Playboy is cutting 80 jobs , including 55 layoffs, in an effort to save $12 million. The company is also exiting the DVD business completely, moving far-flung employees into the LA office, using cheaper paper, and cutting entertainment expenses (noooo!). This has all been easy to foresee. We hear Playboy's main money source at the moment is international brand licensing, along with distribution of their archives online. Not even nekkid women can convince people to buy magazines these days.

So when you watch the debates, do you stick around for the analysts and pundits afterwards? Do you find out how Chris Matthews and David Gergen and Larry King felt? Do you need to find out what the conventional wisdom is before you go to bed? Figure out the narrative, find out who "won" in the eyes of the newsmedia? You don't need to bother anymore. All three debates this year have followed the exact same script: the expectations set by the campaigns are self-contradictory and confused, the debates seem boring and repetitive, and following each one pundits agree that John McCain won "on points," whatever that means. Then the snap polls come in! Last night, Andrea Mitchell tentatively tried to claim, once again, that McCain won "on points," everyone agreed that McCain was feistier and got better zingers in, everyone fixated on the "I'm not George Bush" line as the best of the debates, Joe the Plumber was supposed to be the story of the day, and overall everyone wanted a narrative shift to a McCain comeback, because that's a better story. But the voters didn't care. CBS undecideds: Obama 53, McCain 22. CNN poll: Obama 58, McCain 31. MediaCurves independents: Obama 60, McCain 30. John King tried to explain away his own poll's bias toward Democrats even as the independents they polled when for Obama by 26 points. This is bad news for pundits! Because one very important role a pundit is supposed to play is recognizing and explaining the mood of the nation. They are supposed to predict, based on their experience and wisdom, what voters want to hear and what they will respond to. And this season, they've been dead fucking wrong, over and over again. But more importantly, the numbers are proving them wrong objectively, and they're forced to correct themselves immediately. In previous election cycles, the numbers could say it was a narrow Gore victory or statistical tie, but the punditry could shift those numbers over a weekend through relentless repetition of the narrative they invented, making it a lopsided Bush gain by Monday. It's much, much harder for Maureen Dowd to control—or even reflect—the "narrative" of the campaign now, because the internet makes all the raw data available and everyone has access to it. We never intend to write a "hooray the internet is correcting and democratizing the MSM" piece but in this instance it does seem to be a useful corrective to the tendency of people like Chris Matthews to mistake their own fevered imaginations for the mood of a nation.

♦ Last night's debate attracted more viewers than the first, but not as many as last week's debate. [MediaPost]
♦ Dan Rather will be covering the presidential elections for a French TV network. Does he speak French? [Variety]
♦ Fox's 24 will command the highest ad rates this season. [AdAge]
♦ PBS has decided not to air a documentary about Bush administration torture tactics until after the election. [NYT]
♦ Britney Spears is back in print to hype her latest fragrance line. [AdRants]
♦ Steve Carell will play a French soldier in Brigadier Gerard. [THR]

Negative ads usually work, despite the fact that everybody whines about them. Not this year! Political scientists (A real job title? Not sure) say that this year's campaign is—as old Bob Schieffer grouchily pointed out last night—the most negative in the history of history. But they also say that this time, that negativity is actually backfiring, for once. Apparently "imaginary bullshit" ranks lower on voters' priority lists than ever before:

Tribune's Chief Innovation (LOL!) Officer and crazy, crazy clown Lee Abrams snuck into Manhattan yesterday to "speak" at a media conference, using his trademark nonsensical version of "words." Luckily Jeff Bercovici was there to chronicle his wisdom, lest it be lost in the huge cloud of purple haze smoke that, we like to imagine, follows Lee Abrams at all times. I wonder if he got a chance to compare the newspaper industry to rock-n-roll?

All those rumors that the Weinstein Company is in trouble? Not true, says Bob Weinstein, who took the stage yesterday at the "Media and Money" conference hosted by Dow Jones and Nielsen and reassured the crowd that the start-up studio was doing just fine. "We're not going anywhere—not willingly, at least," he joked, later adding that the company shouldn't have any problems remaining solvent: "We're fortified with enough cash to keep this business going." If this was just spin, props to Harvey for leaving it to his younger brother to mislead the crowd. Harvey was the one originally scheduled to give the talk, but bowed out at the last minute for "personal reasons."

PBS affiliate WNET TV is very proud of "Torturing Democracy," a documentary crafted by a Frontline producer and deemed "flawlessly journalistic" by the New York station's VP for content. But the show makes PBS suits a little, well, uncomfortable. According to the Times, they asked the producer if that provocative name couldn't be changed, and maybe a panel discussion tacked on, oh and also they wouldn't be able to air it until the day after George W. Bush leaves the White House. You see there's an animated sitcom called “Click & Clack’s As the Wrench Turns” that had higher priority, plus you can't air a documentary like this during the Olympics, so the summer was right out. As was the fall, apparently. Or so says PBS VP John Wilson (pictured), as he undermines the program:

Though she's a newcomer to the internet, Tina Brown has spent a lifetime honing her ability to self-promote. Which is how the former Vanity Fair editor seemed to have instinctively grasped what was expected of her last night on the Colbert Report: sell the sizzle, not the steak when it comes to her new internet venture, the Daily Beast — and remember that no points are deducted for going a bit over the top, per the self-parodying bloviations of host Stephen Colbert. When it came time to discuss the Beast's central role in getting Christopher Buckley fired from National Review, Brown couldn't just say the incident was exciting — no, she had to claim it turned the whole office into a party! Lest anyone think she was joking, Brown again mentioned how much the firing thrilled her a few breaths later. Brown, who has herself done away with plenty of magazine writers, may be learning the nuts and bolts of the Web on the job, but her gleeful, shameless bloodlust may yet reveal her as a natural for the medium. For proof, click the video icon to watch the attached clip.

Is The Daily Beast Tina Brown's clever homage to Evelyn Waugh's fictional newspaper or an inadvertent description of the new website's voracious financial appetite? The web property needs $18m from Barry Diller's IAC to fund its next three years, according to Simon Dumenco.

A tipster at Viacom sends us this regarding the company's rumored looming layoffs: "so here's the deal with viacom layoffs - they'll be no bulk layoffs, HR is laying off 3-4 people a day, until supposedly election day to minimize press coverage. sneaky viacom/mtv!" That would be sneaky. They add, "they are currently working on a company wide layoff structure. they've already begun, in a quiet ninja style manner that viacom normally does not do." We're watching you, Viacom. [Anyone with more info can email us]

Although the business media can't sell any ads during an economic meltdown like the one we're having now, it sure is a great chance for reporters to make names for themselves. Business reporters absolutely live for the periodic destruction of the American economy. This is their Normandy! After the jump, we survey the media landscape and pick out the winners and losers—all your favorites, from Paul Krugman to Jim Cramer, ranked on a merciless 10-point scale! [Ratings are on a 1-10 scale—with 10 being the best—and are based on how much the media person or outlet has benefited from the crisis, how right they've been, and how much influence they've had.] WINNERS

Hey, here's one of the many fundamental secrets of LIBERAL MEDIA BIAS: you know what plays on television? Novelty and conflict. If you're a Democrat who likes McCain, you get to be on CNN! If you're a Republican who's turned against his party, you get to be on Colbert! The corollary is if you're a staunch party line conservative, you'll always have a seat at a table that also features a staunch party line Democrat. So the National Review twits currently experiencing head trauma trying to figure out why their colleagues who dislike Sarah Palin keep getting on TV should probably make note of Ramesh Ponnuru's startling claim that some producers cut him from their roundtables for not being conservative enough. (And if we were a bit crankier we might note that the spectrum of opinions regularly entertained as serious on television ranges from Pat Buchanan's to, representing the left, Paul Begala. But Olbermann has that smug guy from The Nation on every so often so it's all ok and the world is fair.)

Tina Brown launched The Daily Beast last Monday, a fact you're undoubtedly aware of by now thanks to Tina's unrivaled talent for drumming up media attention. The Barry Diller-backed site is a news aggregator—or as Brown prefers to describe it, a site that "sifts, sorts and curates" the web—a concept that isn't all that original considering there are half a dozen sites that do precisely the same thing, most notably Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post, which was widely described as Tina's primary competitor last week. But it isn't Huffington who is most concerned with Brown's arrival on the new media scene. That distinction goes to Michael Wolff, the Vanity Fair contributing editor and author who founded the buzz-less aggregation site called Newser.com a year ago.

So Madonna and her husband Guy Ritchie are finally getting divorced. It's a very shocking thing, since earlier this summer, when reports of a pending divorce surfaced, Madonna's flack assured the world that the couple had "no divorce plans." Could it be that the flack, Liz Rosenberg—a charter member of our list of lying flacks—told something less than the full truth? After the jump, Liz's side of the story, and then the other, more accurate side: We asked Liz Rosenberg about this discrepancy between what she said earlier, and what's happening now. Her answer: "there was no pending divorce earlier this year." So, we asked, does that mean that, for example, the Sun's report that Madonna "initially planned to move back to the US with their three children in July" is false? "yes," Rosenberg replied. Well, how credible is Liz Rosenberg? She told the world in 2006 that Madonna was not adopting a baby in Malawi. Although, of course, Madonna did adopt a baby in Malawi. What else do we know about Rosenberg?

So every day during election season, campaigns release "talking points" to their media surrogates on the tv, friendly reporters, and, often enough, unfriendly reporters. Now, on the eve of a big important presidential debate, Barack Obama's campaign has—breaking!—"issued a set of debate 'talking points' to media on Wednesday morning, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal." Mr. Drudge adds: "The memo oddly mirrors much of the main press analysis and theme of the current campaign." This is because the point of talking points is that a) they reinforce what media people are already saying and b) they are usually repeated verbatim on TV within minutes of being disseminated. This is kind of an inexplicable DRUDGE EXCLUSIVE because even the people who still get their talking points from Republicans already know what the Obama talking points are? Anyway. The talking points are attached, because why not. It's kind of a neat peek into how all the bullshit artists on your cable TV get through the day.

Real estate developer and Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman doesn't make too many appearances on Fox News or Fox Business Channel, which may have something to do with the fact both networks are controlled by his arch-enemy, Rupert Murdoch. Today Zuckerman appeared on Fox Business to discuss the bailout and made the egregious error of quoting a figure from the Financial Times. Didn't Mort get the memo in the green room that you're only supposed to cite Murdoch's Wall Street Journal on the air? Apparently not! But the tension between the two billionaires seems to have cooled: Zuckerman says he thinks the Journal has only gotten better since News Corp. took over, and—just in case you're tuning in, Rupert!—Mort would also like you to know he thanks you kindly for his free subscription. Also: Zuckerman thinks the bailout should have been extended to newspaper publishers, too. Now that would be convenient, wouldn't it?

Old Viacom overseer Sumner Redstone announced last week that he had to sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of his company's stock, after the Wall Street crash left him short on cash to back a huge loan. Then this week, out of the blue, his daughter Shari Redstone, who runs the movie theater portion of National Amusements (the other parts being Viacom and CBS), sent out a statement to the media saying, basically, "HEY, THIS ISN'T MY FAULT!" What's the deal with this madness? Shari wants to run the whole company whenever her dad keels over, but her dad's not so sure that's a good idea, so they kind of hate each other. Sumner never even said that this whole stock sale was the fault of the movie side of the business; Shari went public anyhow:

There's a big dinner in New York tomorrow in honor of Al Smith, the first Catholic presidential candidate. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, CBS News' Katie Couric and various other smug media elitists will be there, along with Sen. Hillary Clinton. The Democratic and Republican presidential nominees have been asked to give 15-minute speeches, but only one has requested an a teleprompter to keep him from just repeating "Who is the REAL Barack Obama, my friends" over and over for the entire speech. Organizers are confused, the Post reports, because they've never met a politician who couldn't give a 15-minute address without elaborate technological aids, and in fact no one has asked for a teleprompter for this event, ever, but really McCain just knows he'll be tired out from personally insulting and snubbing Barack Obama in a variety of innovative new ways at tonight's debate.

For some reason Denis Leary, who is actually an accomplished TV and movie star and halfway-decent comedian, has joined with reliable moron and talk-radio screamer Michael Savage and misguided trashy-TV host Jenny McCarthy in spreading scientifically-dubious pap about autism. The charitable explanation is that Leary was rushing to meet the deadline for his book, Why We Suck, or, as all-too-many comedians do, filling it with unfiltered, subliterate transcriptions of experimental new stand-up comedy material when he wrote, "there is a huge boom in autism... because inattentive mothers and competitive dads want an explanation for why their dumb-ass kids can't compete academically." The Autism Society is obviously thrilled. More, via Page Six:

Chris Wilson has had to do some major backtracking since writing, in a Page Six Magazine point/counterpoint article two weeks ago, that he saw a passenger on an American Airlines flight "either pleasuring himself to online porn, or whittling something under his blanket." The deputy Maxim editor was just joking people! Sort of like his magazine was joking when earlier this year it "reviewed" two albums which had not yet been released, allegedly via the magic of crafty editors. Anyway, Wilson was apparently invited on Oprah to talk about his traumatic airplane experience, and had to disabuse (ahem) one of the show's producers of the idea he had written something, you know, true. Now Wilson is setting the entire world straight, via his "old dear friend" at the Observer: