Christmas came early! Someone sent us a scandalous, original blind item just now. And, of course, we'd like to share it with you. After the jump read a tale of gossip and infidelity.

Hey, good for John King. The blue-eyed, silver-haired CNN guy who isn't Anderson Cooper, and who is famous for manipulating a giant iPhone to display election results, will get a four-hour Sunday show on CNN. Jon Klein calls him "the best political reporter of his generation," even though John King honestly just manipulates a giant fucking iPhone and talks about demographics. Media "critic" Howard Kurtz's "Reliable Source" show will be a part of this new show, as well, and we'll continue not watching CNN, because honestly it's worse than Fox, in its own way. [CNN]

Keith Olbermann, MSNBC's loudest, angriest, not-votingest, network-controllingest personality, just signed a sweet new deal. It's a four-year extension of his Countdown show, with two NBC specials and occasional nightly news "essays." It's also worth $30 million! Good work Keith! It was bound to happen, as MSNBC's ratings were way up this election cycle, and Olbermann's show is now a vital part of the network's brand. But it was also brilliant of Olbermann to get the deal now, because there's a good chance he's peaked. Keith Olbermann became the voice of Bush's second term. After eking out a narrow victory and calling it a mandate, the President really outdid himself. The war went to hell, the lies that got us into the war were further aired out, the details of his various unconstitutional surveillance programs came to light, the ideological disdain for effective governance and the bubble of true believers led to the Katrina disaster, and America basically got a serious case of buyers' remorse. One guy on TV sounded as perpetually pissed off and outraged as you did, from 2003 onward: Keith Olbermann! His newfound glee at casting moral judgment on the mendacity of the lunatics in charge was, you know, refreshing after a couple years of the newsmedia wandering in the post-9/11 desert of breathless Bush-worship. Everyone felt kinda bad for selling that stupid and pointless war, but no one quite wanted to be the first to go whole-hog anti-authority. But Olbermann's voice of the opposition was the best thing on TV, leading right up to the 2006 midterms, when America first wholly rejected the Republican party. But now we've just had an election about Hope and Change, and the new guy in charge is not a fire-breathing pissed-off Howard Dean, but a calm and cool unifier promising to bring dispassionate rationality back to the White House. Meanwhile at MSNBC, Olbermann's charming protege is a Rhodes Scholar who's specifically pledged never to have more than one guest on at a time, because shouting and argument and cross-talk don't actually advance the discussion. Rachel Maddow's ratings are phenomenal, and every month there's a new fawning profile of her showcasing how... normal (and nice!) she is. If Olbermann was the voice of the opposition, Maddow is the voice of the new liberals in charge. It won't necessarily diminish Olbermann's popularity and influence (or even his ratings), but he's not on top of the zeitgeist anymore. Let's pray for a great 2012 race to get him across that next contract renegotiation hump. Gingrich/Palin '12!

Boy, CNN's election-night magic hologram technology was a hit! And all for the low, low price of $300,000 to $400,000. Money is no object in these times of plenty! Today, CNN boy wonder Anderson Cooper learns how the magic was made—and then is treated to the amazing sight of his colleague Erica Hill disappearing with a snap of her fingers! Too bad CNN moved AC's laptop in the jump cut, or it would have really looked convincing. Click to watch the poor trickery of cable news in action.

Oh no, Keith Olbermann, The Left's Old Favorite Cable Person, is attacking Campbell Brown, The Lady Who Yelled At Tucker Bounds! They share a timeslot on competing networks so it was certain to happen. Clip below. Campbell is a fine interviewer who does admirably call bullshit when she hears it, but her show's self-congratulatory "keeping them honest" segments still invariably boil down to "both sides stretching the truth, as usual, what are you gonna go?" meaninglessness. And hey, she got some history wrong! In attempting to explain why a single party controlling the legislature and the White House is bad, a terribly annoying bugaboo repeated only by media people and minority parties and not so feared by voters who vote for single party rule, Campbell explained that the last time this happened was in the 1970s, with Jimmy Carter. Hah. That's not true! Nor was it in the 90s, with Bill Clinton. It was, as Keith explains, in the 2000s, with the current President, Mr. Bush. Keith doesn't explain that Campbell's point about all of those situations being disasters is actually borne out by the evidence, but whatever. Unified Democratic government also brought us Vietnam and Civil Rights, for those keeping score at home. Mixed bag, right? Click to view

Allow me to construct a sports metaphor (UPDATE: Which I see the NYT also used in its lead sentence, DAMMIT. Oh well, forge ahead) that would sound stale to serious sports fans, but which I believe will sound fresh and insightful here, where we have only seven (7) total sports fan readers: Fox News is the New York Yankees. MSNBC is the Tampa Bay Rays. The Yankees throw huge contracts at aging veteran superstars, trading away their young players for big-name talent that tends to quickly prove to be over-the-hill. Tampa Bay had a string of bad years but stuck to its strategy of focusing on affordable young talent, nurturing them, and building from within. Now, Tampa Bay is in the World Series. The Yankees are sitting at home. My, this metaphor just gets more and more awesome: Fox just signed Bill O'Reilly, the most predictable shouting head on television, to a new four-year, $40 million contract. They just "lured" Glenn Beck from CNN (if you consider him a man who needs "luring") with a multimillion-dollar contract. Other Fox News names like Shep Smith and Sean Hannity get paid huge salaries to stay on. Meanwhile, MSNBC's new star Rachel Maddow came out of nowhere, in cable news terms. She was with Air America not too long ago, for fuck's sake, which is definitely the minor leagues. MSNBC took a chance on her, got her on air, saw how well she did, and then took the leap to giving her her own show. Which has paid off. The best part? They are probably paying her—in cable news terms, again—peanuts. Where are Fox News' Maddows? Where is the young talent that they nurture and build into a star while still paying them the wages of a rookie? These things are important. The economy is shit, advertising revenue is dicey, and homegrown stars are the wave of the future. I'm taking bets on Tampa Bay. Get at me, O'Reilly.

So when you watch the debates, do you stick around for the analysts and pundits afterwards? Do you find out how Chris Matthews and David Gergen and Larry King felt? Do you need to find out what the conventional wisdom is before you go to bed? Figure out the narrative, find out who "won" in the eyes of the newsmedia? You don't need to bother anymore. All three debates this year have followed the exact same script: the expectations set by the campaigns are self-contradictory and confused, the debates seem boring and repetitive, and following each one pundits agree that John McCain won "on points," whatever that means. Then the snap polls come in! Last night, Andrea Mitchell tentatively tried to claim, once again, that McCain won "on points," everyone agreed that McCain was feistier and got better zingers in, everyone fixated on the "I'm not George Bush" line as the best of the debates, Joe the Plumber was supposed to be the story of the day, and overall everyone wanted a narrative shift to a McCain comeback, because that's a better story. But the voters didn't care. CBS undecideds: Obama 53, McCain 22. CNN poll: Obama 58, McCain 31. MediaCurves independents: Obama 60, McCain 30. John King tried to explain away his own poll's bias toward Democrats even as the independents they polled when for Obama by 26 points. This is bad news for pundits! Because one very important role a pundit is supposed to play is recognizing and explaining the mood of the nation. They are supposed to predict, based on their experience and wisdom, what voters want to hear and what they will respond to. And this season, they've been dead fucking wrong, over and over again. But more importantly, the numbers are proving them wrong objectively, and they're forced to correct themselves immediately. In previous election cycles, the numbers could say it was a narrow Gore victory or statistical tie, but the punditry could shift those numbers over a weekend through relentless repetition of the narrative they invented, making it a lopsided Bush gain by Monday. It's much, much harder for Maureen Dowd to control—or even reflect—the "narrative" of the campaign now, because the internet makes all the raw data available and everyone has access to it. We never intend to write a "hooray the internet is correcting and democratizing the MSM" piece but in this instance it does seem to be a useful corrective to the tendency of people like Chris Matthews to mistake their own fevered imaginations for the mood of a nation.

Newly ascendant MSNBC host Rachel Maddow's show actually beat shouty colleague Keith Olbermann's in the ratings on Tuesday night, 1.8 million viewers to 1.64 million. This proves that our earlier prediction of her success was totally correct, and also that America's love affair with lesbians just keeps getting hotter. After the jump, a clip of Maddow interviewing Bill Maher on her hit show Tuesday:

So MSNBC going back to more "traditional" election coverage? Looks like that David Gregory ascendancy everyone predicted back before the Rachel Maddow ascendancy is finally happening! All because Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams are embarrassed by those loud shouty people and Jeff Zucker's in serious trouble with the rest of the Illuminati. Well it's a stupid, stupid idea, for many reasons. Reasons which we'll explain below.

There are only two explanations for the sieg-heiling image of Sarah Palin that appeared briefly on CNN's website earlier this morning: a mischievous web producer thought to make a connection by photo selection between the Republican vice-presidential nominee and right-wing rabble-rousers of an earlier era; or he or she was so entirely clueless as to miss the allusion. Either way, the choice of image was clearly an embarrassment to a cable news channel which is already under attack from the McCain campaign for aggressive questioning and perceived bias. The front page of CNN.com was changed within minutes; but not before one of our tipsters grabbed a screenshot.

Well, duh to this: MSNBC wants to give their beloved new anchorlady and coiner of the term "post-rational" Rachel Maddow a makeover. (Click through to see Gawker's Steven Dressler imagine the results.) Who doesn't want to give Rachel Maddow a makeover? Rachel Maddow is Every Girl's Best Friend Said Girl Would Love Just .01% More If Said Friend Would Layer Her Hair And Buy A Lipstick Already. I am that friend to a lot of people! Plus there is a storied tradition of anchorwomen celebrating their new jobs with makeovers. Greta Van Susteren got an eye job when she went to Fox, and I heard once that former Wall Street Journal reporter Becky Quick got carded at R-rated movies before she started appearing on CNBC every day in 2000. Oh, but she is a dyke icon you are telling me?So what, she has to be the female Cojo or something? Last I checked dyke icons were still allowed to have haircuts I coveted. And of course Page Six is all over MSNBC for allegedly putting its "glam squad" on Maddow. The hypocrites! But Rachel Maddow, an ex-landscaper a few years fresh from a long career in left-wing activism, has spent her whole entire life not using her irresistible sexuality and expertly applied smoky eye to advance the media ranks. Maybe she wouldn't mind a little glam squad in her life just this one time. Maybe it could be kind of fun. So Rach, and I say this as an avowed enemy of the insecurity industry: fuck the haters, as long as they are paying you to take the day off and enjoy a little microdermabrasion, seize the opportunity. It is good for the economy I hear.

Here's Lou Dobbs, CNN immigrant-hater, complaining about how the entirety of the press—besides him!—is totally, completely in bed with Barack Obama. He's right, of course. Except that the media attention is so self-defeating, twisted, and unhelpful that it's facile to paint it as a neat little example of liberal bias. Also what the hell is he still doing on CNN? Everyone else on the network seems embarrassed to be associated with him. Him and Jack Cafferty should have a show together. A Broadway show! Because then we would never see it.

Breakfast shows can fail if the anchors don't have compatible chemistry. But the on-air flirtation can go too far. Case in point: Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC. The former Republican congressman-now reinvented as a liberal darling of cable news-hosts a show called Morning Joe with Brzezinski, daughter of Jimmy Carter's cold-war national security advisor. As this clip shows, Scarborough and Brzezinski-both married, Scarborough for the second time-have an exceedingly warm relationship; they'd better tone it down a bit because their on-air antics have convinced MSNBC grunts the two are pursuing an off-camera affair.

It's a pattern if not a rule in politics: the more populist the politician, the more lavish the personal lifestyle. John Edwards-son of a millworker and champion of the other, forgotten America-has the most valuable home in the North Carolina county in which he lives. Since cable news has become an extension of politics, it should be no surprise that a news anchor can maintain a double life. CNN's puffy-faced Poujadist, Lou Dobbs, saved his TV career by channeling the anger of America's redundant middle-aged white men. And yet Idaho-bred Dobbs' lavish home outside New York qualifies him as a member of the overclass against which he rails. It's one thing to wade through the property documents; but here are satellite photographs which show the driveway leading up to Dobbs' country house on Wantage's Quarry Road, the swimming pool and tennis court, and the vast hatched lawn that surrounds the compound. The image isn't detailed enough to show the cars in the driveway, but it's safe to assume that one of them is Dobbs' un-American Aston Martin.

The Anderson Cooper rumor mill most recently had the flirty CNN anchor dating an assistant to Barry Diller beard Diane Von Furstenberg in the wake of a breakup from 22-year-old JD Ordonez, a marine mammal trainer in California. Now we're told the silver-haired newsman is trying to settle down, albeit with a 24-ish guy, even as he trots the globe to film his upcoming Planet In Peril special. A tipster heard from the supposed boyfriend's associates that Cooper asked him to move in and that the boyfriend accepted. Is this boyfriend one and the same as Von Furstenberg's assistant? Who knows? (No, really — who knows?) The less friendly gossip is after the jump.

Hold for a second the vitriol that Roger Ailes usually inspires. The Fox News boss is worth watching-not so much for his abuse-inviting impersonation of a corpulent former Nixonite but as a financial indicator of a market top. The cable news network Ailes started for Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch-though a remarkable ratings success-marked the high-water-mark of the Republican ascendancy. A month after the launch of Fox News in October 1996, Bill Clinton came back from the political dead and ascendant Congressional Republicans under Newt Gingrich suffered their first big reverse. So is there an Ailes jinx? Well, take a look at the stock market. Ailes' Fox Business News was supposed to be a news channel with less of the gloom and doom of competitors such as CNBC. Since the start of broadcasting in October last year-right at the peak of the market-the S&P stockmarket index is down more than 15% (click to enlarge graph). If Ailes threatens to launch any new channels, sell!

Jo Piazza of the New York Daily News ran a snippet over the weekend about the relationship between one of Diane von Furstenberg's male assistants and "a very-high-profile, still-kind-of-in-the-closet male broadcaster." That's not much of a blind item: the TV personality pretty much has to be CNN's Anderson Cooper.

Arianna Huffington has reportedly been BANISHED by NBC news—including MSNBC!—because her new book savagely criticizes NBC political honcho Tim Russert. Keith Kelly reports: "Sources said that Huffington was at a dinner in the home of Barbara Walters on Tuesday night when she heard that word had come down from on high that she no longer appear on NBC or MSNBC, where talk show hosts Keith Olbermann, Joe Scarborough and Dan Abrams were all interested in booking her." NBC's Phil Griffin claims to not know anything about it. We'd argue Arianna was just playing up a rumor she heard to publicize her book, but Griffin adds: "I know some people have issues with her as a guest, but it has nothing to do with the book." Say what you will about Arianna, but she's generally a great guest. So we'll take that as a confirmation. Arianna used to appear on Olbermann's and Dan Abrhams' shows fairly regularly, but her media schedule shows no forthcoming appearances. [NYP]

Richard Quest, the flamboyant CNN presenter found by New York police in Central Park with crystal meth in his pocket, is to go into rehab for treatment of his drug habit, says the cable news network. This is by now the default escape route for disgraced TV personalities: they disappear from view, while appealing to the public's sympathy, a technique recently demonstrated by drunk-dialing host of The Insider, Pat O'Brien-twice. Quest also had rope around his genitals and a dildo in his boot, when stopped, making him not just a meth-head but a walking gay cliché.(Previously: watch Quest show off his rope tricks in a clip that foreshadowed his late-night embarrassment.)

Doesn't anyone wear flag pins anymore? HuffPo's Rachel Sklar, who carries an actual maple leaf pinned to a beaver pelt with her at all times, pitted the cable news network talking heads against each other in a brutal MS Paint collage battle, and discovered that while people get all up-in-arms about Barack Obama not wearing his little American flag pin, no one else does anymore either. Except Brit Hume, Neil Cavuto, Karl Rove, and Lou Dobbs. The last defenders of patriotism! Everyone else in America is too bitter.