Larry Mendte, the first male host of Access Hollywood, is under investigation by the FBI for reading someone else's emails. If he did it, at least he probably saw some thrilling stuff: his alleged victim is Alycia Lane, his cop-slugging, bikini-posing former colleague at Philly's CBS TV station. You can see why he'd be tempted! Early indications are that Mendte's snooping could rank right up there with Insider host Pat O'Brien's sexy drunken voicemails in the annals of gossip show host scandals.

Newspaper and magazines are maybe dying because they are simply not as awesome as they used to be. The American Antiquarian Society has put together a book called The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York, and those sporting male weeklies make our modern-day tabloids and lad mags look like they're put together by a bunch of kittens and marketed to little girls. They are called The Flash Press after The Flash, a weekly founded by a drunk Bostonian named William Snelling. He wrote a poem about how much he hated all the other poets in the nation, then moved to New York to spend more time at brothels. Eventually he founded that four-page weekly paper, dedicated to "Awful Developments, Dreadful Accidents and Unexpected Exposures." Was he the original blogger?!

Oprah is the most important person in the world, singlehandedly driving American book-buying and butt cream choices. Ad Age has a monster article today about "How to Get Your Brand on 'Oprah,'" which is the most important task facing American marketers everywhere at any given time. And after thousands of words, the magazine nails the secret to landing your widget in this "pinnacle of product publicity": get Oprah to like you, or something!

Discovery is launching a new cable network called "Planet Green" that will offer round-the-clock "green" programming. The standard assumption is that his network signals a further mainstreaming of environmentalism, and therefore will somehow be good for the environment. This assumption is incorrect. Rather, it signals that environmentalism—a brand of activism that actually means something—has been transformed into "green," a vague lifestyle term that means nothing. What revolutionary do-good messengers will Planet Green bring to the public? General Motors, Tommy Lee, and "earth-conscious celebrities":

Laura Albert was successfully sued for fraud for pretending to be a drug-addicted teen in books she wrote under the assumed name and gender of JT Leroy, so of course she's in an excellent position to lecture her co-conspirator Savannah Knoop for daring to write a tell-all account of the deception. Knoop, you see, was the woman who pretended to be JT Leroy in public appearances, while Albert was the one who did the hard work of, uh, making shit up. Now Knoop is publishing Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT Leroy, and Albert thinks that is "sad and sleazy" because she, Albert, was the real defrauder in the JT Leroy saga. "Just because you play a writer doesn't mean you are a writer," Albert told Page Six. True, and just because you slap the label "non-fiction" on your otherwise mediocre "art" to build buzz doesn't mean you have to refrain from calling anyone else a sell-out. But people have been known to grow and mature! [Page Six]

"Insiders told Page Six that Lohan and OK! are in talks to do a cover where Lohan 'comes out' about her relationship with gal pal Samantha Ronson, and the mag has offered her "around $1 million to do the cover." [Post]

As if its listicle of the "50 Most Powerful Women In NYC" were not journalistically dubious enough, the Post also had to use the list for shameless self promotion, putting two of its own columnists on the list. Granted, some of the non-Post choices were also highly questionable, like the editor-in-chief of Cookie magazine, socialite Ivanka Trump and former hooker Ashley Dupre. But how can you even begin to take the selection of, say, Post columnist Cindy Adams seriously when the first qualification listed for her is "she's got a sandwich named after her?" The Post's self-serving choices are after the jump.

The rumor that the Republican Party has a tape of Michelle Obama railing against "whitey" in Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church apparently surfaced two weeks ago on No Quarter, a blog operated by Larry Johnson, a self-described former CIA analyst and supporter of Obama's Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton. No evidence has emerged to corroborate the wild rumor, but Fox News went ahead and aired the charges on camera today. The justification?

It's not clear whether actor Seth Rogen is smoking marijuana, or something else, in this appearance at MTV's movie awards, which were televised live. But there are three thing you can say for sure. One, the camera pulls back, as though the network wants to obscure the smoking. Two, Rogen just earned some serious publicity for his upcoming stoner film, Pineapple Express, part of a resurgence for the genre of pot movies, which Hollywood considers cheap to produce but highly profitable. And, third, someone is going to get seriously scolded by various media watchdog groups for promoting marijuana use on national television, whether the weed is real or not.

Here's PopCrunch's selections for the "10 Hottest Female Athletes of All Time". Anyone they missed? Anything they got wrong? Thoughts?

They're selling life-sized repilca Cyclons just like the ones in Battlestar Galactica! "You can get one from either the dopey original series or the cool new one. These Cylons [sic] are seven feet tall, weight 300 pounds, have little LED lighting effects in their visors - and sell for a cool $7,900. (That's, like, $8,000 minus the $100 Hopeless-Nerd Rebate.)" Um, anyone got $7,900 handy? Pay you back, I promise! [InsideSoCal]

When you're irrelevant and have lost most of your audience and you say something stupid just so people will talk about you, are you pulling a "Rush Limbaugh" or is that an "Anne Coulter"? Anyway, the fat-headed drug addict radio host, Limbaugh, got a look at those Amazonian tribesman the other day and declared, "[T]hese savages are body painted in red and they're trying to shoot the airplane down with bows and arrows." What else did he say?

So intrepid douchebag Morty White figured that the release of the Sex and the City movie would be the perfect excuse to call up a few of his SATC-loving ex-girlfriends and make fun of them. Isn't he hysterical? "My first call was to Janet. She won the prize for bringing up Sex and the City the quickest-54 seconds into the date, to be exact. We went out on our date in 1999 and haven't spoken since (not including the three messages she left on my answering machine). It took a while for her to warm up to me over the phone, but she finally agreed to play ball:" It begins...

CBS president Les Moonves on talk show host / former supermodel Tyra Banks: "We're in a new day. We've seen with Tyra that the audience is changing. In the past, her audience would have been primarily African-American, but the television audience in general is becoming increasingly colorblind, and younger viewers are particularly colorblind. It's similar to the pattern we're seeing with voters and Barack Obama-he and Tyra have a similar appeal to the youth audience." [NYT]

Now that he's a bigtime fancy-pants director, Clint Eastwood wants nothing to do with his role as a rogue cop with a taste for brutality in the Dirty Harry franchise. Kidding! He's totally cool with it. "'At the time in the press, there was a lot of attention to the rights of the accused, and that's not bad or wrong, but nobody thought too much about the rights of the public or the rights of the victim, that's not what the attention was on,' Eastwood said. 'All of a sudden here was a picture about the rights of all the victims, and I think it really resonated with people who were frustrated.'" And Eastwood's not some gun-nut, either.

So I was gonna do a "Best of Harvey Korman" clip thread to close out that day yesterday, but Gawker Media went all fooey just when I was all ready to get it started. So here it is now. Below is an example of my favorite kind of Harvey Korman moment-namely, him losing his shit. What's yours?

Would you rather be able to fly or be invisible? The Office and Extras creator Ricky Gervais explains the pitfalls of flight to The Daily Show's John Hodgman. Also? Penis nipples and breast testicles.

What's on iconoclastic writer Gore Vidal's mind these days? Oh just everything! Like: "You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?" And: "Everything's wrong on Wikipedia." Plus: "I've developed a total loathing for McCain, conceited little asshole. And he thinks he's wonderful. I mean, you can just tell, this little simper of self-love that he does all the time. You just want to kick him." More of Vidal's idle musings from this month's Esquire after the jump.

Mythbusters co-host and explosives geek Adam Savage chimes in with his review of the Lost season finale. "First things first: the explosives. We blow a lot of things up on MythBusters, so I know from experience that last night Lost missed the mark. The 500 pounds of C4, that whole movie thing about "dummy triggers" and fake tripwires-it's all a load of crap. Nobody does that. At least that's what my friends at the FBI tell me." I've never seen the show, but what comes next sounds like spoilers.

Senator Hillary Clinton trails Senator Barack Obama in both delegates and the popular vote. On Tuesday, the last of primaries will be decided in Montana and South Dakota, where Obama is expected to win. "But that doesn't mean Sen. Clinton will be delivering a concession speech next week. The former first lady is favored to win the Puerto Rico primary on Sunday. A big victory there, combined with strong showings in Montana and South Dakota where Sen. Obama is favored, would put Sen. Clinton ahead in the popular vote, according to her campaign, which counts the votes from the disputed contests in Florida and Michigan and excludes caucus states. Most independent tallies of the popular vote put Sen. Obama ahead [...] 'Voting will be over [on Tuesday] but it's very unlikely the nomination will be secured,' says Clinton campaign strategist Geoff Garin." After the jump, just-released audio of Bill Clinton describing his devious plan for Florida and Michigan at a private fundraiser.