Fantastic news, America-our constitutional right to repeatedly call a man a murderer has been upheld! Former congressmen Gary Condit, who allegedly caused 9/11 (j/k Gary!) sued Vanity Fair scribe Dominick Dunne for defamation, because Dunne kept claiming he knew that Condit knew stuff he wasn't telling about the murder of former Condit intern/paramour Chandra Levy (which Condit is totally responsible for, allegedly). Dunne went on the tee-vee and said "I think he knows more about what did happen than he has ever said," so the judge dismissed the suit becuz "I think" means it was a constitutionally protected statement of opinion, not assertion of fact. Or, as the judge put it, "Dunne does not suggest that his opinion statements are based on any additional facts not known to the public." This is terrible news for everyone, as now we all actually do have to be careful to use those stupid weasel words. Like "allegedly"!

Megamillionaire investment banker and New York magazine owner Bruce Wasserstein (currently under attack from our advertisers) is reportedly getting divorced from his wife (#3) Claude, and taking up with "a young Asian beauty with whom he may already be planning a family." The scandalous tale of wealth, sex, and power will be splashed all over New York magazine next week, in Imaginary World. In the actual world, you probably won't be reading about it there. More interesting than the rich-guy divorce story, though, is the angle that the gossips are hinting at oh-so-delicately: What's the deal with all these old super-rich moguls hooking up with younger Asian women these days? Interracial dating amongst the rich, incredible and noteworthy!:

Wendy Williams, the queen of hip hop talk radio and sworn enemy of Method Man and his cancer-stricken wife, is in high demand these days. And not just by hitmen looking for work! Williams is about to launch a trial run of a morning talk show on Fox, for those who would rather watch a loud, be-wigged radio DJ first thing in the morning than learn some new summer smoothie recipes from Meredith Vieira. Television is a wasteland, let's face it. But at least Wendy is planning to keep things upbeat; the last long discussion her producer had was about "whether you can say penis."

Is America ready for a Real World cast member to serve in Congress? Don't worry, it's just Kevin, from season one! Back then Kevin Powell was sporting a high top and being the serious guy in the New York house with Heather B and the southern girl and the model guy and the other guy. Now, Powell has shaved his head and declared his candidacy for Congress from Brooklyn. And if young people can't relate to this guy, all hope for political engagement is lost. Observe Powell's stellar set of pop culture credentials:

Oh, this is exciting: Remember how Roone Arledge of ABC revolutionized TV sports by superimposing dramatic personal narratives onto matches, then revolutionized TV news with magazine shows like 20/20 and Nightline? Well, now ABC News is expanding on this pioneering legacy by venturing where no other news division has dared to go before (on purpose): fiction! Or, as ABC calls it, "reporting from the future." The network is asking everyone to imagine the hellscape of 2100 in order to "form a powerful... narrative about the perils of our future", and thus incite change. To do this, you just need to make a short video about how terrible things are going to be, based on a "briefing" from ABC's team of trained psychics. Here's the email pitch sent to some Columbia students yesterday:

John McCain used to totally love hanging out with reporters, back when he drove the Straight Talk Express, a giant party bus where the liberal press corps could smoke their hippie reefer weed and listen to old man MAVERICK tell hilarious stories about being tortured by "gooks." But now all the top journalists have abandoned McCain for the new cool kid, teen pop sensation Barack Obama, and so the Republican presidential candidate bitterly decided to only accept questions from angry people in wheelchairs and craven conservative bloggers. Here are the only two questions allowed during a July 1 campaign conference call, recorded by a reporter for progressive magazine Mother Jones (who will never be allowed to talk to or make eye contact with McCain, ever):

Dennis Kneale joined his CNBC colleagues today in effusive praise of JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon. After Power Lunch host Bill Griffeth said Dimon was "very entertaining" at an FDIC event and "had a career as an after-dinner speaker," Kneale added that Dimon was a "guy talking about what he knows." And when Kneale's longtime nemesis Charles Gasparino argued that Dimon's comments should be treated more skeptically — "discounted by 50 percent... because there's a degree of flackery here" — Kneale strongly disagreed (clip after the jump). It's odd that Kneale is offering kind words for Dimon rather than bashing the dealmaker, given that Dimon thinks the CNBC talking head should be thrown in jail.

Fox News has been hammered with a good deal of bad publicity this week, all stemming from David Carr's takedown of the network's PR operation in Monday's New York Times. One downside to FNC's aggressive attitude toward the press is that their own stars get relatively less attention than other cable news icons like Keith Olbermann or Anderson Cooper. Rachel Sklar points out that Fox News anchor Shepard Smith is "a handsome, affable and hard-working straight-up news guy" who's been "under-covered." That's true, and also lends itself to a "straight-up" joke, considering our past coverage of him as a closeted gay man. As we enter the new, liberal age of Obama, America is ready for real diversity-and Smith's gay status has now become conventional wisdom .

Hillary Clinton aide Howard Wolfson is now a regular contributor to Fox News, but in his heart of hearts, he'd like to be a contributing editor at Spin. As we've mentioned, he regularly sends out indie-heavy playlists of what he's listening to to friends, fellow flacks, and journalists. And we finally found his 2004 end-of-year list! Complete with blurbs! Wolfson's top ten, and other assored bits of music criticism from the be-sweatered communications consultant, after the jump.

"The Irena Briganti that I know is funny, hard-working and always willing to help out a colleague-no matter how busy she is," wrote Fox Television flack Erica Keane yesterday, in response to our "smear" of Briganti, Fox News boss Roger Ailes' PR attack-dog-in-chief. But Keane is in the minority in her assessment of Briganti's charm. Our post on her generated perhaps the biggest outpouring of responses we've had since Bloomberg staffers got the chance to vent about horrid boss Matthew Winkler. There was a wellspring of resentment against the Fox News flack just waiting to come out-and much of it came to us unsolicited. Everyone from journalists to Briganti's fellow News Corp. employees weighed in. "She-devil" is among the more middle-of-the-road descriptions. After the jump, all you'll need to know about Briganti's reputation-and her handful of obligatory defenders:

Billionaire Bruce Wasserstein is under attack from communists! And they're taking the fight to the blogs! SEIU, the service industry union, has been trying to unionize workers at a chain of nursing homes called Atria Senior Living. Atria was recently bought by Lazard Real Estate Partners, which is a little corner of Lazard Ltd., which is the parent company of Wasserstein's investment bank. Since the buyout, SEIU says the nursing homes have raised rents while cutting staff and level of care. You'll find SEUI's tricky pretend financial ads on the sites of the New York Post, the Times, and, yes, Gawker (see attached, or look up). But you probably won't see them over at the homepage of New York Magazine, which is owned by a guy named Bruce Wasserstein. [NYP]

No wonder Lara Logan was so cranky on The Daily Show—she's preggers! Logan, the CBS war correspondent whose well-deserved promotion to CBS' chief foreign affairs correspondent was overshadowed by all this homewrecking nonsense, is now safely in Washington and expecting a child with Joseph Burkett, the contractor she famously carried on an affair with while stationed in Baghdad. The scoop comes from Washington Post "media critic" Howard Kurtz, which is funny, because he is generally useless and was all hand-wringy about how tabloidy this story was last week. Funny how a little exclusive can change a guy's mind, right? More passionate wartime forbidden love, below.

"I don't want to die. I love what I'm doing," said Viacom chief Sumner Redstone on CNBC yesterday. My, what a positive and also extremely sad quote! Coming from an old, old man like Redstone, it's more of a last-ditch prayer to Father Time than a peppy statement of on-the-job satisfaction. After the jump, a complete guide to the top five elderly figures in media moguldom. They're a cast that could end up having spent decades in power—probably because the younger counterparts who should be overtaking them decided to go into the tech industry on the West Coast instead (except Nick Denton). May these old men all live, um, a lot longer:

Remember how Vogue had everyone in a tizzy this spring over its covers? First there was the LeBron James/King Kong cover in April, then the horrific Photoshop job on Gwyneth Paltrow in May. For all the damage the disastrous fronts did to the fashion title and its editor Anna Wintour, one would have at least hoped for a slight circulation bump from all the publicity. Not so: Newsstand sales of the LeBron James issue were off 100,000 copies year-over-year to 350,000 while the Paltrow issue sold 45,000 fewer copies. Sad. [WWD]

ABC News producer Michael Bicks had a feeling something was wrong after dropping out of a long group bike ride a few weekends ago. "Besides the nausea, my only symptoms were a persistent cough and an overwhelming feeling that something was not right... That’s when Tim Russert popped into my head." Bicks looked up the symptoms of cardiac arrest online and, ignoring his instinct that "it really didn't feel like much," drove himself to the hospital, where he learned he was, indeed, having a severe heart attack. He lived to write about it in this morning's Times, where Bicks said there has been a spike in men hauling themselves into hospitals with symptoms like his, and with similar thoughts of Russert:

Quick: Which one of these two boxes is an ad, and which is official Times Web content? Both ran in a column down the right side of an nytimes.com business news article, both have headlines in sans-serif font, both use the exact same link colors. It turns out the one with the big corporate logo (on the right) is actually the editorial content, while the one designed to look like a trustworthy Times table of contents is actually an ad, taking the reader to awful, faux-objective content like this. Congratulations, Times. I read a lot of fairly scuzzy media websites in the course of a day, and I've never been tricked quite this completely. Or as Ashton Kutcher likes to call it, "Link'd."

Good news and bad news. The bad news: The New Yorker has made yet another cartoonist uncomfortable by running a cartoon eerily similar to his work. The good news: This time the culprit is not Harry Bliss! Bliss, you'll recall, is the New Yorker cartoonist who came under fire twice in May, once for an uncredited "homage" to comic book illustrator Jack Kirby, duplicated for the magazine's caption contest, and once for a near-perfect facsimile of a cartoon by John Rau. The cartoon above and to the right is also for the New Yorker's caption contest, drawn by Paul Noth. The Wall Street Journal's health blog noticed it looks just like a Cleveland Plain Dealer cartoon from more than two years ago, above and to the left. Here's what the cartoonist had to say:

In response to a Times column about Fox News uglifying a picture of reporter Jacques Steinberg and viciously smearing Tim Arango and other journalists, the cable network's chief rageaholic, Bill O'Reilly, is pretending to be pissed at the Times for caricaturing him in the illustration for a 2007 book review. The caricature, he said during his Fox show last night, even included some kind of devil horn (clip after the jump). But O'Reilly's screaming on-air hatefest is the worst sort of act, because if you actually examine the illustration, reproduced after the jump, you notice two things.

Over the past week, publications like the LA Times, New York Post and even our own Valleywag have parroted a report from the Adult Internet Market Research Company about how the recent federal taxpayer stimulus checks led to a spike in porn site membership. Predictable: it was an interesting piece of news dangled in front of the media in the lull leading up to the holiday weekend, when filler is traditionally needed. Unfortunately, it looks like the report was "total bullshit," at least judging by the reporting of Adult Video News columnist and porn-market scholar Tom Johansmeyer (pictured).

Condé Nast confirmed tonight it will shutter Golf For Women magazine, seven years after buying the Golf Digest spinoff from Meredith Corp. Ad pages were off 7 percent through the July issue and there's been significant turnover on the business side. Meanwhile, also at Condé Nast, Men's Vogue is looking gaunt. Is the magazine brand spinoff an endangered species? After all, a variety of teen-themed brand extensions threw in the towel on the concept two years ago, including Teen People.