"Because of a production error, a passage from this correction was merged in some editions on Tuesday with an International correction, above, about the Moscow Journal." [Times]

For all the bloodletting on Wall Street, the financial services meltdown will probably mean handsome profits for at least some finance hacks. The troubles have to actually end before anyone has a shot at writing a popular book about them, but smart writers and publishers are already hunting. Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Times and Roger Lowenstein of the Wall Street Journal are "considering" writing books, according to the Observer, while Newsweek's Daniel Gross is raring to go with a quickie electronic title he's ready to finish in two months flat. The most leveraged proposal (if you will) comes from Bethany "Enron" McLean of Fortune and Times columnist Joe Nocera, who basically drank until they worked up the nerve to demand a million bucks for their definitive insights:

This really weird ad decrying "The New Communism" ran on A17 of the Times today. It was paid for by some plutocrat in Houston named Bill Perkins who supports Obama. I think it advances my general contention that some of the fiercest critics of the Washington-Wall Street complex are actually beneficiaries of that whole scam, because Perkins's firm Crystal Energy LLC would appear to be precisely the sort of outfit to which God instructed Sarah Palin to fast-track lucrative contracts decimating the environment in pursuit of cheap energy.But I don't actually know because today's Senate hearing cut his CNBC interview down to about one and a half seconds. In any case, I hope the Times still has a Houston rep who can take this guy out to dinner. Who knows, maybe he can rustle up some other likeminded rich guys with money they'd be wiling to give newspapers now that capitalism as we know it has been suspended.

What does it take to get American editorial pages honest-to-God riled up about something? In addition to the expected criticism from the left, Hank Paulson's $700 billion bank bailout has been savaged by no less a conservative than Newt Gingrich, who wrote, "we’re using the taxpayers’ money to hire people to save their friends with even more taxpayer money." Among the more strenuous Congressional opponents is the Republican senator from Alabama who chairs the Senate banking committee and said he worries the bailout "is neither workable nor comprehensive despite its enormous price tag." The Monday plunge in the dollar and U.S. stocks was widely seen as rendering judgement on the cost and effectiveness of the plan, unveiled over the weekend. And yet, save for some quibbling about oversight, the Times' Tuesday editorial on the matter treats the bailout as a given:

Robert Fisk is a legendary Middle East reporter for The Independent and has been called "the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain." But he has that unfortunate angry-old-man attitude about the internet. At a recent lecture, "He recalled being challenged about a quote of his that had been published on a website - although he had never said it. 'But I read it on the internet,' was the response, to which Mr Fisk simply hung up." Reasonable! But what would you expect from a guy who has an entire method of online rhetorical smacking-down named after him?

Last week Nick hated on the media for being too alarmist in its coverage of the collapse of Wall Street; Ryan pointed out this morning that the problem is that they weren't alarmist enough. So we ran the numbers: with some blips the media has been dropping the R-bomb as well as the D-bomb pretty steadily since the CDO market first started dropping off, with a dramatic uptick around the Bear Stearns bailout. Could the problem be that no one fucking listens to the media? And that is a damn shame, because despite the necessary myopia with which it covers a beast whose single most deleterious attribute is its inherent myopia it will occasionally offer up such gems as:

The collapse of capitalism is actually too damn overwhelming for most journalists — much less their readers — to grasp. So how to approach? With a tried-and-true socio-anthropological take on What It Really Means In America As Told To Some Narrow Niche Of Society. Let's start with strippers!

In July, when Richard Fuld was blaming rumormongers and short-sellers for troubles as Lehman Brothers, the Times ran a column by finance writer Andrew Ross Sorkin echoing his complaints and calling one of the rumors, that Barclays would acquire Lehman, "absurd." Today, with Barclays buying Lehman's U.S. operations, the Times is still siding with investment banks over investors, depositors and others who benefit from the free flow of information. Here's some data the paper won't be providing about the mess on Wall Street, according to an article it published today:

Emma Gilbey Keller's new book "The Comeback" is, in part, about emerging from under the shadow of her husband, Times editor Bill Keller. Good luck with that. In the insular world of publishing, the Times Book Review still reigns supreme, and the positive Sunday notice on Emma Keller's title has already arched some eyebrows. Sure, the Keller family connection is disclosed. But people are already wondering about self-dealing at the Times after recent gushing praise for a book by a New York Times Co. executive and four separate plugs for a book by the husband of a company director — whose book-writing son also got notice in the paper. Then there's the efficient praise the Times had for Emma's last book. Newspaper gossips will remember it from the author.

[NYDN. Click to enlarge]

We were all so pure before life got in the way. Even media types! Even Ann Coulter. Via Oh No They Didn't, click for the polemical pundit, back when she was a brunette and a virgin, Lou Dobbs as a Leave It To Beaver innocent, and Rachel Maddow as a 21-year-old leather-jacketed Rhodes Scholar who could kick your ass.


Lou Dobbs

If there's one thing we're absolutely sick of it's journalists complaining about other journalists for no reason except to revel in the glorious, righteous contrarianism of complaint. And we are about to complain about it. Ha, cause we're so contrarian! Check out my surprising viewpoint, baby! I'd like to start off my complaint by telling Washington City Paper editor Erik Wemple to shut up. Wemple's column, which I am now whining about, is him whining about the whining of the New York Times. Specifically, about the Times being disappointed at the fact that their pretty fucking awesome Sarah Palin blowout story last weekend didn't have the same resonance that it would have had in times past, because the media is overcrowded these days. ***WHICH IS TRUE.*** Okay then. Go, Wemple:

Back story: I'm lurking around one of the low-rent haunts of the highbrow magazine elite Wednesday and come upon a friend of mine, Jess, who introduces me to Donavan Hohn, a brilliant writer whose recent piece on a Hong Kong toy fair had inspired me to write a handjobby post about how much I love 'Harper's.' Anyway, like pretty much all journalists under 40 who bother with the whole "crafting exquisite paragraphs" thing anymore, Hohn has cash flow issues. So Jess suggests — naively, I'm assuming — he get into the celebrity profile racket. Her friend Mark Kirby does it! He just wrote a profile of Megan Fox for 'GQ' that was really actually a rewarding effort! And I'm thinking, "Oh Jess, guys like Donovan Hohn are just not wired to hustle celebrity profile assignments. Not least because guys like Donovan Hohn probably didn't know who Megan Fox even was when he saw her at a comic book convention at which he was busy jotting down the philosophies of some enchanting small-time hucksterpreneur, and plus, everyone knows celebrity profiles are the lowest form of hackery." Well shit, was I so totally wrong. Jess had just tipped me off to the best celebrity profile in years. Seriously, you know how the celebrity profile is totally dead? This profile could do for the genre what…Megan Fox does for impotence or something!

Wall Street has been on a historic roller coaster all week, and there's no doubt it's tiring out some business reporters. It was only Monday morning that Times business writer Andrew Ross Sorkin said on CNBC, where he puts in the extra multimedia shift now common to newspaper reporters, that he was operating on just two hours sleep. So perhaps it should not have been entirely surprising that the Times business desk printed Thursday a sensational quote it has now retracted, because it seems no one ever said it.

I cannot say I expected a blog best beloved for its breathless Gossip Girl recaps* would be the blog whose archives I spent the most time raiding to read up on the collapse of capitalism. But this crisis has been full of surprises and one of them is that reading New York magazine's Daily Intel blog could have saved investors a shit ton of money, because they have been paying superclose attention to the saga of America's Crapital Structure and they take very good notes. They reeled me into their archived coverage of what they call the "White Men With Money" beat when they ingeniously dubbed Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein the "Lila Fowler of Wall Street" after the moneyed alpha girl of the Sweet Valley High series. It wasn't a connection I'd think to make, but maybe that's because I'm not as savvy at parsing rumors…1. For instance, they totally rejected the worthless albeit true rumor about Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain's bad toupee and embraced the ex Goldman banker wholeheartedly. He looked like Clark Kent, therefore he would save his company with magical superpowers and common decency and it was really as simple as that. 2. Conversely, they did not like Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld. Did not trust his eyebrows. And seized an early opportunity in June to lambaste him for being a style nazi. He was superficial! And people like that are always way too concerned about what other people think, and they overlook what's inside. Korean Development Bank was no more likely to save him from his deluded sense of reality than Elizabeth Wakefield was Bruce Patman. 3. Early into their shift steering the John Thain love train, they hired a prominent astrologer to see what was in his stars for the year. Just to make sure their instincts were correct. WERE THEY EVER.

Breaking new media crush alert! The Financial Times columnist Francesco Guerrera went on CNBC this morning for a segment on how the financial crisis is so bad even newspapers read by stupid poor people are writing about it. Ooooh look it's on the cover of a Spanish paper and everyone knows Spanish speakers never met a dollar they didn't need to envia back to nineteen impoverished half-hermanos back in Santo Domingo! This, CNBC believes, is a signal for the superior intellects viewing CNBC to stop panic-selling all those stocks RIGHT NOW. Well, Francesco does not buy this logic.* Even when total idiot tool Dennis Kneale presents him with this turd of wisdom: "Come on, Francesco, you're young! You can make it back!" You know what? I'm not even going to get started on that. We'll have plenty of time to vilify him and his whole awful fact-resistant generation of denial dogmatists while we continuing not investing our nonexistent savings in the market.

After NYU student Alana Taylor wrote a critical piece about the merits of her journalism class for PBS's MediaShift blog, her professor, Mary Quigley, caught wind of it and told the class, "We can all agree that there will be no more blogging or Twittering about the class." Can we all agree on that? Especially since this very same professor had previously told them, "Nowadays it's essential for journalists to blog."Professor Quigley later explained, "Yes, I would certainly require a student to ask permission to use direct quotes from the class on a blog written after class." How very 1.0. But now you're on Gawker... d'oh! [MediaShift]

By email, by telephone and by cable television comes a consistent message for Gawker: We should all be woken in the middle of the night, hauled off to jail, and locked away maybe forever for publishing some of Sarah Palin's emails, including her daughter Bristol's phone number and husband's previously-known email address. Some people would also like us shot, because God only knows the terrible things that can be done to someone with email addresses and phone numbers. Bizarrely, the only person who disagreed with our legal culpability was a Scientologist, because despite the many negative things we've written about that "church" the law is apparently clear: "Gawker's fine," Fox News's Greta Van Susteren said. Click the video icon to watch the TV coverage; some emails and a voice mail we "liberal Jews" received is after the jump.

What did the CEO of General Electric say about black people two weeks ago? The Black Corporate Directors Conference may have thought it was doing Jeff Immelt a favor by keeping his comments on race off the record, thus allowing him to speak more freely and so forth. But now that Immelt's statements to CNN's Soledad O'Brien and other conference panelists are the subject of damaging gossip, the hush-hush arrangement is keeping O'Brien and others from publicly denying anything. And that, fairly or unfairly, just lends the rumors more credence. Here's what a tipster told Jossip about Immelt's remarks:

The Associated Press reports it was contacted by the Secret Service yesterday and "asked for copies of the leaked [Sarah Palin] e-mails, which circulated widely on the Internet. The AP did not comply." Wait, why is the Secret Service asking AP for the emails? Do they not know how to use Google? The emails are here, guys, or you can see if wikileaks is back up or try the ones on the Huffington Post. Now please, leave the poor wretches at AP alone so they can resume encouraging you to Keep Up The Fight and crafting ridiculous accordion metaphors. [AP]