In your buggy Monday media column: Kathleen Parker's exact worth is pinpointed, the HuffPo-AOL merger dissection and fallout begins, complaints about The Daily increase, and beware of Al Jazeerans attempting to infiltrate America via television screens.

  • Hey this is funny: the ratings for unpopular CNN talk show Parker Spitzer more than doubled last week. Hmm, strange, why might that be...oh, Kathleen Parker was out sick all week! Swear on a stack of Bibles! Truth really is stranger than fiction, sister!
  • HuffPo-AOL megamerger fallout, day one: Angela Burt-Murray, the former editor of Essence, is out as head of the Huffington Post's black-targeted vertical. Which has not even launched yet! But still supposedly will. What happened? AOL hates black people, or something!
  • Here's Howard Fineman's column on HuffPo-AOL. Can you imagine anything less enticing?
  • Hey, what does Sacred Protector of Conventional Wisdom Howard Kurtz have to say? I guess we can't blame him for the headline, "The Huffington Post's Gutsy Move." (Arianna takes $315 million and is given control of all of AOL's content: gutsy.) But we can blame him for this: "it is one more chunk of evidence that online news and entertainment are an increasingly valuable force in a media world once dominated by old-guard newspapers, magazines, and networks." That's just ten years too late, Howie. Is AOL an "old-guard network?" Or do you mean CBS by that? And how would one online content company acquiring another online content company apply to your formulation, at all? Dude.
  • The various complaints about the new iPad newspapers of the future, The Daily, are already rolling in. (Nice Super Bowl ad guys. That was a very weird and probably not economically productive move! Also, new website faces bugs, glitches, complaints? We know how you feel.) At this time we would like to predict that by the end of this summer, at least a handful of prominent staffers there will be quietly looking for new gigs.
  • Al Jazeera is, wisely, using the good will it's earned from its Egypt coverage to try to convince some American cable companies to, you know, put their network on cable, here in America. Since our nation has *finally* agreed to stop taking George W. Bush seriously, I think they might succeed this time.