The Times ran a special editors' note this morning accusing one of its freelancers of twisting the truth "to fit his theme, contrary to the Times' standards of integrity." The writer, Paul Burnham Finney, apparently distorted an American Psychological Association survey to reflect his article's thesis that business travel and the Wall Street meltdown are stressing people out more than anything else. In fact, the survey showed the economy generally is stressing people out. Also, he rewrote a therapist's quote to also be more specific in the same way, the paper said. Having developed something of a history running false stories, the Times seems to have been eager to get out in front of this one, running its correction barely one week after the original article came out — quite a speedy timeframe for deciding one of your contributors is a liar. The full editor's note is after the jump.

Wow, who would have guessed??! It turns out Michelle Obama didn't order Iranian caviar, two whole lobsters, a lobster hors d'oeuvres and champagne from room service the other night, as the Post's Page Six claimed. The wife of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama ate an entirely different treasonous elitist meal (probably) somewhere else. In fact, she wasn't even staying at the Waldorf-Astoria, as Page Six had it. Whoops. The gossip section so did not see this coming, because why wouldn't you run with something so plausible? "We regret the mistake, and our former source is going to regret it, too," it said today. To really make up for it, the paper went ahead and smeared conservative Ann Coulter, by way of trashing McCain:

The plight of sad Rachel Maddow of MSNBC was revealed in the Times this weekend, as expected. The clearly underpaid anchor splits her time between a 275-square-foot tenement in New York and a 140-year-old cabin in a remote corner of Massachusetts, where she is forced to moonlight as garbage hauler. She has no proper shoes, or even a television, so she drinks fermented "sugar-cane juice" and dreams of a bygone "golden age." But things are looking up!

The last days of the presidential campaign were about to make Keith Olbermann's head explode, what with the racism and Islamophobia and calls for death and so forth, so the MSNBC Countdown host is suspending the specialness of his special comments and just doing them every night until he feels like stopping. He knows he "frequently insisted he would never" do this, and he's sorry, but "I suspect this will be the first of nightly pieces, most shorter than this one, until further notice." In other words, the special comments will be regular for a special period, until they go back to being special, as they regularly are. (Olbermann explains in a video after the jump.)

The Hollywood brain trust is trying to figure out why millions of people prefer to see the talking dogs of Disney flick "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" to "Body Of Lies," an Important Movie about terrorism starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe that got murdered a the box office. The working theory: Everyone is depressed from the near-total-collapse of the Western economic system, and canine dancing helps them forget. So studios are now rushing out escapist movies, according to the Times. Including musicals! Also, to give the foreclosed-upon middle class some catharsis, screenwriters are fast-at-work on Wall Street villain characters:

John McCain's presidential campaign won't let Time columnist Joe Klein aboard its campaign plane because, according to an official statement, " we don't allow Daily Kos diarists on board either." Translation:

Economic meltdown or not, certain nightclubs still seem to be blessed with celebrities who will show up for free drinks, supermodels who will show up for the celebrities, and billionaires who will show up for the supermodels, black Amex cards at the ready. We know this thanks to writer and costume-lover Hud Morgan, who bravely traded his fruitinis for passionfruit shots and infiltrated 1OAK on behalf of Men's Vogue (a scan is after the jump). Illustrating how magazine publishers, too, are defying the recession and financing the posher forms of writerly hobnobbing.

Good news, Barack Obama supporters: Your Democratic presidential nominee is winning the campaign for newspaper endorsements in a landslide, with 112 newspapers to rival John McCain's 39! By circulation it's 13 million to 4 million. Sadly, however, those endorsements are almost definitely useless.

Neal Boulton, the motorcyle ridin', guitar-playin' editor of gay magazine Genre, is expanding his unique... brand, with a website that's the " first and only pansexual sex & relationships site for ALL men." It's called BastardLife. "I can't believe how you guys make [Boulton] out to be some kind of American hero," a jilted lady-love of his once e-mailed us. Yeah, but how can we not? The dude once wrote us a letter asking us to please, please explain to girls everywhere that he's not hitting on them—just friendly! Anyway, the website launched over the weekend, and it asks the hard questions: "Who feels David Beckham would be a great lay?!"The site has ten posts so far—all uploaded by Boulton himself. "Not as good at this as you yet—but what the fuck. I have two generous investors thank god. Like John Lennon said, "I can't be what I am not," and THIS is what I am," he told us. THIS = the following subjects: strap-on sex (for straights!), erection tips n' tricks, hottie pinups (male and female), and advice on female orgasms from a lesbian. Thanks for that last one, Neal.

Our rapid 24-hour-a-day news cycle is turning "solid journalism" into a quaint anachronism! As you may have heard. First it was round-the-clock cable news, then the internet happened, and now even real news outlets are making all types of errors trying to keep up with blogs, where we just invent our stories whole, like Keyser Soze staring at a police station bulletin board. Fortunately some journalistic theorists have just the thing to prevent the general public from being suckered into believing everything they read: media training for tots!

Cosmopolitan Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni: "Taste is personal. For instance, I love the texture and consistency of lamb hearts, and for some reason the idea that they’re hearts doesn't bother me emotionally or intellectually — doesn't give me any pause. I love the custard-like richness of brain, though I admit that for some reason I have to make a bit of an effort to edit out my consciousness (and I’m not making a cute joke here) that it’s brain I’m eating." Fine, just put down the knife and we'll bring you whatever you want. [NYT]

Steve Barnes (pictured), the restaurant critic for the Albany Times-Union, was coming out of a restaurant with a friend last Friday night when, with no warning, two young men walked up nonchalantly and beat them up. "They said nothing, just punched us both repeatedly in the face." Barnes doesn't think he was targeted because he was gay, and he doesn't think he was targeted by the restaurant he just left—but he does think he was targeted:

The New York Times had its resident medical doctor reporter examine all the available medical records of all the candidates for president and vice president. The only problem is that none of the campaigns would turn over any records! But, you know, Barack Obama seems healthy enough, besides the smoking. And Sarah Palin didn't release any records at all, not even about her crazy "giving birth en route from Texas to Alaska" thing, but they only devote like one paragraph to that. Because the point of the story is to let you know that John McCain is an old, sick man. He has all the cancers, everywhere, all over his face. Breaking! Ok, sure, McCain's doctors say he's pretty much recovered from his skin cancer, and the chance of it recurring during his first term, say, is like 10%. But they are maybe not letting us know how serious the last bout of melanoma was!

♦ Judy Miller is joining Fox News as a contributor. [WaPo]
♦ David Carr chats with lousy market prognosticator Jim Cramer, who concedes that it's "a completely humbling market," but won't apologize for suggesting everyone take their money out of the market. [NYT]
♦ Jeff Zucker says NBC will cut $500 million from its 2009 budget. [Reuters]
♦ Jeff Probst has a new show in the works: Live Like You're Dying will feature Probst taking a terminally-ill person on "the last adventure of their life." [EW]
♦ A report on the mood at the Frankfurt Book Fair. [NYO]
♦ Rick Yorn has left the the Hollywood management powerhouse the Firm. [Variety]
♦ Max Payne was the No. 1 movie at the box office this weekend, racking up $18 million in ticket sales. [LAT]

Here's what you can expect in the coming year, internet lovers: lots of young internet companies going broke. The ones you love! Including, but not limited to, user-generated video sites, ad networks, fringe social media sites, and companies that make all those sweet apps. Why? Because in our brave new economy, companies are slower to buy bullshit ads of questionable efficacy on every random "Web 2.0" site. How bad will it get? We'll tell you: Ad Age predicts a small amount of growth:

Jim Cramer, CNBC's chief stock shouter and generally erratic personality, has at least one thing going for him: he owns up to his mistakes. Which are legion! It makes him a more sympathetic figure than he would be if he gave equally bad advice without appearing close to tears so often. But Cramer also stands by his advice that may yet prove to be wrong. Earlier this month he told everyone to yank all their money for the next five years out of the market. “It was one of the greatest calls of my life,” he told the NYT today. “And I’ve been pilloried for it.” Really? So far, Cramer's been "pilloried" more for the calls that he definitively got wrong, and for being a huge bull in general right up until the bottom fell out of the market. The reaction to his "pull your money out" rant was more slack-jawed amazement at how he could totally flip his entire investment philosophy without blinking. And, you know, at how he was about to cry. He may turn out to be right! We'll see in five years. I guess you can't expect him to know what the public thinks:

You may have noticed that a large percentage of flat surfaces in America are currently occupied by those vaguely enraging tri-panel HSBC ads, where identical images are given different captions to prove that—I suppose—HSBC does not believe in a Kantian sense of moral absolutism. "A child: Love. Responsibility. Welfare Fraud." Now the bank is sponsoring this week's entire issue of New York magazine, meaning you'll have more than a dozen new chances to soak in HSBC's triumvirates of relativism. But considering the timing, it's worthwhile to ask: "Banks sponsoring entire issues: Smart. The Future. Monumental Fuckup?" This issue has been "in the works for several months," meaning that the bank sure as hell didn't know it would be running in the midst of The Great Depression Pt. 2. HSBC says it's all very "timely and appropriate." Mm hmm. Regardless of the intent, the real question is, is this sort of thing wise? With a bad economic outlook for advertising in general, publications themselves certainly hope so. Banks are mostly wandering trying every possible ad strategy right now—from comedy to doomsaying—in search of something that's effective. They don't really know what to do. Shhh! But! The one thing we know is that the proliferation of media makes it increasingly hard for advertisers to get their messages out. So buying all the ad space in a magazine or on a website is probably just going to gain favor as a tactic. They just need to make sure they're not buying it in something that's about to fold. That would be embarrassing. [NYT]

This is a rare post-OMT post, because your night editor, Ryan Tate, is off for the evening, doing whatever those people do on the West Coast. The first minute of slummy pornographer Larry Flynt's Veep-wannabe-based fantasy porn, "Who's Nailin' Palin?" is online, and it's my journalistic duty to share it with you. It's totally SFW. And bless the porny screenwriter who penned the line, "Jeepers crumpets, who could that be?" Clip after the jump.

Why else would we even go to the movies or turn on the television? Okay, there are a few other reasons, but mostly it's the sex and violence. So. What are you favorite scenes of people getting it on or having it out? Or both at once? Obviously, keep it tasteful and SFW. I'll get us going after the jump.

Yohana Banda, the biological father of Madonna's Malawi-born adopted son David, is worried about the tot's future now that David's crazy pop icon mother seems to relish fighting an ugly divorce battle in public. "I am still a poor farmer with nothing to offer, but maybe he would be better off back with us," Mr. Banda said. David's biological mother died in childbirth, and Banda, 34, has remarried and lives with his wife Flora, her daughter Tiyamike, 3, and their seven-month-old son Dingiswayo in a thatched hut. Shown a picture of David with Madonna and her manager, Banda said, "He doesn't look happy in this picture. He looks bewildered. If there is no love in the family, is there any love for him? This is a new and terrible thing to happen to him. I am too upset to think clearly. He is only three years old and he has been through so much."