It was inevitable that the Huffington Post would somehow end up sullied by recruiting such a massive army of unpaid contributors. But few would have imagined something this awful: Valued HuffPo political blogger Carol Anne Burger shot herself Friday, and police now believe she was responsible for the brutal murder of her former lover two days earlier. Burger was a scuba-diving instructor who brought an amateur's zeal to her work, and in this sense embodied the best of HuffPo's democratic approach, calling to mind fellow contributor Mayhill Fowler, who broke the "Bittergate" story. But the website will not be eager to associate itself with Burger's energy in dispatching Jessica Kalish.

• Chris Matthews, MSNBC: "It was romance. It was realism... I thought it was fabulous."

What exactly is happening over at Fox and Friends, America's drunkest morning show? As far as we can tell, this clip shows Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy playing the "Who Can Stare At Each Other Longest Without Laughing?" game while reporting on a killer earthquake in Pakistan. Then they just start showing murder scene video for no reason, which really causes extensive sputtering. Why is the Fox and Friends control room making Brian Kilmeade appear to support death? Click to watch.

One of the newspaper industry's great hopes for the last several years has been that one day, technology geniuses would develop a flexible, paper-like display screen that people could roll up and put in their pockets. Then newspapers could beam their content to your magic screen daily and, voila, print survives, in a way! Well now Wired says that such flexible displays could be a mere two years away, thanks to a generous research investment from the US Army. And by then the Army Times will be the last newspaper left, so everybody wins! [Wired]

It's probably safe to say that Howard Kurtz is the most prominent member of his disreputable clan, the media critics. He analyzes the press full-time for the Washington Post, one of the few national papers left, while the Times has no one regular press critic. Kurtz also has a tv show of his very own! How did he swing such a cushy job? By regularly producing the kind of trenchant media analysis on display in today's column, about a magical fantasy world in which Barack Obama is losing. In this bizarro universe, the Obama campaign is poorly managed, beset by gaffes, and the candidate is a national joke. It's really useful thought exercise, if you're into thinking about things that don't relate to reality. This is his thesis:

Wenner Media, publisher of Rolling Stone and Us, laid off half a dozen people this week, mostly on the marketing side. But we hear editorial layoffs at Wenner are coming down on Friday. Anyone with more info can email us.

Being a regular girl is work enough—God knows what being a Cosmogirl entails. A tolerance for fruitinis? The ability to exist on salad alone? The shamelessness required to "[come] to bed in a soaking wet white tee shirt"? We've been gleefully following Cosmopolitan blogger Leo (Smith '07)—her blog's narrative is "one socially awkward girl's attempts to transform into a sexy, social butterfly." At first, we pointed and laughed like bullies—but it was only because deep down, we all feel awkward. We teased her about her use of the word "[doing] the grown-up" as a euphemism for sex, and how she wondered aloud if playing the field was "immoral". We also said that "increasingly, watching her thirty-day evolution at the hands of people who professionally suggest 'how to be a total man-magnet' is like watching a gazelle getting torn apart by hyenas." That was bitchy. But we were rooting for her all along. Leo's written her goodbye post, and we were worried: did the Cosmo machine spit out a Cosmotini-swilling, Choo-wearing girl-droid in the shape of their brand?Writes young Leo:

♦ Details on the layoffs and management changes at Time Inc. [NYP]
♦ More on the demise of Maer Roshan's Radar and its God-awful TMZ-like reincarnation. [NYO, HuffPo]
♦ Fox News has apologized for putting a racist and anti-Semite on the air. [MM]
♦ Noted media expert (and former basketball player) Charles Barkley thinks Fox News is "corrupt." [B&C]
♦ Barack Obama's 30-minute infomercial airs tonight. [AdAge, Politico]

You may have heard that the Commie LA Times has in its possession a video of Barack Hussein Obama giving a speech in 2003 in which he declares his friendship with Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia professor and Palestinian activist who, clearly, probably knows some terrorists from the Middle East. The LAT says they won't release the video because they promised their confidential source they wouldn't, which is pretty ironclad reasoning. But the truth about these two Muslims and their plotting must come out—and be available on YouTube!—according to the McCain campaign. Luckily there's a way for the layoff-plagued newspaper to appear heroic and score some much-needed cash at the same time: A guy allegedly actually named Aston Grimaldi II, of Dune Capital, is offering $150,000 for a copy of the tape. So why doesn't the LA Times just sell theirs to him? They're a Tribune paper. The company's strongest asset is a parking lot, for god's sake, and that's up for sale. They need every last penny they can get. Plus you would bring a smile to the twisted visage of John McCain, American hero! The only losers would be Hussein Obama and the paper's secret "source," a terrorist. U no U want 2 sell it LAT, LOL!

Back in my day, weed was bought from shady characters standing on the corner, or at a weed spot where shady characters gathered. There was none of this ordering on the phone and having some aspiring male model type roll up to your front door on his bike to deliver your quarter ounce. That's that bullshit. Just another sign of dwindling grittiness, like getting our tattoos in malls. So it's no surprise that our city's weed dealers have morphed from streetwise hustlers posted up in the shadows to fancy-free longhairs who give interviews about their business to the Observer under their real names: Stefan Fitzgerald is a bike delivery guy for a large weed operation who was only too happy to bitch to the Observer about his boss:

Oh Fox News PR machine, how we've missed your vicious personal attacks on anyone speaking ill of the Mothership! It's been literally months since one of Roger Ailes' specially trained attack flacks unloaded against a reporter or a PR person or anybody else for the crime of calling Fox News a den of writhing right-wing pus-sucking leeches, or words to that effect. Well now they're up against 6'6, 250-pound man who specializes in snatching balls. Finally, a fair fight: NBA Hall-of-Famer, erstwhile (former) Alabama Republican and free-speaking man Charles Barkley pointed out the obvious:

Patrick Swayze, like other media and entertainment personalities, opted to work through his treatment for pancreatic cancer. The Times got the first interview with Swayze since his diagnosis, and reported he's working 12-hour days on his TV show, has restored some healthy bulk to his physique and missed less than two days work. But it also indicates Swayze's doctors are still battling his disease, which kills 95 percent of patients within five years. The actor couldn't help but sound a contradictory note amid the Times' reverentially upbeat story:

The name should perhaps be changed to Saturday Night Streamed, suggests the Times' Brian Stelter, and he kinda has a point: The most memorable SNL sketches of the season were likely seen by more people online than on broadcast television. Tina Fey's debut impersonation of Sarah Palin was viewed 14 million times on Hulu.com, compared with 10 million people estimated to have seen it on TV. Numbers for her follow-up impersonation were similarly lopsided. We love the way NBC has used Hulu, but the whole thing looks like a trap.

"A one-time $18 million start-up cost for the launch of a web site is excessive, inconsistent with IAC’s operations, and just not accurate in this case." [Wired]

After it was revealed that she doesn't write her own column for Page Six Magazine, socialite and self-styled "Freelance Journalist" Lydia Hearst took to her Facebook to announce she would devote her "eighteen-hour days" to a "new beginning." What will this fresh new start for the model entail? She's not really sure, but it's going to be awesome, because anything can happen in New York. After all, Krispy Kreme donuts were invented here!

Granted, the headline number is a shocker: 600 people losing their jobs starting two weeks from now at Time Inc. The cuts, reported this evening by the Times, will further hurt morale among magazine workers who once had the nearest thing to lifetime employment in American journalism. But put in proper perspective, the cuts look less draconian than one might have speculated after rumors started circulating earlier this month. For an organization with 10,200 staff, the layoffs amount to six percent of the workforce — a shave rather than an amputation, by the standards of endemic newspaper layoffs and the Great Magazine Die-Off. And they should come as no shock: Time Inc. has been contracting for years now.

Did you wonder who your favorite Slate contributor is voting for? Good news: now you know! Michael Kinsley instituted the quadrennial endorsement list in 2000—go back and read how wrong all the Bush people were!—and it's been a beloved feature ever since, the two more times they've done it, because everyone cares how a Slate copy-editor is voting (spoiler alert: for Obama). There is one McCain vote, a half-hearted endorsement from the conservative editor and Slate lady-blog contributor Rachael Larimore. But there are fewer third-party votes and abstentions than in either of the two previous iterations of the feature, even in divided anyone-but-Bush 2004. Because, duh, people like Obama more than Kerry. But one man, press critic Jack Shafer, remains relentlessly devoted to his utterly wrong-headed principles. Shafer, once again, is voting for the Libertarians! Shafer in 2000:

Wow: The Christian Science Monitor, a highly respected 100-year-old paper with a circulation a lot smaller than its reputation, just announced that it will stop printing issues for good in April of next year. It will continue to publish online only. In doing so, the paper essentially gives up the cost—and "prestige"—of its money-losing print edition in exchange for being able to hold onto more of its reporting staff, including several foreign bureaus. The CSM is by far the most important paper to take this step. Do you know that this means? That the CSM is very smart:

♦ The battle over Project Runway rages on: Harvey Weinstein is now claiming that Bravo intentionally undermined the success of Season 5 by changing the show's airtime, running "mundane and unappealing" ads, and "revealing spoilers about future episodes." [THR]
♦ Barack Obama will appear on The Daily Show tomorrow night. [AP]
♦ The New York Times is not running out of money, say execs at the paper. [NYO]
♦ MSNBC moved into second place in the primetime cable news race, beating CNN for the month of October. [THR]

New York Post attack columnist Andrea Peyser is a vocal fan of both cocks and pussies (but not whores). Why is it always about sex, Andrea Peyser? "With kabbalah, you learn how to turn on the 'light force' - kabbalah-speak for, say, taking out the garbage without expecting sex from your husband in return." Hm. I'm sensing a theme in your work, Andrea Peyser: