• Nick Lemann has 5,000 words on Bill O'Reilly. Which we'll get around to reading soon. [NYer]
• David Carr thinks VF, underneath all its bullshit, is actually a pretty good mag. [NYT]
• And Jon Friedman thinks that all the other magazine editors are ganging up on poor David Remnick. [MW]
• We always thought Bill Beutel was kind of a little crazy, but that's probably because we only really watched him in his later years. He helped invent Eyewitness News, and he died Saturday. [NYT]
• Bloggers "are the new media darlings," and — shockingly — many hope to get paid gigs with traditional media. [Newsday]
• More breaking insights: An attractive grad student who is raped and murdered makes for great tabloid fodder. [Baltimore Sun]
• No Hachette mags were among the Ellie finalists. Again. [WWD]

On last night's O'Reilly Factor, your basic cable destination for reasoned debate about hot-button issues in Hollywood, Bill O'Reilly invited famously closeted actor Tab Hunter and onetime onscreen homosexual Harry Hamlin to discuss the industry's post-Brokeback climate. Hamlin explained how he believes his choice to play gay in Making Love crippled his movie burgeoning movie career:

• Remember how Ad Age told us last week that when the biannual circ numbers came out they'd show the celeb weeklies way up and O, The Oprah Magazine way down? Well, they came out, and they did. [NYT]
• Designer working on WSJ overhaul is urging the paper to consider more fashion and celeb coverage. Dow Jones execs can't wait to catch the celeb-mags circ mojo — and we can't wait for the stipple portrait of Jessica Simpson. [St. Pete Times]
• Nick Kristof raises $727K to send Bill O'Reilly to Darfur. It's amazing how much money you can raise when people will never actually have to fork it over. [E&P]

Here's part of an O'Reilly Factor transcript:

• Fighting back against Fox News, whose ratings dwarf CNN's, Jon Klein savors small victories. Which makes sense, because there ain't been a whole lot of big ones. [NYT]
• Conde Nast is running out of ad inventory. [WWD]
• Nick Kristof manages the delicate trick of making Jack Shafer feel a little bit bad for Bill O'Reilly. [Slate]
• Icahn and Wasserstein's TW plans don't don't help thing. [NYT]

We like it when our op-edsters climb down from their inky pedestals and mix things up a bit. Which is why it's always a happy day at Gawker HQ when Nick Kristof decides to spend his 750 words taunting Bill O'Reilly about the Fox News blowhard's unwilling to bloviate about real problems instead of imagined ones. Kristof wants O'Reilly to travel to Darfur with him, and today's trash-talking is even more fun that the usual:

• CBS News chief Sean McManus won't say that Katie's his dream anchor, but he does say that the next anchor will be named within a year, will be a solo anchor, will not come from within CBS, will be a known persona, and will have covered a lot of big stories at a network. Later, he added that the new anchor, while not necessarily Katie, will be female, perky, and willing to undergo an on-air colonoscopy. [NYT]
• Why are guests willing to go on O'Reilly? Masochism, clearly. [Boston Phoenix]
• Huh. Turns out James Brady has done a whole hell of a lot more than just those inane celebrity interviews in Parade. We had no idea. Cool. [Forbes]
• In the latest twist of the ever-amused saga of The Source, the board fires co-founders Dave Mays and Benzino. [NYP]
• OK! encourages its staffers to go on all-expense-paid junkets. Shit, now we kind of want to work there. [WWD]
• New chief at Time4 Media. [NYP]

• James Risen's State of War — the impending publication of which forced the Times to finally publish the domestic-spying story — also makes Judy Miller's WMD excuses fall apart. [NYO]
• Still, the domestic-spying articles were better than the book is, says Jack Shafer. [Slate]
• Lunatic talking head Bill O'Reilly promises to "get into the lives" of Bill Keller and Frank Rich if (perhaps imagined) Times attacks on him continue. We really hope he does, because Keller would be so much sexier if he were a little less earnest. [Media Matters]
• Yesterday was CBS's first day as its own company. Well, except for all those all days as its own company. [WP]
• New Oxygen show features middle-aged women partying with college guys. We're pretty sure we saw that same show on Cinemax once. [NYT]
• Not-quite-victorious — but still really good — GMA staffers get cheesy commemorative trinkets. [NYO]
• Jon Friedman is clearly smoking crack, as proved by (among other things) his prediction that MSNBC will beat CNN and Fox News in 2006. [MW]
• Latest Q-ratings study shows Katie Couric isn't as popular as she used to be. Clearly not in the polling sample: Les Moonves. [WWD]

Dave Letterman was in fine form last night, as he adorably served a spanking to Fox News shoutytwat Bill O'Reilly:

• Those News Corp kids sure do know how to throw an incredibly odd Christmas party. Weirdness aside, things were moments of normalcy: after the picture at right was taken, she ended up in the broom closet with dude dressed like a giant beaver-like thing.
• It was inevitable, really, that LIRR tickets ended up on eBay. Go ahead and collect your little piece of hell! [eBay]
• In the meantime, the TWU and MTA mediators are kinda passing notes back and forth, but it might not last long if the authorities jail union folk. [Gothamist]
• Tomorrow at 12:30, you should probably go meet this freak on a corner and sumo wrestle him. [Craigslist]
• The world's best Christmas list always starts with a request for one-night stands who appear with perfect boners. [NYO]
• How to kill yourself like a man. [The Best Page in the World]
• Maybe we missed something, but how, why and when the hell did the New Yorker make Bill O'Reilly's blacklist? [BillOReilly.com]
• Why Jews secretly love Christmas. [Pdhyman]
• We always knew Oprah was to blame for America's reading crisis. Bitch. [n+1]
• Pac-Manhattan hits the University of Michigan, becomes just reality Pac-Man. So that means this stuff takes approximately two years to trickle towards the Great Lakes. [Boing Boing]
• If you win a prize involving financial support from evil realtor Barbara Corcoran, is it really winning at all? [GMA]

• Murdoch, Newhouse, Philbin, and friends: Meet the city's media Power Geezers. [NYO]
• CBS wants Katie so badly that they're offering her a pay cut. [NYP]
• Food and the City: HBO buys rights to Ruth Reichl's memoirs for a new memoir. [WWD]
• A new front in the War on Christmas: Plano, Texas, where the school district bans kids from wearing red and green, according to Defender of the Faith O'Reilly. Except for one thing: It's not true. [Dallas Morning News]
• LAT to shutter national edition, ending its print presence in Washington and New York. Yeah, we're as surprised as you are to discover it had a print presence in New York. [NYT]

• In a fit anger, Britney Spears has booted husband Kevin Federline out of their lovenest and into the Beverly Hills Hotel. Good for K-Fed: we're sure Spears is footing the bill. [R&M]
• On their way home from a Thanksgiving weekend spent at a Scottsdale, Arizona spa, Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn are pulled over; the cop smelled a hint of booze and advised Vaughn not to continue driving. And then, because they were white and famous, they were let go. [IMDb]
• Actor George Clooney won't finish his post 9/11 catfight with Fox News screamer Bill O'Reilly, but he'll certainly mention it at any opportunity if it helps promote his new movie. [Page Six]
• Martha Stewart's daughter Alexis experimented with lesbianism, but the bois she dated just didn't know how to bake. [R&M (2nd item)]
• Whoopi Goldberg and Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex? Yeah, we're stumped. [Lowdown]

The suffocating demands of fame, it seems, have taken a terrible toll on Fox News' favorite son, Bill O'Reilly. In fact, he's so psychically drained by the constant scrutiny that comes with being among the world's most recognizable "big personalities" (coughassholecoughcough) that he's even starting to identify with—-no, it's too horrible to say! Just read it yourself:

You have no idea how hard it is to be a Fox News asshole. Thankfully, Newsday's Verne Gay shines a light on these oppressed people today, giving us an opportunity to learn just how difficult life is for a hate-spewing, pompous multimillionaire blowhard like, say, Bill O'Reilly.