Who gets Twit? UC-Berkeley J-school student James Karl Buck knows the power of Twitter: jailed in Egypt after photographing a protest, he was freed in one day after his one-word tweet alerted friends who contacted the U.S. embassy and an Egyptian lawyer. Hillary Clinton, it seems, doesn’t get it so well: she is  followed by 3,051 people (well shy of Barack Obama’s Twitter-leading 24,000), but follows no one herself, a move that BusinessWeek calls not only “bad PR” but a possible lost opportunity in data collection.

Reporting military suicides: Editor & Publisher’s Greg Mitchell has long been tracking the alarming spike in non-combat military deaths in Iraq, noting that local papers consistently break news that many deaths the Pentagon reports as “non-combat-related” are really suicides. Today he points out work by the Pioneer Press’ John Brewer who reported that 22-year-old St. Paul resident Jacob J. Fairbanks died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound six months into his second tour in Iraq.

Must-read: Greg Mitchell, the editor of Editor & Publisher and author of So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits — and the President — Failed in Iraq, published a great column summarizing a few of the questions the media have steadfastly failed to ask about the war.

Excerpt:

A frank assessment of the overall media performance, from the “run-up” to the “surge,” was nearly non-existent… What about the removal of the vast majority of U.S. reporters from Iraq in the early days of the occupation, just when they were most needed to warn of the daily Coalition blunders and emerging insurgency? The media’s role in falling victim to official propaganda in the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman cases? The delay in exposing the abuses at Abu Ghraib — and attacks on civilians in Haditha and numerous other places?

“The list goes on: Why did it take years to really focus on ill treatment of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans back here at home? To expose the rising suicide rates among soldiers in Iraq and returning vets? To assess the full trillion-dollar financial costs of the war, now a hot topic but underplayed for so long?… Why didn’t the media fight harder the Pentagon’s ban on showing coffins returning from Iraq? Why, for the most part, did they refuse to show dead or injured American soldiers from the war zone, thus preventing the public from absorbing the true human costs of the conflict?”