The New York Post is tough on crime. Especially celebrity crime. They take gleeful pleasure (as we all do!) in cataloging the excesses and trashy doings of the drug-addicted and famous. Yesterday's breathless report on the arrest of poor former child star Tatum O'Neal went into embarrassing detail of her arrest for purchasing crack cocaine ("I'm researching a part," a "source" told the Post). But today's front page? And accompanying exclusive report from brittle columnist Andrea Peyser? A sympathetic tale of a troubled woman just doing her best to stay clean. The lead: "TATUM is saved!" Who the hell is O'Neal's publicist, Obi-Wan Kenobi? (Or, uh, Howard Rubenstein?) Drug-addicted celebrities! You may wonder how to garner such friendly treatment in the Post after your next drug deal gone bad! We have some suggestions:

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's unborn twins are worshiped by the entertainment press as a sort of double celebrity messiah. Bidding for exclusive first pictures has reportedly reached $15 million and is poised to rise further. So it was with no small measure of elation Friday that Entertainment Tonight delivered news that the twins had just been born in the south of France, a big scoop. But People and Us Weekly soon reported denials from reps for the couple. Brad Pitt attended a Grand Prix event across the border in Italy, which would be an odd decision for a new father. The celebrified Associated Press, which obtained a denial from Pitt's manager, asked, "Was Entertainment Tonight punk'd?" Maybe not. Maybe it is the victim of a MASSIVE ANGELINA JOLIE CONSPIRACY.

Audio emerged tonight of former President Bill Clinton calling Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum a "sleazy... dishonest... slimy... scumbag." Former Times reporter Purdum, of course, is the guy who wrote the just-released article about how Clinton is running around the world on private jets, including one called "Air Fuck One," with billionaire scuzzballs like Ron Burkle, Steve Bing and Jeffrey Epstein. Clinton told a Huffington Post reporter Purdum was awful, and that the Vanity Fair piece has "five or six blatant lies," but then added he had never read it. But that didn't stop him from continuing to trash it, nor did the fact that Purdum is married to Clinton's former press secretary Dee Dee Myers. Audio after the jump, along with a text summary.

Some secret Japanese government files have emerged about Tadamasa Goto, the Yakuza gangster boss who's threatened the life of American reporter Jake Adelstein and his family. And—we hate to say it—but it really sounds like Goto is not a guy you would want to be threatening your life. The file notes that he both pays off reporters and "will seriously and relentless threaten whoever is responsible for unfavorable coverage." Duh! Well uh, he's not really brutal, is he?

Larry Mendte, the first male host of Access Hollywood, is under investigation by the FBI for reading someone else's emails. If he did it, at least he probably saw some thrilling stuff: his alleged victim is Alycia Lane, his cop-slugging, bikini-posing former colleague at Philly's CBS TV station. You can see why he'd be tempted! Early indications are that Mendte's snooping could rank right up there with Insider host Pat O'Brien's sexy drunken voicemails in the annals of gossip show host scandals.

As if its listicle of the "50 Most Powerful Women In NYC" were not journalistically dubious enough, the Post also had to use the list for shameless self promotion, putting two of its own columnists on the list. Granted, some of the non-Post choices were also highly questionable, like the editor-in-chief of Cookie magazine, socialite Ivanka Trump and former hooker Ashley Dupre. But how can you even begin to take the selection of, say, Post columnist Cindy Adams seriously when the first qualification listed for her is "she's got a sandwich named after her?" The Post's self-serving choices are after the jump.

The anchor of Fox's "Good Day New York" thinks this Rachael Ray/ Dunkin' Donuts controversy (recap: Celebuchef Ray wore a keffiyeh in an ad, right-wingers were outraged, the company pulled the ad) is so stupid. It is! When the story came up this morning, he acknowledged that he can't stand Rachael Ray and doesn't even care what this controversy is about. Cue co-anchor Jodi Applegate leaning over and hissing (audibly): "Dunkin Donuts is one of our sponsors." His backtracking is magical! Please, click to watch this moment of journalistic integrity in action.

Earlier this month we told you about Jake Adelstein, the American reporter who spent 15 years covering organized crime in Japan and who now, unfortunately, finds himself and his family marked for death by an angry gangster. Adelstein's tormentor, Yakuza boss Tadamasa Goto, has been very sick lately; Adelstein's hope was that Goto would pass away, so he could return to America to be with his family without fear of assassination. Well, bad news: it's been revealed that Goto and three of his henchmen got precious, lifesaving liver transplants in Los Angeles (while many others died waiting). Thanks, science!

Barring legal challenges, gay couples can begin marrying in California starting June 17. Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi will eventually wed, but the wire services needed some examples of couples getting into the spirit now, or maybe some archive stuff from the gay marriages four years ago in San Francisco. Reuters surfaced the picture on the left; the Associated Press the one on the right. As Daniel Radosh notes, "Ninety thousand lesbians in California, and the AP just happened to find the professional belly dancer. That's what I call a nose for news." Maybe there was some smart thinking behind the AP's strange new celebrity news division; the wire service has already learned to think like the paparazzi. [Radosh]

When News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch decided to sit down for a rare, on-camera interview, it was of course with two reporters from his own media empire, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal. In this clip from the Journal's D conference in Carlsbad, California, Murdoch explains how he thinks the Journal and Times will be competing aggressively with one another on all stories — business, political or otherwise — within just "a few months." He also rants about how it's "ridiculous" that an average of 8.3 editors looks at a typical WSJ story, inevitable expanding it beyond reason. "People don't have time for it — there's not a story that you can't get all the facts in (within) half the space." Also: Murdoch confirms he was involved in the Post's decision to switch its allegiance from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama.

Last year, tabloids were abuzz with the story of a spinning class gone bad on the Upper East Side. One man was assaulted by another man, right in the middle of class. To be fair, the man who was assaulted—48-year-old Stuart Sugarman—is the type of guy who likes to shout out "you go girl!" and "great song!" during spinning class. A fellow spinner, irate at Stuart's unceasing exclamations, grabbed his bike and slammed him against the wall. Now the case has finally come to trial, and Sugarman took the stand yesterday, resulting in what is perhaps the finest exercise-related legal news story of the year:

Remember that Wired article about the various pluses and minuses of drug use that got the Times' panties all in a bunch about whether it would actually "promote drugs?" It was a stupid controversy over a relatively innocuous drug story. The Wired piece didn't deserve criticism for its content, but it might have been served by some disclosure; the author of it, Mathew Honan, is a reformed cokehead. That fact didn't appear in Wired, but on Honan's own blog:

The WSJ wraps up its three-part series on the Bear Stearns Wall Street clusterfuck today, and it is a masterpiece of financial journalism that's a lock for a Pulitzer. Uh, not that we care. In the final installment, various cutthroat maneuvers lead to JP Morgan's bitter $2-per-share salvation of the troubled Bear. And it's clear that enemies of JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon (such as: formerly wealthy people who work at Bear Stearns!) were very forthcoming sources on this story, because two of the best anecdotes in the piece do nothing but make him look like a snippy asshole:

Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz is married to a publicist, and one would expect the press scold to studiously avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest with regard to her clients, who pay in hopes of getting their story into newspapers like the Post and onto TV shows like Kurtz's Reliable Sources at CNN. In fact, both Kurtz and wife Sheri Annis have been rather brazen about advancing one another's interests. As the Times notes this morning, Kurtz on Sunday interviewed for his TV show a CBS journalist who had written a memoir about her time in Iraq, and who just happens to have hired Kurtz's wife to do publicity. Kurtz went so far as to read aloud from her book before noting his conflict briefly at the end of his segment. His wife, it seems, has been even less ethically careful:

In this week's cover story about Barack Obama, Newsweek distills the conventional political wisdom into a bitter tonic of condescending campaign advice. The Democratic presidential candidate is praised for having "wisely taken to often wearing and American-flag lapel" and advised "it would help to be seen venerating your white mother and grandparents as well as your black father" and that "whites resent being accused of racism for remarks they regard as innocent," in case the black politician hadn't learned that yet. To illustrate this cynical lesson in realpolitik, the magazine had originally planned to run the suitably stark cover above and on the left, according to the person who supplied us with a copy. But that cover was "killed" late Friday night, we are told, and replaced with the bright and sunny front at right — a bizarre choice given the gritty lead article and stark collection of supporting pieces on racial division. More outlandish still is the purported reason for the cover switch:

First letter of each paragraph: "GOODBYE READERS." He's taking a buyout. [Post]

It's come to our attention that the Times' story today about the "miracle fruit" that makes everything taste sweet is—to use a technical journalism term—a big ripoff of a Wall Street Journal story from a year ago. A Page One WSJ story, at that. And it's not just that the Times wrote a piece on the same topic, which is common enough; they used a bunch of the same sources, and made the many of the same points in the same way. With not even a nod to the original! This is a semi-gotcha—it could have been solved by simply giving a little credit. It's not plagiarism, but it is enough to mightily piss off a fellow reporter. Check out the similarities:

Everyone continues to be terribly impressed by John McCain's awesome ability to bullshit. The man is beloved by the press corps (or, at least, he used to be) because he will say any damn thing that comes to his mind, and what usually comes to his mind is whatever you want to hear. So Slate's Jacob Weisberg sat down with McCain in August of '07, when McCain's campaign was a mess and he was losing. Weisberg asked him how things were going, and McCain answered frankly that everything sucked. How Maverick-y of him not to lie! Then he said Weisberg didn't even have to read McCain's book if he didn't want to. Then McCain criticized the President and his handling of Iraq!

So. Times columnist and former theater critic Frank Rich has a sweet creative consulting deal with HBO. They give him a paycheck, and he will sometimes call them up if he has a great idea (and Frank Rich has thousands of great ideas every day). He will maybe read some scripts and give notes. Did we mention he gets a paycheck? We don't begrudge him this cushy gig, but he should BEWARE. Another respected cultural thinker once went down this road, Frank!

It's no secret that the gossip business tends to be driven by self-promotion, grudges, favor-trading and image-polishing. But the press release after the jump is enough to make one yearn for the vicious, but still very human, world depicted by Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success. The release is headlined "Gossip item, Press advisor, Gossip item, Press advisory, Press" and claims that reality TV star Kim Kardashian was recently "saved from stampede of 13 year olds" at a hotel. It's hard to say what ulterior motive is behind this "gossip" — touting the demographics of the show, perhaps, or deflecting attention from something juicier — but one would hope the likes of Page Six and Us Weekly would at least make celebrity publicists go through the motions of pretending their gossip isn't manufactured. Check the papers tomorrow to find out if they do.