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Five years earlier, after an actress on Mr. Cosby’s TV series “Cosby” told the police that he had tried to put her hand down his sweatpants at his New York townhouse, Mr. Cosby’s lawyers threatened The National Enquirer with a $250 million defamation suit for publishing detailed comments about the incident by the woman’s relatives.

What follows is an object lesson in why year-end best, worst and other lists shouldn't be published until the year actually ends. A Kwanzaa "parade" was held in Los Angeles yesterday. In reporting on the event, CBS Los Angeles published a work of fiction which absolutely belongs on any 2014 list of most embarrassing moments in journalism (HT Twitchy; bolds are mine):

Yesterday, New York Times readers were treated to a beautifully nuanced and balanced and richly detailed feature about a topic very much in the mix. Its author, Ariel Kaminer, came by her story and its scoop—the first interview with the accused (possibly falsely) rapist of the woman at Columbia who is carrying a mattress around campus to make a statement about campus sexual violence—by developing deep roots in a narrow beat, higher education. And now, Ms. Kaminer will join a hundred or so of her colleagues on the unemployment line as the Times once again cuts costs by cutting journalists....

Jessica Pressler is no longer going to work at Bloomberg’s investigation unit after the disgraced New York magazine writer penned last week’s story about the Stuyvesant High School senior who allegedly made $72 million trading stocks, only to have it proved a hoax.

By most accounts, he was an incredibly arrogant ####, among other unflattering adjectives. When his former classmates at Princeton and Harvard were interviewed, certain words kept repeating. One was a nice thing -- that he's very smart. The others, not so much...

Far-right group Pegida holds ‘Islamisation’ protest, using slogan from 1989 campaign against East German government. Its members have been dubbed the “pinstriped Nazis” and they refer to their demonstrations as “evening strolls” through German cities. But on Monday night, an estimated 15,000 people joined Pegida, or Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of the West, in a march through Dresden carrying banners bearing slogans such as “Zero tolerance towards criminal asylum seekers”, “Protect our homeland” and “Stop the Islamisation”. Lutz Bachmann, the head of Pegida, a nascent anti-foreigner campaign group, led the crowds, either waving or draped in German flags, in barking...

If the Senate were high school and there was a superlative for "least popular member," Ted Cruz would win in a walk. The Texas Republican reaffirmed his status as the Senate's most reviled member -- among his peers -- over the weekend when he refused to allow the chamber to go out of session on Friday and return Monday to vote on the $1.1 trillion omnibus spending package. Instead, Cruz used procedural moves to force 10 straight hours of votes on Saturday as a way to protest President Obama's executive action on immigration. Cruz ultimately forced a "point of order"...

When I asked her for an example, she replied, “Every morning, we hold a meeting about how to build that evening’s broadcast. We’ve been doing this for decades. Everybody talks about which stories we’re going to air, what the line-up looks like, and which reporters we’ll have live in the field and which ones will be filing taped pieces. In the past, the left-wing bias was always left unspoken. People just ‘got it,’ because they all thought the same. “Once Obama pulled ahead of Hillary and certainly once he became president,” she said, “the bias came out of the closet....

Republicans know they can't win the popular vote. You won't believe sick schemes they've launched to get around it. Republicans have only won the popular vote for president once in the last 25 years, a steep decline in their fortunes from the period from 1972 to 1988, when they won the popular vote every time but one–1976, the aftermath of Watergate. Add to that massive policy failures and demographic trends against them, and the motivations to cheat are overwhelming. Voter suppression seemed promising at first—and it’s helpful in many downticket races—but it’s not going to be enough to secure the...

Before a writer for Rolling Stone ever made the mistake of believing an alleged gang-rape story told by a student named "Jackie," she bought an alleged multiple-rape story told by a former altar boy named "Billy." On Nov. 19th, Rolling Stone published an article claiming that "Jackie," a student at the University of Virginia, had been allegedly gang-raped by seven men at a fraternity party. ["A Rape on Campus; A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice At U-VA."] The fraternity was tried in the media and found guilty. Bricks were thrown through the windows of the frat house, the cops...

Liberals aren't going to let mere facts get in the way of a good story. A Politico magazine article on the UVA rape accusation debacle, in which the accuser's allegations have unraveled, quotes a student newspaper editor thusly: "to let fact checking define the narrative would be a huge mistake."

In her just-released memoir, Not That Kind of Girl, Lena Dunham describes her alma mater, Oberlin College, as "a liberal arts haven in the cornfields of Ohio." After a month-long investigation that included more than a dozen interviews, a trip to the Oberlin campus, and hours spent poring through the Oberlin College archives, her description of the campus remains the only detail Breitbart News was able to verify in Dunham's story of being raped by a campus Republican named Barry.

Media Malfeasance: Short of handing local rioters a locator map, the newspaper of record provides enough information to find the home of the police officer some still accuse of murdering Michael Brown for no good reason. We're not sure what the New York Times was thinking when it published an item last Monday by Julie Bosman on the recent marriage of Officer Darren Wilson along with the town they lived in and street they lived on. The street in the small St. Louis suburb they live in is only two blocks long, and the piece had almost all the information...

Do not accept the Ferguson police officer’s retirement. Just keep talking about his phantasmagorical fear of the black body – or else.It would be easy enough to call Darren Wilson a liar, as so many pundits have done, after reading the now-former Ferguson police officer’s testimony in the case of the killing of the 18-year-old Michael Brown. We could imagine this paragon of whiteness, soft-spoken and soft around the middle, as a rational actor, spending months after the shooting to carefully prepare for his grand-jury testimony, to repeat his performance in front of George Stephanopoulos for a television interview. Calling...

My 102-year-old mother-in-law, Henryne Walker Stewart Goode, whom we buried a week ago at the Walker family cemetery in Okolona, Miss., often told an unforgettable story at our kitchen table. She attended Okolona College, where she was taught English and public speaking by James Raspberry, the father of my late Post colleague, William Raspberry. At one time, in my mother-in-law’s telling, animals on the school’s farm were falling victim to some invading marauder. A school employee discovered the culprit — a dog — and shot it. But the white farmer who owned the dog retaliated, turning up at the school...

The New York Times, whether consciously or not, has just endangered Darren Wilson’s life. With tensions running high in Ferguson over the lack of an indictment for Wilson’s killing of Michael Brown, the paper has published the officer’s approximate address -- the street and town where he lives with his new wife, who also is named. Given the racial animosity unleashed by Brown’s death, given the rioting and the looting and the stores that were set afire, how can a news organization make it easier for some crazy zealot to track down Wilson? But there it is in the paper:

While Buzzfeed is mostly known for fun quizzes and amusing lists, the website also has trending posts on abortion. Over the past couple of weeks one such piece included “What Having An Abortion in 1959 Was Like,” by Buzzfeed contributor Diana Weiner. The headline reads: “Illegal, secret, expensive, and incredibly scary. A 74-year-old grandmother tells her story.” Emphasis is original. Diana Weiner’s story is personal and in many ways does seem “incredibly scary.” The piece fails to distinguish though how an abortion today is necessary different from those things. While it is no longer illegal to have an abortion, abortion...

FULL TITLE: 'Religious zealot' Christian student 'decapitated 19-year-old friend because he thought he practiced witchcraft' A deeply Christian college student in Oklahoma allegedly nearly decapitated the son of a state trooper with a sword because the victim practiced witchcraft, police say. Isaiah Marin of Stillwater was charged Thursday with first-degree murder in the attack that killed 19-year-old Jacob Andrew Crockett a day earlier. The two had been playing cards with a third pal, Marin's brother, when Marin removed the 'large black sword' from its sheath and began swinging it around, court records obtained by MailOnline show. Scroll down for video

Hear the one about Wendy Davis going to hell? A Republican state representative got a big laugh Saturday from Abbott and a roomful of supporters with a joke at Davis’ expense. Abbott faces Davis, a Democratic state senator, in next month’s general election for governor. On Saturday, Abbott and GOP attorney general nominee Ken Paxton were campaigning at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Frisco. Abbott was introduced by Frisco state Rep. Pat Fallon, who opened with a joke in which Wendy Davis visits a grade school and sees a boy reading a book about whales. Here’s the joke Fallon told: The...

Right now, millions of Americans are disenfranchised by our political process. They can pay taxes and contribute to social security, but they can’t vote. They can be sentenced to life in prison, but they can’t vote. Every day, their bodies, lives and futures are affected by politicians and policies they did not choose. Who am I talking about? Felons? Guess again. We need to lower the voting age. This is a prime moment to ask ourselves whether our voting system is yet fully equitable. Last month, Scotland made history when, for the first time in British politics, 16- and 17-year...