So Hillary's "leaked" internal polling numbers gave her an 11 point lead in Pennsylvania, and Obama publicly predicted he'd lose by 8-10 percentage points. TV talking heads decided she needed to win by "more than 10 points" to justify staying in the race. And Clinton ended up clobbering Obama with 9.2 percent victory! Then, oddly, everyone suddenly admitted that the entire Pennsylvania primary was an elaborate farce with no actual point.

In this clip, CNN picks up on Maxim's fake review of the Black Crowes album. But they fail to pick up any anchors who know anything about the Black Crowes. Instead, the anchors just spitball about the band's connection to the "grunge" movement, then, grasping at straws, congratulate them on lasting longer than Nirvana. Which does tend to happen when your lead singer hasn't committed suicide. Click to watch the fun! [Disclosure: We don't know anything about the Black Crowes either].

On Friday, Fox News boss Roger Ailes reminded employees in a memo that "there are no locks on the doors." Now the network has proven the point, by helping two find their way out. Eric Burns, the moderator of "Fox News Watch," the media critic roundtable show mandatory to all cable news networks, along with liberal panelist Neal Gabler, who was known for criticizing his employer, have both been let go. Gabler moaned about Fox's lack of promotion for the show, but the network called sour grapes. They did not, however, "wish him well." [NYT]. After the jump, classic footage of Burns&Co. discussing the Larry Craig scandal; sadly, you won't ever get to see this happen live.

The New York Times Co., News Corp, and Time Warner all saw their stocks fall to 52-week lows. The one winner amongst the pall? Lightly viewed upstart Fox Business Network, the only business channel politically incorrect enough to make staffers work on Martin Luther King Day, as Europe's stockmarkets careened. While, Bloomberg TV only had a brief live period Monday morning, and CNBC was on taped programming all day, Fox Biz was covering the crash live from the overseas markets. Dr. King did always believe in the redemptive power of work.

"We all have too many hours to fill and too little imagination to fill them creatively." [MSNBC's Tom Brokaw, the retired network anchor, one of the few TV presenters who didn't call the New Hampshire race for Barack Obama.]

This is either the strangest regional accent I've heard on cable news, or one of the best TV bloopers of the campaign. A CNN commentator, interviewed by Anderson Cooper, intended to predict that the nomination would be "hard-fought". It came out "a hard-fart nomination." The clip, after the jump. Wait till 00:31 into the video.

Today's puzzler: 24-hour cable news nets are more interested in missing white lady hiker and successful black guy candidate than crazy hospitalized pop starlet. ALSO it could snow at any second in California!

As you know, we've recently discovered some mixed emotions about our beloved Anderson. Now the Observer's TV queen, Rebecca Dana, reports that it seems the rest of the world has conflicted feelings on him, too. How so? Well, he's indisputably a star — VF coverboy, bestselling author, new 60 Minutes correspondent, Details columnist, Yale commencement speaker. But there's a catch: Turns out barely anyone is actually watching his TV show. Some numbers, as accumulated by Dana, after the jump.

• The news is still big; it's the newspapers that got small. [Slate]
• David Carr asks: Is CNN news or entertainment? What, it can't be both? [NYT]
• Pissing off Dick Cheney was not, in fact, the Times' reason for running its financial-records-spying story, says Bill Keller. [NYT]
• As we already told you, WWD media man Jeff Bercovici is going to Radar. WWD media woman Sara James, however, is not. She's leaving Women's Wear — we're sure of that — but it's just unclear where she's going. [Jossip]
• Roger Ailes thinks with Fox Newsies aren't working hard enough. [B&C]
• Wednesday will be Charlie Gibson's last day at GMA, and his feeling will be hurt if he doesn't get as many video tributes as Katie did. [USAT]
• Spiers steals David Lat from slutty sister Wonkette for her nascent juggernaut. Next time, she'll just twist Denton's nipple directly, without the intermediary. [WWD (second item)]
• Bigshot VCs give people like Rafat Ali — proprietor of the distressingly capitalized paidContent.org and, years ago, an intern where we used to work — money. [WSJ]

Remain mystified by Connie Chung's off-key, ill-choreographed, nonsensically lyric'ed song-and-dance routine bidding farewell to her avec-Maury MSNBC show? (Haven't seen it yet? Oh, go watch. You'll thank us.) In this morning's Times, media reporter Jacques Steinberg graciously explains. It was, as Connie insists, all just a joke. Oh really? Hmm. In this case, then, we fear Connie never learned what our father used to tell us were the first and second cardinal rules of humor: First, your joke must be funny. Second, other people must think it's funny. How we wish we'd been able to explain this to her last week.

As you may have heard, MSNBC president Rick Kaplan — the famously antagonistic former ABC and CNN executive, and a shockingly tall Jew — announced late yesterday that he's leaving the network after two and a half years, in which time he barely budged the news network's anemic ratings. His departure was widely expected, given MSNBC's performance on his watch, and it once and for all proves that, surprisingly, the way to rescue a cable network is not in fact to pick as one of your lead anchors a male-to-female tranny. Who knew?

A reliable pal passes along this bit of cable-news programming gossip:

Last week, a group of six New Yorkers were on a Caribbean vacation in St. Maarten. Two of them were brutally beaten — one, Dick Jefferson, a 51-year-old top producer at the CBS Evening News, is out of the hospital but now has a titanium plate in his head; the other, a 25-year-old researcher there, remains in intensive care with brain injuries. Why were they beaten? Because they're gay, and the attackers had earlier that night been thrown out of a bar for heckling Smith and his boyfriend, Justin Swenson. ABCNews.com did a thorough story earlier this week, which made an interesting point:

Crazy With a Z [fourfour]
Earlier: It's a Gay Gay Gay Gay World: Liza With a Z at the Ziegfeld

It is not pleasant to be idly flipping channels late at night and happen across Headline News, on which appears two seemingly identical Nancy Graces, both blondely staring back at you. Such wrath, you imagine; such anger, such concern for missing white women. Then you realize it could be worse: It could be MSNBC and two Rita Cosbys.

• 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]

• Come on, Pinch, you're breaking poor Tom Scocca's heart. [NYO]
• Was Bob Woodward the first reporter to learn of Valerie Plame's identity? And why didn't he mention that to anyone till now? [WP]
• Ah, but at least Ben Bradlee says it's OK Woodward didn't tell his nominal bosses. [E&P]
• Turns out Bush-crony public-broadcasting chief Kenneth Tomlinson — you know, the guy determined to get more conservatives on PBS — broke all sorts of laws and regulations. [NYT]
• Who's to blame for Arrested Development's (latest) demise. America, obviously. [NYO]
• Rupert: This internet thing is gonna be huge! [Hollywood Reporter]
• What reference in a headline will conclusively show that boomer media dominance is over? [Slate]
• MSNBC's Chris Matthews name-drops, and Jon Friedman loves him anyway. [MW]

Clearly we tuned into Fox News at the wrong time last night. We should have been watching Hannity & Colmes:

Let's say you're both politically interested and also a moderate alcoholic. And so, while of course you're interested in yesterday's election returns, you're also not interested enough to give up happy hour with some friends at the neighborhood bar. (It's an off year, you know who'll win NYC mayor, and certainly New Jersey and Virginia governors, while important races, aren't going to keep you home and sober.) So you go out for a while, and you get home at, say, around 10:15. At which point you turn on NY1 to confirm that Bloomberg has, of course, won. He has. And then you want to learn about the other two big contests, the two gubernatorial races, which, because they're on the other side of the Hudson, you don't expect Roma Torre to tell you about.