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 attached clip shows local news at its absolute finest: a hothouse of over-serious but under-talented egos, squabbling with each other over the responsibility of real journalists to cover broken elevator stories as thoroughly as possible. The anchor, venerable old Jim Ryan, forced into retirement from WNYW in 2005. The reporter, former New York Daily News assistant managing editor Dick Oliver. They have a bit of a history. Clip after the jump.

OMG, did you see that video, the one where a television reporter gets bird shit in his mouth on camera? We did too! Because 800 gullible people sent it to us. The clip is a fake. "That's not our guy. That's not our guy at all," a surprised guy named Chuck said when we called up WXYZ, the local Detroit news station identified by the Huffington Post as the video's producer. "That's not even our microphone," he told us. Yeah, we thought we smelled a rat when we heard the crowd of people laughing in the background. Come on, HuffPo, have you ever seen a local news team out in the field with more than like, a camera guy, and if they're lucky, the van driver? Us neither.
UPDATE:Oh, HuffPo. Editing a credulous item about a fake video with a blase update implying you knew it was a spoof all along is just silly. Especially when your changes get recorded in our RSS feed:

Local journalism isn't a hot Web 2.0 field. Journalist Dan Gillmor learned that the hard way when he had to sell his unsuccessful citizen journalism site Bayosphere to a similar venture, Back Fence, which itself has barely grown past a few communities in Maryland and Virginia. Turns out people get their local news from old outlets just fine, or they turn to specific blogs. That makes sense; why would I need my local news to share a platform with everyone else's local news? The only way to add value is to aggregate already-existing local news and let the user pick the geographic and topical scope they want. That's exactly what EveryBlock, which launched this week, aims to do.

Anemic sales and high gas prices mean America's retailers might've had the worst Christmas ever! "Perhaps the season's biggest loser was women's apparel," says the Wall Street Journal. On the other hand, they didn't spent an hour stuck upside down in a tank full of shit.

Here's a late update on the horrific story that's been riveting our city's leading citizens for close to half a year now: CW11 News at 10 anchoress Kaity Tong remains homeless after being chased out of her Chelsea duplex in July by some sort of killer toxic mold unleashed by the ongoing condo conversion of the O'Neill Building next door. Tong—who's persevered over the decades as the classy, saucy jewel of New York's local-news crown, even through such trying times as the traffic-helicopter arms race of the mid-90s and the "my Doppler is doper than yours" weather wars of the late-90s—has been forced to bunk down with husband Patrick Callahan in a $600-a-night room at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Which, needless to say, is no place for this foxiest of fourth-estate cougars!

News Corp. buys two small Bronx papers, bringing its local weekly circulation to approximately 300,000. [NYT]

It's that time again where we float a rumor currently making the rounds and ask you to do our work for us: Has the NBC axe fallen on some local "favorites"? A tipster writes:

What with an important election coming up and all, the local Fox affiliate last night decided to air an in-depth examination of the day's vital question: Is your husband gay? (Or, to put it in their parlance, "Is the man of your dreams dreaming of another man?") There's video on the website, but there's also an accompanying "checklist" of clues that might provide you with answers. As a public service, we reproduce it after the jump.

In part three of our trilogy of TV news idiocy, please enjoy this weather report. We can't believe they chose Sam Champion over this guy for the GMA job.

INFAMOUS COLD CASE HELD U.S. IN ITS GRIP [NYP]
A killing like none I'd ever seen [NYDN]
Poll [NYN]

After soiling ourselves with fear over yesterday's foiling of the air terror plot, we decided to see how the story was being covered in the media. It was a fairly predictable series of packages designed to once again liberate your bowels from their contents (our particular favorite moment came when ABC's Chris Cuomo gravely informed us that "hair gel can be made into a bomb nicknamed 'The Mother of Satan'.") One local channel, however, went above and beyond the call of duty: Fox 5 summoned up the expertise of Bernard Kerik, former police commissioner, and recent subject of a photo-shoot for Bronx prosecutors. Bernie's currently busy solving the mystery of the missing million, so you've got to consider Kerik a pretty good "get" for Fox. And the Feds.

Ask and ye shall receive: A kind soul sent us the video of Jodi Applegate's on-screen freakout, and it's every bit as enjoyable as we expected. At this point we feel any further comment would be superfluous; just watch and enjoy.

You watch "Good Day New York," kids? Not us; we're too busy masturbating to Ann Curry's face while Johnny Mathis plays in the background. So apparently we missed a total anchor meltdown by someone called Jodi Applegate this morning. We'll reconstruct what happened from viewer e-mails after the jump, but if any of you out there happen to have video, please get in touch.

Channel 4's Aimee Nuzzo gave a report last night on the damage caused to Westchester by Tuesday evening's storms. Approximately halfway through the fairly extensive dispatch Nuzzo noted that, "It will be days before man can clear away what nature left in disarray." That's not just news, people. That's poetry.

• Valerie Plame's $2.5M book deal with Crown falls through. Patrick Fitzgerald subpoenas Judy Miller and Matt Cooper in attempt to find out why. [NYT]
• CBS reporter injured in Iraq is in critical but stable condition, sedated and breathing with a ventilator, and able to recognize her boyfriend. [AP via NYSun]
• Seventy WPers take early retirement. It's almost like working at Time Inc.! [WP]
• The Atlantic is opposed to flip-flops, tank tops. [Media Mob/NYO]
• Court says fuckin' CBS shouldn't have fuckin' fired Arthur Chi'en from fuckin' Channel 2. Fuck. [NYDN]