The moderator's chair was empty as Tom Brokaw and Meet the Press vets James Carville, Mary Matalin, Mike Barnacle, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Gwen Ifil, Maria Shriver and the show's executive producer Betsy Fischer gathered to celebrate the life of their old friend. Clip after the jump.
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann often tears right wingers a new one. And the New York Post hates that. And now it turns out that Olbermann has a ladies' disease! So the fun begins! "THE perplexing mystery of why Keith Olbermann acts like a twitchy, hopped-up geek on his MSNBC show has been solved. The New Yorker's Peter J. Boyer reports the TV loudmouth 'has been given a diagnosis of Wittmaack-Ekbom's syndrome, also known as 'restless legs syndrome' (and also 'the kicks,' 'Jimmy legs' and 'the jitters'), a neurological disorder that produces a prickling, itching or crawling feeling in the legs.' Known as a women's ailment because it strikes twice as many women as men, the syndrome has stirred controversy among doctors who don't agree whether it's even real or instead caused by various physical and/or emotional factors." After the jump, Olbermann is clumsy and big-headed.
Star editor-at-large Julia Allison needs your help. Her pal, heiress Meghan Asha, absentmindedly left Julia's external hard drive on the subway on Friday, perhaps lost forever in the dank bowels of NYC. Upon said hard drive was "every video I've ever taken (as well as every photo before 2006) … and no back up. None. Everything gone … literally hundreds of videos and photos, every family event, every birthday, every lip dub I never posted, every sex tape (kidding) … gone. I was in shock the entire day - I've always been the scrapbook-kind-of-girl, and memories (if you haven't noticed) are incredibly important to me." What can you do?
Who made your heart and knees go all to jittery goo the quickest in the movies and TV shows of the wonderful 1980s? My personal fave has never-as far as I know-been filmed in the delightful leg-warmers of the period, so that field is wide open. And, yes, boy-crushes are welcome.
Well, the Internet was fun while it lasted, but now three of the nation's largest service providers are going to shut it down and throw us all back to the dark ages of telephones and postage stamps. "Some people use the Internet simply to check e-mail and look up phone numbers. Others are online all day, downloading big video and music files. For years, both kinds of Web surfers have paid the same price for access. But now three of the country's largest Internet service providers are threatening to clamp down on their most active subscribers by placing monthly limits on their online activity."
Less than a day after Tim Russert died of a heart attack at 58, his life and death have received so much coverage that some bloggers-who need to have opinions on everything-are complaining about the coverage, and that, too, of course, is being covered. Both The New York Times and the Stranger focus on one particular note of dissension from John Cole of Balloon Juice. The rant, and a lot more Russert coverage, after the jump.
Despite four decades of feverishly anti-establishment rocking by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, fans are showing up at concerts and booing the rock veterans for performing anti-war tunes. They've even been mraching out en masse in protest against songs like "Ohio" and "Military Madness." "The forthcoming documentary 'CSNY: Deja Vu' charts that friction, portraying fans who saluted the group's efforts and those who felt betrayed by them, while introducing viewers to Iraqi War vets who are now protesting the war as musicians, politicians and social workers. Directed by Young and due in theaters July 25, the film blends concert and behind-the-scenes footage with short news features created by CNN correspondent Mike Cerre."
Battlestar Galactica's Katee Sachoff "Blonde Tomboy Space Girl" and Tricia Helfer "Bleachy Cyclon" kick ass in real life too! "One in 10 motorcyclists is a woman, but that statistic is rarely reflected on screens big or small. If an actress does 'ride,' it tends to be only for the camera and it's usually rigged, as it was for Renée Zellweger in 'Leatherheads,' whose Indian was operated by remote. Enter Tricia Helfer and Katee Sackhoff — stars of SciFi Channel's 'Battlestar Galactica.' Helfer, who plays the part of sexy cylon [sic] Number Six, and Sackhoff, a.k.a. combat pilot Starbuck, are both avid motorcyclists who will be taking their off-screen passion to guest roles on other TV shows when Season 4 of the space-age series ends."
Newsweek, along with Time, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, is on the short list of publications that Apple CEO Steve Jobs will actually deign to meet and speak with. Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, is taking over as the lead tech reporter at Newsweek. That leads us to a tantalizing conclusion: It can't be long before Fake Steve Jobs and Real Steve Jobs meet in person. Like the attempt at discovering the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider, the unintended consequences could involve the earth folding in on itself. We wait with bated breath.
In what may or may not be an irony of some kind, but should probably not actually be noted, because it's sort of ghoulish and in poor taste, political journalism superstar Tim Russert went out today with a Friday newsdump, that hallowed Washington DC practice of burying news no one wants to see. Earlier today, June 13, 2008, Russert suffered a fatal heart attack. While working, obviously. Because he worked a lot, and he always looked like he loved it.
He invented The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. Have you friggin' heard of it? Dan Lyons, the Apple CEO impersonator whose identity so bedeviled us until he was outed last year, is leaving Forbes for Newsweek, taking the place of Steven Levy as Newsweek's house technophile. So much for a brave leap into the unknown world of the Web. Lyons had made no secret of his discontent at Forbes, where the website is run separately from the print magazine and the two sides hate each other; high-level strongarming was required to get Forbes.com to link to Lyons's blog, which he will now take with him to Newsweek. (Photo by Mark Coggins)
Creepy sexual compulsive Paul Janka is, predictably, trying to stretch his 15 minutes of fame into a TV series. (As if a humiliating appearance on Dr. Phil wasn't enough!) A acquaintance of the self-styled Manhattan Casanova told us that "a friend of mine, who is an aspiring actor, recently auditioned for Paul Janka and an unknown production company who is producing a spec pilot that Showtime has an interest in (but not so interested that they funded the pilot.)" In fact, Paul was just in L.A. last week meeting with Showtime. What kind of television classic do we have to look forward to?
Fox News has been accused of being a house organ of the Republican party, though that's not entirely accurate. It follows the mostly conservative "what can you do for ME" ideology of its owner, Rupert Murdoch, with a bit of the faux-populist anti-elite Nixonian media strategy of Roger Ailes, its initial guiding force. But lately, cracks and strains have become evident. The network doesn't particularly like John McCain, the Republican nominee. And Rupert Murdoch seems to have developed a little crush on Barack Obama, the Democrat. But the network's airheaded personalities just aren't comfortable embracing the black guy with the funny name. The cognitive dissonance leads, over and over again, to terribly offensive slurs followed by half-hearted apologies. Let us examine the worst of their crimes!
An excellent analysis of bizarre racial thinker and hip hop hating intellectual John McWhorter traces his evolution from academia into neocon hackdom, and concludes, "We have admittedly now left the frame of legitimate criticism, but there is a sense in which McWhorter has never recovered from the shame and trauma of having been beaten up by a girl when he was four." [ebogjonson]
Did loutish talking heads on cable news networks ruin Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign with the magic of "sexism?" They couldn't destroy Barack Obama with incessant repeats of racially-inflammatory sermons from Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but this "sexism" is said to be extra strong. On the CBS Evening News the other night, Katie Couric pulled out her mystical "notebook" and read a fable about sexism in which a blonde lady has her career ambitions destroyed by sexist men in the television industry. Mistaking this for a story about Clinton, America promptly got very scared and upset, and the Times sent two reporters out to ask everyone in the media if sexism shouldn't be stopped with "outrage." Here's what they found:
In the world of newsgathering, there is thin sourcing, there is sketchy sourcing, and then there is this post, the sourcing for which is, admittedly, atrocious. It comes from what is said to be an internet conversation between a blogging anti-Scientology crusader and an anonymous purported member of the Church of Scientology. In it, the Scientologist claims knowledge of some big plans on the part of movie star and church bigwig Tom Cruise. So, right there, we have, like, a billion things that could go spectacularly wrong, accuracy-wise. That said, the source claims to know of a move Cruise is about to make on the business front:
There was much consternation in the media world earlier this week when it emerged that Tribune's Los Angeles Times would take its Sunday magazine out of the hands of trained journalists and hand control over to the newspaper's sales staff. Editor Russ Stanton even insisted that the magazine's name be changed so readers didn't get the idea that it still had, you know, integrity. But journalists are as much to blame as the business side for the fact that their work increasingly sounds like catalog copy. Here's ink-stained wretch Rob Walker in his most recent "Consumed" column for New York Times Magazine:
The Los Angeles Times interviewed internet gossip belcher Perez Hilton for the "How I Made It" feature in its business section. The newspaper does its best to puff Hilton up, saying he charges "up to" $54,000 for a one-day ad package and noting he once wrote for Star magazine — without mentioning that Hilton was fired from that same job, per the LA Times' own reporting. The not-so-subtle message to readers: If this guy in bunny slippers can make $50k per day off his crayon-illustrated website, why is the recession kicking your ass? That's OK, since Hilton takes himself down a peg, by talking about his sex life:
