted by a company that during a potential liquidity crisis might find the capital markets closed to it, versus the nation’s largest state with its obvious ongoing taxing authority? Apply the same logic to the gargantuan size of the asset-backed market it has insured in recent years – subprimes and CDOs in the trillions of dollars – and you must come to the same logical conclusion: this is absurd. It is as if Barney Fife, television’s Sheriff of Mayberry in The Andy Griffith Show , promised to bring law and order to the entire country.

… the sense of stability imparted to an oligopolistic industry with visible flaws is not likely to last, nor may the hope for a return to economic growth of recent years. The modern US financed-based economy has a striking resemblance to Barney Fife, guaranteeing global prosperity without the productive industrial-based firepower to back it up. Neither ultra-low interest rates or tax rebates, nor investor-led and authority-based monoline bailouts are likely to change that significantly during the next few years.

Meanwhile, the chief of Germany’s biggest bank is sounding the alarm also, talking to Bloomberg TV.

Deutsche Bank AG Chief Executive Officer Josef Ackermann said rating downgrades for bond insurers pose risks that could match the U.S. subprime market collapse.

“It could be a tsunami-like event comparable to subprime,” Ackermann said in a Bloomberg Television interview in Frankfurt today. Deutsche Bank, Germany’s biggest bank, is “well positioned” on its risk from bond insurers, he said.

Bond investors stand to lose $200 billion should MBIA Inc., Ambac Financial Group Inc. and Financial Guaranty Insurance Co. forfeit their AAA grades because of declines in mortgage-backed securities they insure, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Ratings on $2.4 trillion of debt that the industry guarantees would be thrown into doubt.