The Times ran a long story on the front page of its Business section yesterday about Gary Milby, an "oil man" who has swindled investors out of millions of dollars. What has he done with his ill-gotten gains? Bought lots of shit for his spoiled teenage daughter, apparently. Her name is Ariel, and both she and dad were featured on an episode of MTV's apocalyptic teenage hatefest "My Super Sweet 16." And the show was so over-the-top that it caught the attention of the feds, speeding up the investigation of Milby's wrongdoing [NYT]. First time ever "My Super Sweet 16" has displayed redeeming social value! Below, a clip from the show, leading up to Ariel's "Fairytale" party. Here's a fairy tale, mean girl: your wealth. Ha ha.

Here we are in the fifth day of the Possible Spitzer Hooker #2 saga, and the tabloid accusations continue to fly back and forth like so many bullets made of sex. Kristin Davis, who everyone agrees ran several high-priced call girl rings, also stands accused by the Post of servicing Eliot Spitzer himself; the Daily News says she has no connection to the Love Guv. The latest developments: Daily News sez madam serviced big sports star; No way, sez Post. Plus: Is the Kristin Davis "Black Book" client list a hoax? The Post says yes, for some reason!

Regarding our earlier post about all the conflicting stories surrounding possible Spitzer hooker #2 Kristin Davis: a reliable source at the Daily News assures us that the paper did not pay for Davis' "Black Book" client list, which someone was shopping around to us yesterday. They also reiterated that in all their digging, the Daily News has not come up with any connection between Spitzer and Davis; the Post's sourcing remains a mystery.

In the UK, entertainment reporters have a reputation for being tough and heartless when it comes to reporting on celebrities. But you have to give them this: They're also horny sleazebags. At least one is. His name is Rob Grainge, and he works for the London Paper. Now that French first lady Carla Bruni is getting so much press for her tour of England and other endeavors, the London Paper is trying to get some renewed interest in Grainge's interview with Bruni last year, when she was still a simple model and celebrity. And it is interesting, as a case study in a reporter being unable to control his metaphorical boner while interviewing a pretty woman.

Self-referential LA Times humor person Joel Stein finally says "fuck everything" today, and writes a column about Julia Allison [LAT]. Yes. He calls her "a genius," but perhaps this was just a bit of flattery to draw some good quotes out of her. Here she is explaining the thinking behind her fake role as "editor at large" for Star, in an interview she gives via cell phone while shopping for clothes: "The people who do corporate strategy are understanding the power of three or four minutes on a cable network or a morning show. It's the best publicity you can get. Oh, that is the cutest dress I've ever seen. Oh my! Oh my God! I can't handle it. Anyway, with the advent of 24-hour news networks, you have an incredible amount of air time to fill." Shopping and building her brand at the same time! In case you're still stuck in the old, outdated journalism world, Julia breaks down how she is really just as smart as—or smarter than—any other REPORTER or whatever:

What time is it? Time to pile on the LA Times for its fictitious Tupac shooting story! When one of the nation's top four papers (or, one that once held that position) splashes an investigative story this big that turns out to be based on forged evidence from a lifelong con man, you can expect a lot of tsk-tsking from the journalism establishment. But actually the reaction has been pretty muted. The reason: most reporters know deep down that they could be done in by fake documents just as easily. Slate's Jack Shafer has a rather gentle column today on what LAT reporter Chuck Philips could have done differently—mainly, don't trust con men, and always vet your documents. Your sympathy for Philips (those were convincing forgeries, after all) might be diminished, though, by this quote he gave in a recent web chat, defending his 2002 story that alleged that Biggie "Christopher Wallace" Smalls was involved in Tupac's murder—he sure was sensitive about forged documents back then:

Back in the early aughts, moving to Buenos Aires was the totally hip thing to do. But now everyone's doing it. God, it's like you can't drop "independent studies at Brown" without 12 people turning around. And it's just like that in the media, too. First the Times plagiarizes, and worse exaggerates the coke situation in Argentina, and now the paper is lifting articles from Newsweek about the artist scene. Well, maybe. The Times ran a travel piece on Buenos Aires by Denny Lee two weeks ago that featured similar passages as the January Newsweek story. Lee quotes many of the same people, but seriously, those 12 Brown kids represent the entirety of the ex-pat scene there. Most egregiously, one of the people Lee quotes had moved to the U.K. in Spetember and claims that Lee never interviewed her. Ugh, Argentina is so tired anyway. Let's all move to Santiago, Chile and start news scandals from there. [via Mediabistro]

Earlier this week, dangerous fiend Gene Morrill was convicted of 20 charges of sex crimes involving minors. At his sentencing hearing in Stafford County, Virginia, yesterday, Morrill offered a stunning defense: a sasquatch molested him in the woods of New Hampshire. The heroic journalists at Washington DC's WJLA led with this story on yesterday's 5 p.m. newscast. Reporter Jessica Weinstein actually contacted experts at the Bigfoot Field Research Organization to ask whether Bigfoot had ever been spotted in New Hampshire. This is why blogs can never replace genuine shoe-leather reporting. The ABC7 report is attached. [WJLA]

The New York Times recently investigated the internet phenomenon known as Rickrolling—the fun-for-all-ages game of tricking people into clicking on a link that takes them to a Youtube clip of unlikely pop star Rick Astley singing his greatest hit, "Never Gonna Give You Up"—but they didn't do a very thorough job, considering that they were unable to track down Mr. Astley himself for comment (the LA Times found Rick and ran a lengthy, entertaining interview). They were also duped by a hoax clip of a "prankster" interrupting a college basketball game dressed as Astley and lip-synching the song. That performance, it turns out, happened before four different games, none of them the one the Times identified, and was not a halftime prank. And so, today, the Grey Lady runs a Rickrolling correction:

NYT reporter Mike Nizza was toiling away on the LA Times' fraudulent Tupac story beat yesterday, explaining to racist elderly Times readers what went wrong, and who all these hip hop people are. Then, like a ray of sunlight piercing the clouds over Shaolin, a reader made a joke about Wu-Tang in the comments. Mike was all over it! It really brightened up his day, we think, to know that somebody else out there is available to discuss how cool it is that Raekwon dropped that "I grew up on the crime side, the New York Times side" lyric on "C.R.E.A.M." Unlike the dorks in the Times cafeteria who don't appreciate it at all. Somebody rescue this man! Click to enlarge the key exchange of internet musical acknowledgments.

Here's the lead to Page Six's item today about Dr. Pepper's Guns N' Roses PR stunt: "TIRED of a world in which Americans idolize wannabe singers, and where musicals about high school students pass as rock 'n' roll, Dr Pepper is begging Axl Rose to finally release this year his 17-years-in-the-making album, "Chinese Democracy." Such powerful language! Now here's the lead to the press release announcing the same event:

Russ Smith, formerly the professional anti-New York Times crank at the NY Press, is now writing his same exact anti-NYT screeds, broken record-style, at SpliceToday.com. Good to know he's still cranking them out, just as trees fall in unoccupied forests. [Splice via Romenesko]

The Smoking Gun has a treasure trove of incriminating information on Jimmy Sabatino, the incarcerated serial con man who the site says forged documents that the LA Times relied on in its (now doubtful) scoop associating Puff Daddy with the 1994 shooting and robbery of Tupac Shakur. Sabatino's shady and unreliable nature was well known; back in 1999, the Miami New Times published a long feature story titled "Con Kid" that detailed Sabatino's history of outrageous scams that he used to hobnob with celebrities and land free stuff. TSG also says that Sabatino's father is a restaurant manager, not a mobster as the LAT reported (and we repeated). The LAT's story today on the launch of its own internal investigations notes that the paper "has not identified the source of the purported FBI reports," but that would presumably change if it turns out Sabatino was the source, and the documents were false. After the jump, a screengrab [via TSG] of Sabatino's MySpace page—the entire "About Me" section is apparently fiction:

The Smoking Gun says that the LA Times' big investigative scoop last week implicating Bad Boy records chief Sean "Puffy" Combs in the 1994 shooting and robbery of rival rapper Tupac Shakur was based on fabricated evidence. The site says that James Sabatino (pictured)—an incarcerated con man who appeared as a player in the shooting in the LAT story—is actually a fabulist who forged the FBI reports that the paper relied on to build its investigation.

How on Earth is this Times piece about how it is too expensive for reporters to actually tag along with campaigns not headlined "On This Year's Bus, Fewer Boys (and Girls)" or something along those lines? "The Buzz on the Bus" barely qualifies as one of those Timesian barely qualifying puns. Anyway, it's a bad thing that no newspapers send reporters on the bus (or plane) anymore, because newspapers are dying, but it's also a good thing, because of blogs and the YouTube. Also there is a picture of Mark Halperin playing make-believe reporter and looking cold. [NYT]

Folio Weekly, the alt-weekly in Jacksonville, Florida (where I used to work), ran a story this month about the BDSM scene in Jacksonville. Their reporting on sexual practices that are not licensed by the Baptist church outraged a Jacksonville City Councilman, naturally, and he's made a formal call for the city to remove all of Folio's distribution boxes from its property. Which the city is seriously considering. The righteous councilman reasons that children go to libraries, and what's to prevent them from picking up this article and turning into whip-wielding kink fiends? And the worst part is he was actually forced to read the blasphemous article—slowly, no doubt—in order to know what the god-fearing citizens are up against! From his letter to the mayor:

In an episode that was simultaneously poignant, noble, and hilariously out of touch, old New York Times reporter David Dunlap—who is always on the lookout for "illegal marketing campaigns"— says he "sensed a story on the evening of the 14th, when I came across two or three young men stapling posters for a new hip-hop album to lampposts." He started taking pictures of them, and they asked him what he was doing. He replied that what they were doing was illegal; then a guy attacked him and smashed his camera [City Room via FishbowlNY]! Dunlap got pushed down and roughed up, but is unharmed. And he refuses to press charges, because he's so grateful that they didn't stomp him out or rob him at the same time!

PR firms are mighty enthusiastic to have relations with bloggers. Close, close relations. APCO Worldwide—a scarily connected lobbying and PR superfirm with all types of ex-politicos on its payroll (including former White House flack Scottie McClellan!)—just released a survey on "The State Of Blog Relations," that asked both bloggers and PR people about their ideas on how they can make nice with each other [via PRWeek, where I used to work]. So the flacks all came off like devious bastards, right? Well, some, but the bloggers also came off like money-grubbing sellouts!

The question weighing on the mind of the print media at large is, "In what month will I be getting laid off?" But in the luxury print media sector, the question is more like, "Will our readers be buying more, or fewer, private planes this year? And when should I buy mine?" As hard as it is for crusading journalism school grads to admit, magazines targeting upscale readers—a polite term for "rich Wall Street bastards"—will naturally attract more premium advertising, and are usually better positioned to ride out any crazy economic fluctuations than other magazines whose readers are quicker to go broke. Or are they?

Anne Rice, the author of all those books about Vampires (including the one that they turned into that Tom Cruise/ Brad Pitt movie with the twin themes of latent homosexuality and glorification of the dark side), has opened up to the world about her bizarre and stunning deity worship [WP]. The famed creator of monstrosities publicly proclaims her allegiance today to a strange "God Man" who supposedly performed impossible miracles in days long past. Now, the Dracula-loving storyteller has "consecrated" herself to this mythical "Jesus"—who can die and revive himself at will—and nothing will change her mind about his magical powers. The bloodsucking aficionado will not abandon her hallucinatory reasoning for anyone!