Kent Brownridge, former deputy to magazine mogul Jann Wenner and recent overlord to Maxim and Blender, is now general manager of the U.S. edition of free-spending celebrity weekly OK!. It seems that between billionaire owner Richard Desmond supplying famous-baby-photo cash and editors Sarah Ivens and the creepy Rob Shuter keeping sources fluffed, OK! needed someone to, like, sell some ads or something. Brownridge apparently didn't compile a stellar track record doing that for Maxim and company, which earlier this month squeezed him from his job, but as Shuter knows, OK! is fast becoming a miraculous land of second media-industry chances. [Post]

Two years ago, 26-year-old publishing heir Ben Goldhirsh withdrew $2.5 million from his trust fund and exuberantly started Good, which was going to change the world by donating subscription revenues to charity, employing Al Gore's kid and writing all sorts of obnoxiously altruistic stories. Goldhirsh, who threatened to sink another $10 million into the venture over the following five years, was all too easy to mock as a spoiled vanity publisher. And, lo, he still is! Because Goldhirsh is so "stressed out" about actually making any money that he's brought in a grownup to, you know, run his business:

Sure, internships are supposed to be tough, but the rabid neoconservatives who run the New York Sun seem to be going out of their way to be severe to the unfortunate young souls who somehow find themselves paying their dues there. The dress code, for example, stipulates not only a suit and tie but a specific color of shirt, shine to the shoe and knotting of neckwear. Is this really the paper that celebrated Middle Eastern women who defiantly wear tight jeans, bikinis and punk-rock-inspired clothes under their burkas in the name of not being "dressed like everybody else?" And is the de facto ban on subway rides of more than 30 minutes coming from the same editors who slammed the mayor for taxing suburban commuters? Apparently so! Whether there's hypocrisy at work in them or not, the Sun's "Guidelines For Interns" are pretty hilarious, assuming you don't have to slave under them. Someone who did just sent us a copy, and we've highlighted some of the fun bits:

Finally, it's come to this: McCain is pulling out of an interview with professional softballer Larry King, because King's CNN peer Campbell Brown accidentally asked McCain proxy Tucker Bounds some tough questions about Sarah Palin's readiness to be commander in chief. (As we said before! The media forgives everything besides violating your own narrative!) This will teach Larry to keep everyone else at the network in line! Here are some of the many many lies John McCain's increasingly whiny campaign is accusing the liberal media of spreading: First of all, every single word of today's Elisabeth Bumiller story on Sarah Palin. All of it is FICTION, they say! Like that thing about how she was a member of that secessionist party because she attended their conference and her husband was a member of their party until be became an "independent" in the '90s? That is false because Palin has been a registered Republican since 1984. More:

"Having been the editor-in-chief of teen magazine YM for five years, and now as the mother of a 17-year-old girl myself, there are a few things I know." What does that sentence tell you? That's right, it's time to hear another one of former Star editor Bonnie Fuller's unique screeds comparing the Presidential race to various moments in celebrity history! Here is why Sarah Palin is just like Lynne Spears:

Are you a talented young go-getter anxious to make useful connections in the media? Or, alternately, are you a lazy young ignoramus anxious to build up enough connections in order to coast through the rest of your media career solely based on who you know? Either way, you'll need to know how to "Network" at "Media Events." PRNewser has an earnest guide to this invaluable practice today, full of tips on how to prepare your "elevator pitch" and "follow up" later to build strong working relationships. If you want to go that route, we salute you. If you're an awkward misanthrope like us, read on for five real tips on exploiting these media cattle calls to your advantage:

If we're dragging politicians' families through the mud it seems only fair to do some digging into the distant past of the mysterious Barack Obama. His ancestors came, of course, from an exotic foreign land: a mysterious, magical island called "Ireland." According to an Irish genealogy site: "Obama's earliest known relative, his 6th great grandfather, was a member of a family of wealthy wig makers who included an Irish politician, Michael Kearney." This Michael "Hussein" Kearney was apparently exactly like his distant descendant Barack Obama. A contemporary scurrilous pamphlet said of him: "No man alive was equally fired with ambition." Zing...?

In America (the Land of the Free) you can't win a libel suit unless you can prove not only that what was published was false, but also that it was published with actual malice—i.e., you must show that someone meant to hurt you on purpose with false information. But in the UK, the situation is the opposite; it's up to the publisher to prove what they wrote is true. So offended parties from across the world practice "libel tourism," filing suits in the UK against writers and media outlets who have only sold a few copies there, in order to take advantage of the crazy English laws. Luckily our (USA) legislators have now done something useful by protecting gossip sites like us from libel suits across the pond. Here's how one evil Saudi billionaire is helping Gawker write more freely: Commentary has a think piece out this month on new legislation signed by New York's heroic blind governor last spring, which allows judges here to invalidate libel judgments obtained in countries with lesser free speech protections (hello, UK). The prime motivation was reportedly the nonstop libel tourism of Khalid bin Mahfouz (see below), which threatened to bankrupt some journalists. Huzzah for our right to write things, and yours to read them! Here are some of recent history's most notable libel tourists:

We have some natural sympathy for anybody locked in a battle against Page Six. Although that sympathy recedes when the P6 opponent is Chaunce Hayden, the rad tat-sporting editor of Jersey gossip rag Steppin Out who was denounced by P6 boss Richard Johnson for feeding him bad tips. Because Chaunce's rage is now leading him to send out mass email blasts about "news" that he, uh, just kinda made up! Or maybe he's always done that? Either way, now he's pissed off the Post even more. Here's the full story of one errant shot in the gossip war: Today Chaunce sent out a big email blast that "New York Post, Page Six scribe, Marianne Garvey, has been fired!" Chaunce wrote that Garvey used to write for him at Steppin Out (which she describes as two pieces when she was in college for $40 each), and that she had recently turned down a cover at the mag that instead went to Shallon Lester at the Daily News, so maybe Richard Johnson was so mad about it that he fired her? But definitely, she was fired. According to Chaunce. Actually Garvey left to take a job at In Touch—which she announced more than two weeks ago. By all accounts she left on her own terms, and wasn't fired. When this was pointed out to Chaunce, he sent out a "statement":

There's no better example yet of John McCain's sudden inability to work his beloved national press like the mess that is the Sarah Palin pick. It's actually hard to remember now that John McCain used to be the coziest man in Washington with the political press corps. Just like it's hard to remember now when "experience" was the McCain campaign's primary selling point, but whatever. You know what happened—McCain was supposed to pick his buddy Joe Lieberman, or lightweight right-wing Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, and then suddenly he's introducing this charming Sarah Palin woman. The move was supposed to signal "maverick," but as allegations of ethical misdeeds and family drama painfully leaked out over a long holiday weekend, it became apparent that the pick was so maverick-y as to be positively outside the bounds of logic. So don't listen to people who say the media is beating up on Sarah Palin over some private family matters—they're beating up on McCain for acting like an idiotic political novice. It seemed so simple, at first. A young woman governor, beloved in her ultimate frontier state. You pull soccer moms, right-wing Christians, maybe a couple disgruntled Hillary voters, and independent Westerners. She even had a bit of energy cred! But when McCain runs as the "experience" candidate and ridicules Obama's lack of foreign policy experience and seriousness and then defends Palin by saying her foreign policy experience is that her state is close to Russia it causes the "serious"-minded commentators to take notice of the only sort of political malfeasance they genuinely can't abide: violating your own message. As Michael Kinsley puts it:

There's a scene in the first episode of Mad Men when the ad agency pulls its only Jewish employee out of the mailroom and has him sit in on a meeting in order to impress a Jewish client. This is called "casting," and it happens in real life too! Today Jews are more adequately represented (we assume), but the ad industry is currently seeking another group for a starring role in central casting: the young. Because young people "get it" in this changing digital age, haha, supposedly! Veterans say this is stupid—mostly because they're scared of getting fired. But they're also right! The ad industry is in a downturn right now, just like the media. That means higher-salaried employees are the ones that agencies would most like to let go. Also, every client wants something "digital," and having taken their cues from Mountain Dew commercials, they're convinced that only young slacker types can truly deliver the audience they need buying their widgets. So, no matter how smart people are, you can't put any old folks in front of clients seeking young buyers, regardless of who actually comes up with the good ideas. And ruminate upon this quote:

As you would imagine, it's hard enough for TV networks to come up with marketing campaigns for all their new shows every time the fall season rolls around, because most of the shows are doomed to be failures. Which ones? Hopefully not the ones you, network marketing person, came up with the campaign for! Promotions are always a balancing act between enthusiasm and tempered expectations. But this year the networks are having a slightly different problem: they don't even have enough material on many new shows to make ads for them. Thanks, writers' strike!

It should really come as no surprise that News Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch wants to be respected by the limo liberals who (officially) disdain his politics and tactics. That's why he paid so dearly for the Wall Street Journal, and was proud for having done so, right? But no one really thought age and young wife Wendi Deng would gentrify Murdoch's barbarian soul to such an extent that he now spins fantasies about buying the Times from one side of his mouth while betraying his conservative shock troops at Fox News Channel out of the other. Murdoch's brash past is becoming an embarrassment to him as his portfolio becomes more respectable, at least according to Michael Wolff, who excerpted his sanctioned Murdoch biography in the October Vanity Fair. And yet the Aussie can't help but revert to his old ways, like when he told Wolff that Muslims are, as a group, inbred:

"CNN President Jon Klein [said he] declined to hire Maddow because he found her 'predictable.'" [Washington Post]

Nearly half of India's population lives on less than $1.25 per day. And yet Vogue India thought everyday Indians would be perfect models for a $10,000 Hermes handbag, $200 Burberry umbrella and $100 Fendi baby bib. The models' lack of teeth and shoes and their dirt flooring only made the products look all the more attractive to India's growing upper class, apparently. But thousands of indebted Indian farmers committed suicide over the past decade, leading one local newspaper columnist to call the ads "tacky... downright distasteful... [an] example of vulgarity." Vogue India editor Priya Tanna thinks her critics are being way too glum:

Now that Hurricane Gustav seems to have safely blown past New Orleans and Baton Rouge, we can turn our attention to ridiculing TV journalists who pointlessly risked life and limb to set up more of those clichéd, wind-whipped hurricane-reporting shots. Even CNN can't resist making fun of those guys, and it employs half of them. The Washington Post said storms tend to produce a "High Chance of Blowhards" and added that "no one covers a house fire by rushing into the burning building, or reports on a war by doing stand-ups in the middle of a tank battle." True, but that's just because there are firemen and soldiers to keep journalists out of those dangerous situations. They'd totally shoot there if they could! Click the video icon to watch some of the most insane moments so far.

Now please don't worry about any PC nonsense. I checked with the Council of Elders and everything's cool. So, Jews! Jewish characters, actors, actresses-anything goes! So long as it's funny or moving or even just plain controversial. And note, I'm going with my first pick because the character is clearly such a Jew, not because the actor is, but do feel free to use any reasoning you like when choosing your clips.

I really dislike critics of any kind, subscribing as I do to the theory that they're people who cannot even for a second do the things they are paid to bitchily criticize. But I've watched At the Movies since I was a little kid and over those long years I developed a love for Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. And, given some time, I even learned to appreciate Richard Roeper when he replaced Siskel after Siskel's tragically untimely death. And I knew that Ebert and Roeper had disowned the Disney-run show and were being replaced by a couple of young nothings from nowhere. But it just hit me really hard when tonight's episode ended with Roeper announcing that it really was his final episode. And that went for Ebert too. Fuck! They really won't be back!

Beyonce Knowles' sister, singer Solange Knowles, went on a local Fox affiliate the other day to promote her album-only after her publicist made it clear that the young diva was NOT to be questioned about her brother-in-law Jay-Z or the failure of his 40/40 Club in Las Vegas. And since it was a harmless fluff piece to fill airtime, the interviewer agreed and didn't mention a thing about it. Sadly, Solange apparently heard some studio chatter while she was being introduced, mistakenly assumed that it was being broadcast, and proceeded to pick a fight. The embarrassing footage ensues.

We now know that Sarah Palin probably isn't baby Trig's grandma (damn!) but someone on her team seemed to think her past needed a little bit of a touch up. On Friday, just 15 minutes before rumors started circulating that John McCain was going to pick her for his VP, someone made more than 30 favorable changes to her Wikipedia page.