♦ Rupert Murdoch says he has no plans to buy the New York Times. He also wants you to know that Fox News chief Roger Ailes is staying put: "He's not going anywhere. He's very happy. I'm very happy with him. We're good friends and we get on well" [SAI]
♦ Katie Couric's interview with Sarah Palin is official. [AP]
♦ A day in the life of Brian Williams and Erin Burnett, courtesy of the Observer's Meredith Bryan. [NYO]
♦ Newark's Star-Ledger may go under. [NYP]
♦ Consumers don't actually want to surf the web, talk on their cell phones, read a newspaper, and watch TV all at the same time. [AdAge]
♦ The New York Times will begin providing business commentary from Breakingviews.com. [NYT]
♦ Ariel Foxman is the new managing editor of InStyle. [Gawker]
♦ Ratings for the fifth season premiere of House were down from last year's debut, but Fox still managed to beat the competition last night. [TV Decoder]
♦ Craziest idea ever: Steve Irwin's 4-year-old son Bob wants his own wildlife TV show. [NYP]

If you were Rupert Murdoch's niece, you'd probably keep it under wraps too. Anna Torv, the Vera Farmiga-esque star of J.J. Abrams' new X-Files rip-off sequel homage? inspired show Fringe, is the Australian media mogul's (and wicked conservative world manipulator who owns the television network she's on) niece by marriage. But she's not too fond of the connection. "I hate that that even comes up," she told an inquiring mind. "I've been estranged from my father since I was eight." Her father being the brother of Murdoch's ex-wife, also named Anna Torv. Hah. Murdoch and Torv's divorce was pretty nasty, so her being cast was probably not a case of nepotism. Just sheer weird coincidence (like on the show!). You have to wonder what the Fox Labor Day picnic was like. "Ello there, how's the potato salad?" "Good. It's... good." I also wonder if she ever wakes with a start in the middle of the night with the sensation of having cold hands around her neck, a low rumble and the faint hum of a didgeridoo lilting in from somewhere past the bedroom door.

• The premiere of Saturday Night Live with Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin and Michael Phelps as guest host generated the show's best season debut since 2001. [THR]

Ok. A couple things to note here. The Fox and Friends morning crew are actually stupider than the stupidest people currently participating in the national discourse, because they don't understand the basic tenets of Biblical Literalism or creationism (or they're just pretending not to). But more importantly: the guy who isn't Steve Doocy totally referenced Fox mascot Bill O'Reilly's famous meltdown, on Fox, and cracked everyone up. It's... weird. This show creeps us out, even when it is "funny."

Shutdown Fever! Hot on the heels of 24 stopping production to work out script issues, Joss Whedon's upcoming Eliza Dushku vehicle Dollhouse is grinding to its own quality-mandated halt. Already, Whedon was instructed by a tinkering Fox to shoot a second pilot (the original will air as Dollhouse's second episode), and the additional order left him too busy to bring future scripts up to snuff. Currently on its third completed episode, Dollhouse sets will go dark for two weeks while Whedon works out the kinks, though Fox claims its midseason debut won't be affected. Firefly fans, commence your worrying. [Zap2It]

Can't a network game show gather muscular, waxed contestants together anymore without one of them having a notorious gay porn past? Hot on the heels of the American Gladiator who was revealed to be more familiar with the joust than originally thought, Fox's bizarre new game show Hole in the Wall premiered on Sunday with a face that should be familiar to customers of the gay porn website Sean Cody. Dubbed "Ajay" during his stint in the skin trade, Hole introduced him as Aaron Savvy, member of the Six Pack team. Then, after being asked, "Are you ready to face the hole?" Savvy and his personal trainer teammate had to navigate advancing walls with perilous shapes cut in them, forcing the duo to assume positions not put into use since "Ajay & Spence Flip-Flop." Does Savvy make it into the holes intact? Let's just say he has better luck at his day job. [After Elton]

We'd be lying if we told you we watched Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles with any regularity. But after being made aware of this clip from last night's show, in which Garbage lead-singer Shirley Manson morphs from a men's urinal into an old-school, T-1000 liquid Terminator, we think we might have to start tuning in. They've actually turned the beloved singer of "Queer" and "Stupid Girl" into a killer-robot urine receptacle, who can extinguish any full-bladdered obstacles in her mission to destroy teenage John Connor with one extension of her built-in fingercicle feature. That's bad ass! [Terminator]

At this point, 24's seventh season has been hit with more obstacles than the beleaguered Jack Bauer — so what's one more? After suffering through a WGA strike, a one-year delay, and a stint in jail for lead Kiefer Sutherland, the Fox drama is once again shutting down production, says EW. Producer Howard Gordon tells the mag that he was unhappy with the scripts for hours 19-24, so the show will power down until writers can start from scratch. Still, thanks to the eight episodes banked before the strike, producers don't expect the season premiere to be delayed any further — which is more than can be said for the Lifetime debut of Project Runway, now pushed back to January 2009. Originally slotted for this fall, where it would have followed quickly on the heels of its Bravo swan song, producers couldn't make the abbreviated schedule work. The delay lends Lifetime the extra time it will need to craft an all-important needlepoint challenge and secure the participation of "fashion legend" Meredith Baxter Birney as final judge at NY Fashion Week. [EW]

The more we learn about the true extent of Seth MacFarlane's empire, the more we become quietly frightened. MacFarlane, the 34-year-old creator of Family Guy, is just about to roll out his huge new online cartoon series in partnership with Google, which will reap him just a disgusting amount of money from sponsors like Burger King. And yes, Family Guy is well on its way to becoming the Simpsons of a new generation. Sorry, haters:

Brit Hume is exhausted. The flinty Fox anchor has always seemed short-fused and quietly seething (right?) but covering campaign '08 has drained all the joy out of his life. (As have the tensions in his marriage and his fling with Megyn Kendall?) A profile by useless Washington Post media something Howard Kurtz finds the original face of Fair and Balanced Fox openly disgusted with the empty gimmicks of the Republican National Convention: "Baby pictures of John McCain? What in the world are they doing? Oh, this is just atrocious." And: "I'm 65, for God's sake. I don't want to do all that stuff anymore." And "It's dispiriting. This is just partisan poison, and after a while you get tired of covering it." Jesus, he sounds like us. Remember when Fox was the terrifying propaganda organ of a far-right cult of personality? Now it's just the sad official network of embittered, impotent, cranky old white men. (In the event of a McCain victory, of course, it will become both.) [WP]

I love that asshole Gordon Ramsay. He combines all the best qualities we seek in television chefs: cooking skills, abusive language, a foreign accent. As well as the occasional tender moment! Kitchen Nightmares, the show where Ramsay travels to nice, homely restaurants in the New York area and berates their owners to distraction before showering them with thousands of dollars worth of new kitchen equipment, is coming back to Fox tomorrow night. And not a moment too soon—with the Republican convention wrapping up, where else will America turn for our televised dose of a blond man with an ill-concealed temper demanding that foreigners accept his help or be destroyed? See the parallels there, zing? Yes. Watch the trailer after the jump; the cockroaches represent Islamofascism:

Beyonce Knowles' sister, singer Solange Knowles, went on a local Fox affiliate the other day to promote her album-only after her publicist made it clear that the young diva was NOT to be questioned about her brother-in-law Jay-Z or the failure of his 40/40 Club in Las Vegas. And since it was a harmless fluff piece to fill airtime, the interviewer agreed and didn't mention a thing about it. Sadly, Solange apparently heard some studio chatter while she was being introduced, mistakenly assumed that it was being broadcast, and proceeded to pick a fight. The embarrassing footage ensues.

There was a time when the aesthetic of the Japanese game show was thought to be too bizarre to translate to America, but the times, they are a-changin'. Hot on the heels of the summer hit Wipeout comes Hole in the Wall, a Fox remake of the Japanese show in which contestants contort their bodies to pass through a strangely-shaped hole in an advancing wall, lest they be knocked backwards into a pool. Sound simple? It is — gleefully so, as you'll see from the clip (after the jump). We could have used some more J-pop songs or cute, lightning-spouting rat/dogs watching from the sidelines, but otherwise, we think we've found the crown jewel of the fall lineup. It's bold for Hole in the Wall to premiere on the anniversary of September 11, but if this show can't heal America's wounds, what can?

Cable news is a hyper-competitive environment full of huge egos fighting with each other for every scrap of a ratings point. And at this time of year, with all the shouting heads descending upon the political convention like a gang of ferrets into a small sack, conflict is inevitable. Plus it's hot, and there's not too much real news anyhow, so everyone is grumpy. After the jump, an illustrated guide to the most vicious feuds in the cable world. Pick your side, demonize your enemies, and play along:

We are pretty sure this is a photoshop. But who knows because it just appeared out of the blue on a Tumblog today, without attribution or sourcing. Maybe crazy Rex is right about this [via] business! It's been tracked back to this demotivational poster, making it already an altered image, though it was presented without that crucial bit of information when it first set down on a the microblogging corner of the internet today, whereupon it was emailed and IM'd to your editors like three times in ten minutes. Now it's been reblogged on god knows how many other Tumbling Logs! So let's play Snopes: find us a clip, guys, because this looks like bullshit. If it's not on MediaMatters it didn't happen. We did crack up last night when the Fox graphics said "ALERT: MRS OBAMA: I LOVE AMERICA" though, among other statements that look hilarious when preceded by "ALERT."

Newsflash! The producers of Karaoke Borg American Idol have done the unthinkable: They have decided to tinker with the magical Idol judging formula America has come to rely on. In addition to the Really Bitchy One, the Inarticulate Gang-Sign-Delivering One, and the Alternately Effusive, Incoherent, and Flat-Out-Unconscious One, we can now look forward to the Non-Jaded Songwriter Who Doesn't Spend Most of the Auditions Fantasizing About Traceless Ways To Snuff Ryan Seacrest Out of Existence One. Let's let the Fox press release explain!

Hah. So CNN rearranged its national bureaus, leaving fewer reporters in their main bureaus and shipping staffers off to smaller cities to, ostensibly, provide more coverage of more cities at a lower cost. Many former Chicago reporters now find themselves reporting full-time from terrible places like Columbus and Minneapolis. So, according to Fox News, that means CNN HATES CHICAGO. They took out a totally fair and balanced full-page ad in the Chicago Tribune about this! News Corp properties are always so IN YOUR FACE about their competitors, right? How far are we from the Wall Street Journal hiring someone to climb the Times building and unfurl a banner that says, like, "Pinch Sulzberger's a Pussy"? [TVNewser]

It's time for the Democratic National Convention in lovely, boring Denver! Are you psyched? Journalists are! Because they're going to be drunk for a week, thousands of miles from home! Just two of the many venues in which hardworking journalists will be getting their drink on the over the next few days are the bars taken over by the cable news networks. Fox's hip FOX Experience and the down-home CNN Grill. Which one looks more like the worst possible place you could ever get drunk? Let's see!

If there's one important lesson that can be drawn from the blockbuster performance of Warner Bros.' The Dark Knight, it's that audiences aren't afraid of a comic-book movie that takes a walk on the dark, grim side. However, the same can't necessarily be said for Fox topper Tom Rothman (the bane of AICN) who greenlit two Fantastic Four movies, hired Brett Ratner to direct X3, and now is allegedly mucking with the X-Men spinoff Wolverine. Despite the fact that the gritty, Hugh Jackman-topped film was met with a giddy response at this year's Comic-Con, Jeff Wells says that Rothman is pressuring director Gavin Hood to make the movie more kid-friendly — and when Hood won't cave, Rothman is taking matters into his own hands:

• Hachette is shuttering Home magazine. [Mediaweek]