So much for the truce between MSNBC and Fox. Since news of a cease fire (or at least a ratcheting down of the rhetoric) appeared in the pages of the New York Times twelve days ago, whatever fragile peace the two networks negotiated has dissolved into the usual volley of insults. Bill O'Reilly is once again the worst person in the world, according to Keith Olbermann. And MSNBC's parent company, GE, is once again responsible for supporting terrorist regimes that are hell-bent on America's destruction, according to O'Reilly. Few at MSNBC and Fox News are happy the deal has unraveled—and both sides have said they're hoping to salvage it, an unlikely prospect at this point—although some of the most annoyed people around are the NBC staffers who are getting increasingly fed up with Olbermann's antics.

• The New York Times Co. is now publicly shopping the Boston Globe. Meanwhile, the list of potential acquirers is getting longer: The firm that bought the San Diego Union-Tribune is now a possible buyer. [AP, NYT]
• Related: The Globe is going to start charging to access its Web site. [E&P]
• News Corp. and GE were hoping to "ratchet down the rhetoric" when they ironed out a peace pact between MSNBC and Fox News recently. Keith Olbermann didn't abide by it, of course. (And Bill O'Reilly returned the compliment.) But Olbermann is still pretending it never happened. [WP, HP]
• It seems one embarrassment this week wasn't quite enough for Olbermann. Because he's resorting to shameless (and familiar) excuses to try and explain away the Richard Wolffe conflict-of-interest fiasco. [Gawker]
• Profits at CBS dropped by 96 percent in the second quarter. [WSJ]
• Why did Twitter go down yesterday? Blame the Russians. [NYT]

Tonight Keith Olbermann explained why he was ignorant of the fact that one of Countdown's regular political analysts/guest hosts is a working lobbyist — he's been too distracted grieving his mother's death. Boy, doesn't that sound familiar?!

On Monday night, in response to a Times report alleging that Fox and NBC had brokered a deal to end his feud with Bill O'Reilly, Keith Olbermann lashed out at the world. Tonight it was O'Reilly's turn to rebel.

MSNBC and Richard Wolffe have been taking heat for Wolffe's employment at the network as a political analyst and guest host for Keith Olbermann while also working as a lobbyist/publicist. Now Wolffe's secret Obama book proposal has been revealed.

• Keith Olbermann took Times reporter Brian Stelter to task last night for reporting that News Corp. and GE had worked out a deal to tone down the rhetoric between MSNBC and Fox News. But he didn't disagree with everything Stelter reported. Conveniently, only the bad stuff about him was wrong. [NYM]
• More bad news for Olbermann: MSNBC now admits it made a mistake by not disclosing that Countdown fixture Richard Wolffe is a paid lobbyist. Naturally, Olbermann had absolutely no idea about any of this. [Politico, Salon]
• Condé Nast is shedding more staff. This time around it appears the media giant's receptionists will be paying the ultimate price. [Gawker, NYM]
• Reps for Bruce Wasserstein met with BusinessWeek execs yesterday to discuss a bid for the magazine. Joe Mansueto, the founder of Morningstar and owner of Fast Company, may be a potential bidder as well. [BW]

Tonight Keith Olbermann returned from vacation and used his "Worst Persons" segment to emphatically rebuff the Times report stating that he and Bill O'Reilly's feud has been muzzled by corporate chieftains. He also addressed the Richard Wolffe situation online.

Richard Wolffe used to be a Newsweek reporter, but now he's a strategist at PR firm Public Strategies. On Friday he guest-hosted MSNBC's Countdown. His first topic: how awesome healthcare reform is. Guess what his clients think of healthcare reform?

• Funny People debuted at No. 1 at the box office this weekend, although it was still the worst opening for an Adam Sandler movie in five years. [Reuters]
• Mort Zuckerman is selling shares of his real estate company to pump $50 million into the Daily News to pay for new printing presses. [WSJ]
• Lou Dobbs has become a PR nightmare for CNN. Presumably the fact that Media Matters is airing an anti-Dobbs commercial won't help matters. [AP, HP]
• Is the peace pact between Olbermann and O'Reilly a sham? [TDB]
• Google CEO Eric Schmidt has resigned from Apple's board of directors. [BN]

Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald posted a scathing column about the armistice between GE and News Corp meant to end Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann's fueding. It's a chilling read, and brings in a tangentially related player: Richard Wolffe.

Friday night is for dumping embarrassing news, as media companies well know. So it is that the New York Times now surfaces a secret deal in which NBC is said to cravenly promise to ease its criticism of Fox News.

In your woozy Tuesday media column: MSNBC pulls in the crazies for airtime, Gallant former journo beats Goofus current journo, NYT family members catch the swine flu, and the LA Times is all fucked up.

Remember Erich "Mancow" Muller, Keith Olbermann's radio-clown pal who kept getting MSNBC airtime because Olbermann found his waterboarding conversion politically useful to flog even though it was a hoax? He just called Barack Obama a "Kenyan-Muslim turd" on the radio.

• New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson "isn't happy with the media." She'd also like to make it clear that the company is not currently up for sale, so please put your dollar bills back in your wallet, thank you very much. [MW]
• Ten movies will compete for Best Picture at the Oscars now, not 5. [THR]
• Sad: Dick Cheney landed a $2 million deal to publish his memoir. [NYT]
• Also sad: MSNBC, the illustrious home of blowhard Keith Olbermann, seems to think its tired prison docs are more important than covering Iran. [LAT]
• Director David Fincher is in talks to make a movie about Facebook. [Reuters]
• The always classy In Touch spent $75,000 to purchase photos of Kate Gosselin spanking her kids in public for its cover last week. [WWD, NYP]

Keith Olbermann already lives at the Trump Palace on East 69th Street: He paid $4.2 million for a 2,100-square foot, three-bedroom apartment on the building's 40th floor in 2007. But that's clearly not enough space for the MSNBC host: Two weeks ago, Olbermann paid $810,000 for a 7th floor apartment in the same building. Guest quarters for out-of-town visitors? An abode for his cleaning lady?

One of the strangest explanations Chicago shock jock Erich "Mancow" Muller gave for why his publicist had called his waterboarding "a hoax" was that he risked arrest if she said otherwise. For real? Like Mancow's original stunt, that's a fabrication.

How to determine your Political-Empathy quotient: On one axis find your political ideology somewhere between the two poles of Conservative and Liberal. On the other axis we have "Us"(inclusive) vs. "Them"(exclusive). Yes.

Keith Olbermann devoted a good deal of time on his show tonight to our reporting on Erich "Mancow" Muller's fake waterboarding escapade. He says we're conspiracy theorists. We never said anybody conspired with anybody to do anything, but his puzzling, false, and hysterically paranoid response makes us wonder.

Erich "Mancow" Muller pushed back against our reporting on the fake-ness of his waterboarding hoax on his radio show today. He invited the Marine who poured water on his face—who told us today that he "knows nothing about waterboarding"—to testify as to the realness of the charade.

• It's not just TLC that is happy about the Jon & Kate nonsense. Putting them on the cover of Us six times in a row has been a "windfall" for Janice Min. [NYP]
• Get ready to pay for People.com: Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes says the company may begin charging for access to online magazine content. [AP]
• With book sales plunging and attendance down at BookExpo America, the mood in the publishing industry is kinda gloomy at the moment. [NYT]
• Keith Olbermann is in hot water again. The waterboarding video on his show last week was staged, it turns out, and MSNBC was made aware of that fact before the show, but they went ahead with it anyway. [Gawker]