Last night, after airing footage of Jesse Jackson whispering that he wanted to "cut [Obama's] nuts off" for "talking down to black people" on faith-based federal initiatives, Bill O'Reilly said on his Fox News show that the network had further, "more damaging" footage of Jackson talking that it did not air (see the last video here). O'Reilly was, perhaps, trying to sound like he was taking the high road, but really just came off like yet another Fox News smear artist. Now, a Fox News staffer is doing some whispering of his own about what Jackson said, and it seems inevitable the cable news channel will have to back up O'Reilly's allegations with full details. Citing a coworker friend who had seen the tape, the New York-based Fox staffer tells us Jackson referred to Obama "using the n-word — [and] not 'Nilla." The source also shed light on why it took three days for Jackson's comments to emerge.

Earlier this week, Fox News began sprinkling helpful exclusives on its erstwhile enemies at the Times in an ostensible bid to atone for past smears. But the favors may also be part of a divide-and-conquer strategy to prevent the formation of an anti-Fox "posse," to use columnist David Carr's memorable phrasing. And so, perhaps, it is with Julia Allison, the shamelessly self-advancing internet fameball who so many in the New York media bubble love to hate. Why has Fox stooped — famewise, mind you — to picking a fight with Allison, telling the Daily News today that her comments against the network's vicious flack Irena Briganti are "yet another sad, relentless attempt at relevancy?" Maybe because the "rep" quoted by the News is actually Briganti herself, unable to resist swiping at someone with far less power than the Times. Or maybe the network is deploying its divide-and-conquer strategy to a much larger group of detractors than reporters at one newspaper — people who hate Julia Allison.

Someone started an aptly-named site called "One Person Trend Stories," which does a pretty fantastic job of skewering the thinly-sourced, heavily-caveated features familiar to readers (and writers!) of pretty much every major newspaper and newsmagazine out there. It's not clear if the anonymous author — J-school student? Disgruntled intern? — intended the site as a parody, or as more straightforward humor. But it's pretty obvious that bloggers everywhere love the site and are linking to it. To be sure, the only example I have is the post you're now reading. Ahem. One of the better posts is after the jump.

Bloomberg News has failed to win an award, and that is obvious proof of fraud! So goes the logic of Bloomberg boss Matthew Winkler, the bow-tied tyrant and enemy of humans. Bloomberg ran an epic investigative piece on the insurance industry that generated both acclaim and a lot of pushback. The industry said the piece was full of errors; an investigation found no errors; the Deadline Club of New York eventually named the story as a finalist for several awards, but it didn't win any. Right that second, Matthew Winkler's bow tie perked up. He knows a setup when he sees it!:

Oh, this is exciting: Remember how Roone Arledge of ABC revolutionized TV sports by superimposing dramatic personal narratives onto matches, then revolutionized TV news with magazine shows like 20/20 and Nightline? Well, now ABC News is expanding on this pioneering legacy by venturing where no other news division has dared to go before (on purpose): fiction! Or, as ABC calls it, "reporting from the future." The network is asking everyone to imagine the hellscape of 2100 in order to "form a powerful... narrative about the perils of our future", and thus incite change. To do this, you just need to make a short video about how terrible things are going to be, based on a "briefing" from ABC's team of trained psychics. Here's the email pitch sent to some Columbia students yesterday:

"When I’m promoting a show for program for Discovery I turn into a giant media slut.'" [TV Decoder]

Dennis Kneale joined his CNBC colleagues today in effusive praise of JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon. After Power Lunch host Bill Griffeth said Dimon was "very entertaining" at an FDIC event and "had a career as an after-dinner speaker," Kneale added that Dimon was a "guy talking about what he knows." And when Kneale's longtime nemesis Charles Gasparino argued that Dimon's comments should be treated more skeptically — "discounted by 50 percent... because there's a degree of flackery here" — Kneale strongly disagreed (clip after the jump). It's odd that Kneale is offering kind words for Dimon rather than bashing the dealmaker, given that Dimon thinks the CNBC talking head should be thrown in jail.

Remember how Vogue had everyone in a tizzy this spring over its covers? First there was the LeBron James/King Kong cover in April, then the horrific Photoshop job on Gwyneth Paltrow in May. For all the damage the disastrous fronts did to the fashion title and its editor Anna Wintour, one would have at least hoped for a slight circulation bump from all the publicity. Not so: Newsstand sales of the LeBron James issue were off 100,000 copies year-over-year to 350,000 while the Paltrow issue sold 45,000 fewer copies. Sad. [WWD]

The Washington Post tonight named former Wall Street Journal editor Marcus Brauchli its new executive editor, replacing Leonard Downie Jr. after 17 years. The transition comes thanks to a new publisher, Katherine Weymouth, who wants to put her own stamp on the paper. With Brauchli, it will be hard to avoid doing just that. While the Post has remade itself over the past decade as a local paper with a focus on national politics, Brauchli is basically a foreign news reporter who, prior to a replacing Paul Steiger atop the Journal masthead, edited global and national news. Then again, we hear Brauchli is prepared to sacrifice much of what he has accumulated at the Journal to take the Post gig - and not just the wealth of his experience.

The L.A. Times is cutting 250 jobs, the Tampa-Tribune is cutting 21, the New York Times is now available only on Kindle during a lunar eclipse, but all is well in dead-tree medialand — in Korea. An anti-Communist group in Seoul plans to distribute 100,000 free copies of its newspaper to North Korean readers via balloons. The so-called Free North Korea Shinmun "will expose and condemn human rights violations in the communist country with articles written by North Korean defectors living in the South." The good news? The paper's made of plastic, so less atmospheric wear and tear. The bad? There's no food supplement made of real food to actually be use to North Koreans.

Recently, Steppin' Up editor Chaunce Hayden got himself banned from tipping Page Six because of an inaccurate item he sorta sent them about a sex tape involving the wife of radio morning show host Opie. Does that sentence confuse and upset you? It should, because there's no fucking reason you should've ever heard of Chaunce Hayden, Steppin' Out, or "Opie," as Chaunce Hayden more or less admits in a Radar profile today. The unread free New Jersey magazine is actually just a vehicle for Mr. Hayden to meet famous (or "famous") women and land his name in the columns.

How, we ask you, could someone named "T. Boone Pickens" possibly be bad? T. Boone is, as you have probably guessed, a Texas billionaire. An oil billionaire! But he does not spend his billions on running moonshine or buying the world's largest cement pond. No, instead Pickens-who will be played by Charles Durning for the remainder of this post-funds slanderous attack campaigns against Democratic political candidates. The campaigns feature lies so ridiculous that the only people who regularly take them seriously work at every cable news station and many newspapers.

Look what happens when journalists report about a ratings dip at Fox News: their photos become ghoulishly caricatured on Fox & Friends. According to the show's co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade, New York Times television editor Steven Reddicliffe, who just so happens to be a fired and disgruntled Fox employee, assigned reporter Jacques Steinberg to write a "hit piece" on how fewer viewers were tuning in to the fair and balanced news network. It was a form of aggression that would not stand, and so the nasty liberal "attack dogs" got their comeuppance by having their facial features distorted and exaggerated with the magic of Photoshop. As you can see above, Steinberg became a chain-smoking Dick Tracy villain, and Reddicliffe became Lionel Trilling.

Right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh is signing a contract with Clear Channel and Premiere Radio worth more than $400 million, the New York Times Magazine will report this Sunday. In addition to finagling a nine-figure signing bonus, Limbaugh has also taken to purchasing a new G550 jet and a pyramid of gilded skulls belonging to the financiers of Air America. The profile already seems like a softball (it'd have to be if Limbaugh agreed to it). The author is Zev Chafets, NYTM's house conservative and a former press officer for Menachem Begin (!), who previously wrote about Mike Huckabee's forgettable down-home charisma ("Lunch with Mike Huckabee is a study in faith-based dieting," "If there was magic there, it was working."). So far, the only advance Limbaugh quotes are the following:

CBS war correspondent Lara Logan was recently promoted to "Chief Foriegn Affairs Correspondent," but no one noticed because OMG SEX SCANDAL! The Enquirer broke it, the Post semi-legitimized it, and it's been mentioned now in, like, real newspapers and everything. She slept with some people in Iraq! One of them was married! Some wonder if there is maybe a double standard. Would we hear about the dalliences of male journalists in the war zone? Well... sort of?

Everyone is complaining that Sunday's Tom Brokaw-hosted Meet the Press was too boring. ("A little too much comity!" -Alessandra Stanley. "The Most Boring Meet the Press Ever!" -Jossip.) Is that bad? We didn't watch it, but we're still going to say "no." Look, Tim Russert, may he rest in peace, was a fantastic broadcaster, and yes, he made the show entertaining as hell, but if Tom Brokaw is ditching Tim's trademark "once you said this, now you say this, EXPLAIN YOURSELF" method, more power to him and to NBC. We realize it's not what the Sunday shows are "about," but let's not bitch about how "boring" a quiet, informed political debate is while we're all hand-wringing about how toxic and broken the campaign process has become. Deal? After the jump, a clip of Brokaw interviewing NBC analyst Chuck Todd. Tom's gentle admonishment of Chuck was apparently the most interesting part of the broadcast.

Press releases: everybody hates them. Reporters hate them because they are trite, condescending, unreadable, superfluous, or some combination thereof. The flacks who write press releases hate them because they know that their intended recipients have nothing but scorn for their hard work. And the public hates press releases because the lazy media uses them anyways, producing tons of craptastic non-news. Flacks recommend buzzwords to get a press release picked up: "green," "environment," "foreclosure," "toxic," and, in Idaho, "polygamy." Wrong! Buzzwords are why people hate these things in the first place. After the jump, five real live ways to put together a good press release:

For unclear reasons, the Times felt compelled to hand a huge chunk of its Sunday Business section over to a profile of Bonnie Fuller—the woman most responsible for creating our nation's soul-destroying cast of powerful celebrity magazines—who was recently axed from her multimillion-dollar gig as editorial chief of American Media. A sympathetic profile! The news peg, purportedly: Bonnie Fuller is doing some vague new project on the internet. For women! With specifics to be determined! Color us skeptical. The Fuller that the Times describes does not sound like the woman who was so despised by her assistants that they put snot in her food. What's the major malfunction here?

Oh, hey, people of The South! The New York Times might like to hire you as a stringer/researcher/ admin/journalistic sharecropper! But please remember: This is an elite newspaper for the elitist elites in fancy New York, so please no redneck type people. To help ensure you are not a hick, the Times has asked you to pre-pitch five stories NOT involving anything the Times has ever covered before (you do take the Times right? It's only $665 per year in trashy zip codes!), and also NOT about cliché things only of interest to the poors: "Please do not submit ideas concerning dog fights, cock fights, or the Confederate flag." Anyway, if you do get the job, you'll be rewarded with good pay and creative freedom. Ha ha, just kidding, you'll tackle "light administrative duties" and also "the pay is very modest," but at least you'll learn how to talk right, and the money will probably go a long way in your shantytown or whatever. Full job listing after the jump!

CNET News.com writer Caroline McCarthy published a nice scoop today on how social networking site I'm In Like With You raised $1.5 million from venture funding firm Spark Capital. Silicon Alley Insider has been chasing the story for weeks! How did McCarthy pull the exclusive out from under their nose? Who's to say! But, um, it's probably worth noting that McCarthy is dating David Karp, founder of blog network Tumblr and an intimate, bed-cuddling, entire-body-carrying friend of I'm In Like With You founder Charles Forman. Karp's company also shares Spark Capital as a venture funding backer. So, basically, McCarthy had sources close to her boyfriend to draw on. (Pictured, the happy threesome of Forman, Karp and McCarthy, as photographed by Richard Blakeley.) Should McCarthy's CNET blog post have carried a disclaimer? She doesn't think so: