She'll embrace her status as a queer icon, show up at the GLAAD awards and even host the gayest flight into Australia, but D-lister and reality show star Kathy Griffin does not appear eager to jump into bed with Manhunt, the notorious site for convenient man-on-man hookups. The site was hoping Griffin might be willing to join a marketing event for their newer, slightly less naughty site, ManCam, in which men merely ogle one another via Webcam and, uh, so forth. But she's totally not returning their calls! So they're just going to go ahead and use her likeness in a ManHunt online ad banner anyway, thus getting some nice free advertising. Sure, she could sue, but then that would mean free publicity! The banner and an excerpt from a Manhunt email on Griffin after the jump.

CNN's American Morning has a thing for cheesy rock-and-roll intros, and the Daily Show tonight showcased the most embarrassing among them, including Scorpion's "Rock You Like A Hurricane" for a story on Tropical Storm Bertha or "Changes" by David Bowie for everything from credit cards to reform in China. But the best part comes at the end, when host Jon Stewart reveals how American Morning host John Roberts, once considered heir apparent to Dan Rather at the CBS Evening News, learned to pair pop hits with headlines. Hint: Think Adam Curry. Click the icon for video. UPDATE:

OK, the "beleaguered Vanity Fair editorial assistant Bill Bradly has to get 10,000 VF fans on Facebook before he gets fired" stunt is wearing a bit thin, but it's still relevant. Why? Because it proves that somehow, deep down, Vanity Fair actually believes that getting those 10,000 fans on their Facebook group is actually important to their online brand strategy. That's what's funny! But. Ladies! You could win a date to Graydon Carter's Waverly Inn. Hang on to your panties, though. Ol' Bill won't be getting fired anytime soon. [VF Online]

Cultural capital of the world Los Angeles held up bravely during its earthquake yesterday, not counting its public officials. Bloggers continued their work, showings of Batman went on undisturbed, and gynecologists kept on, uh, doing their thing. But Judge Judy was not the only celebrity to suffer a disruption; the quake shook LA's indispensable horoscope reader CosmosGal (pictured, bracing herself) to distraction! Even worse, the attractive denizens of the Big Brother house were forced to flee outdoors and remove their shirts! You can see both of the stunning clips of disaster survival after the jump; we urge any other minor celebrities who may have been inconvenienced to contact us at once:

Celebrity publicists are definitely busy. They're often liars. Sometimes they try to control media coverage. But are they really a "dark breed of fixers, stuntsters and arch media manipulators"? Do Hollywood flacks count as "an invisible army of Machiavellian schemers"? No, they're more like a very visible army of bumbling media whores and hustlers. But the Times UK has several even more exaggerated descriptions of the prowess of idiot flacks. This story's hyperbole makes it the stupidest article ever written about PR, which threatens to destroy the media forever:

Political journalist Ron Fournier took his lumps recently for an ill-advisedly friendly email he sent to Bush brain Karl Rove back in 2004. Today, the Politico reveals that Fournier was this close to getting a "senior advisory role" in the McCain campaign, probably as some sort of fancy flack. He turned it down and went back to the AP instead, but now this has been reported and it's fueling the anti-AP fire. They're in bed with McCain! It's like there are these two gigantic beds in DC and everyone in the press is lying down on them with a candidate. Or it's like bullshit. This story, and the last one, are pointless except as part of some weird campaign to embarrass Ron Fournier. Fournier quit the Associated Press a couple years back to start something terrible called HotSoup.com, a sort of message board social networking political blog thing that was supposed to revolutionize everything ever. A couple weeks later (at least it felt like a couple weeks) he was back at the AP as their online political editor. (He's now the Washington bureau chief.) He's actually done a little bit of good work at the AP, stripping away some of the obtuse house style and inserting some liveliness into wire reports, but now all the liberals will decide the AP is a den of McCainiacs and boycott them or something. We ask you: why is a job offer from two years ago news? That's all this is. A declined job offer. Politico even twists the knife further:

In the (very near) future, presidential candidates will have national advertising campaign budgets of about $637 or so. They'll just make a few very low-tech ads full of stock photos and slanderous lies about their opponents, run the ad once at 3 a.m. on a small local news channel in the Midwest, and then let the news networks swoop in and show the ad in its entirety hundreds of times for free, repeating all of its slanderous lies each time. That's basically been John McCain's strategy so far, and it's working like a charm!

I do not have one single informed or worthwhile opinion about women's fashion, except this: The existence of "Spanx" is a bad thing. Shoving one's thighs, buttocks, and midsection into a tight spandex tube that crushes you like a hot dog casing does not count as "reshaping your body." It counts as "cutting off blood flow to vital organs." Spanx represent deception and instant gratification in the form of underwear, which explains their popularity and their status as a celebrity must-have. So I guess it's not surprising that the company's founder and president credits her success to "my butt":

Remember how sexist media pundits maybe helped Hillary Clinton ruin her shot at the Democratic presidential nomination? "When Hillary Clinton speaks, men hear, 'Take out the garbage,'" loutish author Marc Rudov said on Fox News in January, leading the way for other controversial statements by Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. Well now the shouting heads are doing the same thing to John McCain. And it's those bastards at MSNBC again! Just listen to Joe Scarborough make fun of McCain for getting cluster-bombed by liberal jars of apple sauce during what should have been a simple grocery store photo-op (via the Observer):

Enough said. [Washington Monthly]

John Edwards' mistress has been receiving $15,000 a month in hush money via a rich friend of Edwards, the National Enquirer is claiming. The Enquirer, of course, was the only news outlet that bothered to seriously follow up on allegations that the Democratic politician was having affair with former campaign contractor Rielle Hunter, and thus it was the only publication to catch Edwards in a hotel last week visiting Hunter and his alleged love child. There's been no confirmation of any of this yet from reputable newspapers, like the one that told us about the secret scientist who knew where Saddam Hussein hid his chemical and biological weapons, or from the one that said Puff Daddy was in on the plot to gun down Tupac Shakur. So, gosh, who knows if it can be trusted! But if you still want some salacious details on this hush money stuff — or word from Radar on how the mistress is trying to negotiate her share of this feeding frenzy — it's yours after the jump.

Kudos are in order to the public relations company that "tipped" us earlier today about the supposed government-created mutant that washed up in Montauk, if for nothing other than its timing. The firm, described by its owner as a purveyor of "grassroots viral marketing," was wise to try and place a campaign than in the midst of the summer news doldrums. But neither Gawker nor Jezebel (original recipient of the tip) seem an appropriate place to plug a children's show, which a different tipster thinks is behind the Montauk picture.

Reporters are scrambling all over the place in LA right now to find out just what "went down" in the Great Shake Of '08! Newspapers are pulling first-hand accounts off Twitter! Websites are quoting other websites! But the LA Times is already taking ownership of the official reaction-angle to the disaster, by tracking down Southern California's most scaredy-cat government officers to describe exactly how they cowered in fear when the quake struck an hour ago:

"My editor said that she can't, with a good conscience, tell us to go into the newspaper business." [NYO]

The story we're about to bring you is sad on so many levels. Well, two levels. First, it illustrates the disappointing and kind of disgusting decline of a legendary civil rights institution, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), former home of Martin Luther King, Jr. Second, it shows what a farce half of the things you see on editorial pages are, if they come from public figures. We'll give you a condensed version of this ongoing media vs. advocacy group vs. PR firm controversy-as you read it, ask yourself whether MLK would have found himself caught up in this crap. Charles Steele, Jr., president of the SCLC, wrote an editorial which ran in several southern newspapers. The editorial was against upcoming legislation that would limit credit card fees-a bill favored by retailers (which would save money) but not by credit card companies (which would lose money in fees). Here's the problem: Steele didn't write the editorial. A PR firm working for the credit card companies contracted a third party to write it, and it somehow got submitted to the papers without getting approved by Steele. Fucked up, right? It's obviously a huge mistake by the PR firm. It makes the papers look foolish for running an editorial that the "author" hadn't even seen. And, of course, nobody wants to wake up one day and read something in the paper with their name on it that they've never seen. But Steele and the SCLC aren't heroic in this. Check out their main complaint:

When extremely important news breaks at any hour of the day or night, we here at Gawker receive a BREAKING NEWS ALERT from the web liaison at the New York Post. They are a paper packed with pavement-pounding journalists that never sleep, and they want to ensure that we, the internet nerds, are able to communicate important news items to you, the other internet nerds, in a timely fashion. So we have to apologize for any loss in civic informed-ness that you may incur because of our lateness in bringing you this story, which the Post urgently emailed to us just as it was filed late last night. But better late than never, we're excited to tell you: "GYM MACHINE HURLS LARGE WOMAN." Three (3) Post reporters managed to track the down the details of this occurence:

Earlier this month we wrote about how New York socialite Emilia Fanjul (pictured) hired as an executive assistant and charter-school press contact one Chloe Black, who marries and otherwise travels in white supremacist circles. The story was picked up by the Post and down in Palm Beach, and boy did the shit hit the fan! Among neo-Nazis, that is. Chloe Black, you see, told the Palm Beach paper, "I... do not agree with extremist or racially prejudiced views," even though she was once vice president of the Louisiana KKK and has attended a variety of white supremacist conferences recently, including one in Alabama in June. Perhaps she was trying to appease her boss Fanjul, who according to a Post source did not know about Black's history and who, as of July 18, has not fired her. In any case, commenters in racist Web forums — like the one run by Black's current husband! — are enraged at Black's professed non-bigotry, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports. A sampling:

Everyone is out to get Bill O'Reilly! First Scott McClellan, the elven former White House press secretary, said on MSNBC last weekend that he and his minions used to feed Bush administration talking points to O'Reilly and other Fox News shouting heads. "It was done frequently, especially on high-profile issues," he told O'Reilly nemesis Keith Olbermann following an appearance on Chris Matthews' Hardball. Then CNN covered the allegations as though they were news! Clearly a conspiracy is afoot. O'Reilly said on his show tonight that McClellan and MSNBC "look to be partners in this enterprise," while CNN picked up "garbage." So O'Reilly can presume MSNBC is in cahoots with McClellan simply because it aired and editorialized on his statements, but MSNBC can't say O'Reilly was in cahoots with McClellan even when McClellan himself says that's what happened. Watch this twisted logic unfold by clicking the video at left.

Oh, hey, look who got a blog or column or whatever on the Huffington Post — Joe Dolce! How convenient that is for the thoroughly obnoxious former Star editor, because it turns out his new PR business, shepherded into existence by patron and fellow sometime slimeball James Frey, is promising clients it can "guide you through the new media landscape — ensuring that the attention you receive is the attention you want." The HuffPo slot will surely prove useful in that regard! Or at least it will once Dolce and business partner Davidson Goldin scare up some clients. For now, Dolce appears to be using his column to do some ambitious prospecting. He suggests a "summit" between celebrities and paparazzi, which will never work, especially given who Dolce suggests might host it:

"I have big shoes to fill." Meet The Press hosting gig still unsettled. [TV Decoder]