Fox News chief Roger Ailes sent a memo to all employees at Fox News urging them to fight the intimidation of the Obama administration, the Washington Post reports.

Wrote Ailes: ”The administration’s attempt to intimidate Fox News and its employees will not succeed and their excuses will stand neither the test of law, the test of decency, nor the test of time. We will not allow a climate of press intimidation, unseen since the McCarthy era, to frighten any of us away from the truth.”

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“When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material,” the Washington Post reports.

“They used security badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal e-mails.”

Gawker is trying to raise $200,000 to buy the video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack cocaine so they can publish it online.

Roll Call: “A video posted on the Politico website featuring Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s chief of staff has been taken down after the Kentucky Republican’s office objected to its placement on a page designed to solicit advertisers.”

The video features McConnell chief of staff Josh Holmes explaining why he reads the Washington publication and ends with him saying, “I’m Josh Holmes and I’m a Politico.”

Sarah Palin “has been offered a major syndicated TV talk show by reality show producer Mark Burnett but turned down the deal,” Newsmax reports.

The deal is “not completely dead” as “sticking points have been over location and money… Burnett has insisted that Palin do the show from either New York or Los Angeles, which would require her to move for a significant portion of the year from her residence in Alaska where she lives with husband Todd.”

Aides to Hillary Clinton tell Politico the former Secretary of State has a “default” policy of rejecting all Sunday political show interview requests.

Said one: “She has a standing refusal… She hates them. She would rather die than do them. The White House knows, so they would know not to even ask her.”

New Yorker: “If the three-strikes rule were in effect, President Obama would be heading for the dugout, bat in hand. First the alleged Benghazi cover-up, then the kerfuffle about the I.R.S. targeting conservative groups, and now the revelation that earlier this year the Justice Department secretly seized two months of phone records involving editors and reporters at the Associated Press.”

“Among the many questions that the phone-records story raises are these two very basic ones: What were they thinking? And who, precisely, were they?”

The Week: Why did the Obama administration spy on the Associated Press?

“Reporters at Bloomberg News were trained to use a function on the company’s financial data terminals that allowed them to view subscribers’ contact information and, in some cases, monitor login activity in order to advance news coverage,” the New York Times reports.

“More than 315,000 Bloomberg subscribers worldwide use the terminals for instant market news, trading information and communication. Reporters at Bloomberg News, a separate division from the terminal business, were nonetheless told to use the terminals to get an edge in the competitive world of financial journalism where every second counts.”

Bloomberg News editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler apologized in a column today.

A former Bloomberg employee told CNBC that he “accessed usage information of the company’s data terminals of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.”

“The information appeared to concern general functions used by the officials and the frequency with which those functions — such as looking at a bond, equity markets or news — were accessed. The source said all Bloomberg journalists who knew of this capability of the terminal would have had access to the usage information of the officials.”

BuzzFeed reports Bloomberg officials knew of the practice since at least 2011.

The Week reports Rush Limbaugh is threatening to leave Cumulus Media after the company blamed him for declining revenue.

“If Limbaugh walks — his contract ends this year — Cumulus will lose the No. 1 rated talk radio program in the country, probably to rival syndicator Clear Channel. Limbaugh would lose access to 40 radio stations, including his flagship channel, New York’s WABC.”

“All of these things we’ve said about what the
president could do, should do, might have, could have, but the central
thing to keep in mind is his opponents — you talk about taking them out
to dinner, making nice with them — these people, politically, want to
cut his heart out and throw his liver to the dogs.”

— Dan Rather, in an interview on the Chris Matthews Show.

Newt Gingrich confirmed to Time that he’s been talking with CNN about reviving the political talk show “Crossfire.”

Said Gingrich: “People forget but for the first 10 years it was a very serious program. I remember doing it as a junior member — it was a real workout. It was a destination for people to hear both sides discuss serious issues in an entertaining way.”

“Yuk it up media and pols. While America is buried in taxes and a fight for our rights, the permanent political class in DC dresses up and has a prom to make fun of themselves. No need for that, we get the real joke.”

— Sarah Palin, writing on Facebook, about the White House Correspondent’s Dinner last night.

Gawker: “Tomorrow evening, the cream of our nation’s mainstream media celebrities, political celebrities, and celebrity celebrities will put on tuxedos and evening gowns and gather in a ballroom in Washington, DC to mutually give one another handjobs, in a mostly metaphorical sense. This is because the most powerful elements of our nation’s DC press corps are all ‘on the same team’ as the people they cover (politicians) and the people they idolize (celebrities). This is called the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, and it is the single most revolting annual gathering of pseudojournalistic cocksuckery in all the land.”

The Week: “If history is an indicator, talk of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — affectionately known as ‘Nerd Prom’ — is about to set Washington atwitter.”

“And the fact that journalists are willing to own the nerd word (even ironically) speaks volumes about how far nerddom has come in recent decades.”

Sources tell Politico that CNN is in talks with Newt Gingrich and former Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter about hosting a new version of Crossfire.

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