MTV Networks is having its upfronts today, where it pitches its new season to advertisers. The network is also trying to sell sponsors on its "podbusting" techniques—i.e., making commercials that are like mini-shows in themselves. The theory, of course, is that making ads more like regular programs will defeat the almighty Tivo, with content so compelling that you cannot help but watch, slack-jawed, as the hypnotic 60-second Mountain Dew Bourne Ultimatum spinoff flickers before your eyes. They're so entertaining! Way better than boring old regular commercials. In one sense, this is corporate America trying to give us what we want. But do we really want better ads?

TV Guide, one of America's biggest magazines, was sold a few days ago. Now it's for sale again! Well, not the parts of the brand that have some actual value (the website and the cable program guides and on-demand technology). Rather, new owner Macrovision is looking for a sharp business entity that would like to take the print magazine off of its hands. Cheaply, no doubt! And to the skeptics who might say that buying the money-losing print version of TV Guide without the accompanying web brand would be like buying a cow without milk, consider this: the new editor is looking to achieve "topicality and newsiness, urgency." By doing things like reviewing YouTube videos!

Ruthless press baron Rupert Murdoch has concocted two diabolical schemes to ruin the lives of New York tabloid readers and owners forever. First scheme: Murdoch will raise the price of his New York Post — NO! — to fifty cents, with the extra quarter going directly into a special fund for the eradication of all remaining integrity and decency in American media, starting with the Wall Street Journal, which Murdoch has not yet finished burning to the ground forever. Ha ha, just kidding, the extra quarter will just offset the Post's estimated $50 million per year losses, and you will pay it, because it's not like you can just read Page Six on the internet or something. Scheme the second: is classified. This is a secret scheme. But:

"A source from within CNN says that [American Idol host] Seacrest, who has filled in for his friend Larry King in the past, is involved in 'serious negotiations' to take over Larry King Live around year's end." Someone is trying to deny Katie Couric her birthright. [The Scoop via Radar]

"NBC Universal plans to announce Wednesday that it will start a 24-hour local news channel along the lines of cable's New York One... The reasons for the reshaping of WNBC are tied to the coming expansion in digital capacity for local broadcasters as well as the sharp decline in profitability for local stations." [Times]

"[CBS News] Spokeswoman Kelly Halyard insists: 'Sean McManus asked [producer] Rick [Kaplan] to consider taking some time off to rest after working two jobs for the past 11 weeks. After his week off, Kaplan will transition back into his full-time role as the executive producer of the CBS Evening News and CBS News' election coverage.' Counters our source: 'Total bunk.' Our insider suspects this to be PR spin to keep Katie's situation from looking any worse. If Rick actually does return to the Evening News, 'he won't be there long. They are just spinning.'" [Jossip]

Internet gossip Matt Drudge parted with his precious, carefully-assembled hoard of scary Hillary Clinton photos in the clearest indication yet that It Is Definitely Over for the Democratic presidential candidate. Drudge gleefully culls these pics from magazines and newspapers every morning and keeps them in a scrapbook under his bed. But he knows they'll be worthless soon so he's rushed them onto the internet, probably while crying bitter tears of loss. A bunch of talking heads said last night that Clinton was done for, and even more say so in the Drudge-linked clip after the jump.

CBS continues to be a total disaster. Last year they brought in former MSNBC president Rick Kaplan to save Katie Couric's Evening News (without asking Katie's opinion). We all know how that went! Not that Kaplan stayed there long—soon he was dispatched to take control of the constantly failing Early Show, where he replaced the scary, tequila-swigging Shelley Ross. Ross left, but her "mean girl" staff remained. So far, Kaplan has not righted the sunk ship. Now we hear it's curtains for Kaplan. Or at least he's taking a suspicious two-week vacation during sweeps. The kind of vacation you don't come back from. Speculation from a leaky CBSer, below.

Denver Post columnist Al Lewis is on a crusade. A cranky Starbucks crusade! "How 'bout a slice of lemon to go with that $2.10 iced tea?" he asks, rhetorically. Because there is no lemon! Other places, they give you lemons. But fancy-schmancy Starbucks? No lemons. Don't blame Al Lewis. He's written (multiple) columns! He's sent his concerns all the way up the chain to the CEO! And now he knows why Starbucks' stock has lost half its value in a year: because they can't get Al Lewis a freakin' slice of lemon:

Because I didn't grow up with rich, famous New York media figures for parents, who could use their connections to insert me into a choice job in the media world, I've always been in favor of banning people who do have such parents from holding those good jobs. It would make the competition for them more meritocratic, and (bonus) wouldn't affect me personally. Sure, some of those legacy kids are smart and qualified for their positions—but then again so are dozens of other, less connected people. Prime example: Nathaniel Rich, son of Times demigod columnist Frank Rich. Nat is an author and associate editor at the Paris Review, and, by all accounts I've seen, intelligent and capable. But still, I think we should ban him from writing out of pure spite and envy. It just seems like the revolutionary thing to do. In the clip below, Nat talks about how growing up in the Rich family has affected his career. "I don't feel I need to respond to it. People refer to me a lot worse ways (than as a Rich boy)," he says. Such as?

Soldiers are fighting back against a government attempt to take their men's magazines away! Stars and Stripes talked to a bunch of our military men at a base in Germany, and they voiced universal opposition to a proposed bill to ban "sexually explicit" magazines—including Playboy, Penthouse, Maxim, FHM, and the like—from Army bases. They're good for morale, the soldiers say. And besides (everybody together now), they read them for the articles!

Not long ago, a media reporter asked your day editor if he seriously doesn't like Greg Gutfeld. Because surely it's an act, all this mocking him! We send attention his way, he responds with an amusing attack on our commenters, we trash him again, everyone goes home to cash their tax refund checks and buy some $10 cigarettes. But the truth is, no, I don't really like Greg Gutfeld. He's not funny. And his two-dimensional controversialist routine is tired. Regardless of how much either of them mean what they say, Colbert does a wittier Bill O'Reilly. Gutfeld is a mediocre Morning Zoo Shock Jock. He seemingly used to be funny—some of his HuffPo posts were truly inspired. But his show is terrible and his "noxious gay-baiting even though he's friends with plenty of homos" routine is, once again, done better by Ann Coulter. So when Greg says, as he did to MediaBistro recently, that Gawker only trashes him because he refused to write for us, well...

Superstar MarketWatch media columnist Jon Friedman remembered recently that there was this young fellow who worked for the Times once who got in trouble for making things up and lying. It was a bit of a scandal! It happened five years ago this... season, so Friedman asks a couple folk what they think of the current state of media ethics. Salon's Joan Walsh says the Jayson Blair (for that was the fabricator's name) scandal forced writers and editors to remind themselves not to lie, or to maybe fact-check once in a while. Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell says the scandal encouraged more papers to issue corrections more often and not plagiarize so much. But a couple critics note that Jayson Blair is really the least of the newsmedia's woes in 2008.

Frivolous backstabbing egocentric money media war! The protagonists: Tim Sykes (pictured), who made a big name for himself as an under-30 hot shot hedge fund guy by starring in a reality show called Wall Street Warriors, and then proceeded to lose lots of his money and try to remake himself as a media figure; and Randall Lane, the former editor of odious greed magazine Trader Monthly and current head of Doubledown Media, who recently lost a gig publishing Players Club magazine after a financial dispute. Lane disinvited Sykes from a Trader Monthly party last year, and the young capitalist is still nursing his wounded ego! Now Sykes has taken to the internet to tell Lane—a "Sick Twisted Son Of A Bitch"—boo-yah, loser!:

We get all types of PR pitches around here, and, as you might imagine, many of them suck. So we're going to list the three worst ones we've gotten so far this week, and ask for your considered judgment on which is the worst of all. The winner may be specially ridiculed in a future post! Our three entrants: The aforementioned New York Dance Parade pitch, urging us to publish a story on "socialdancing" lest we lose our job; a pitch for Time Out New York's sex issue, which opened with "Feeling hot and bothered? So are we, and we've got the boners to prove it," and touted its "interactive pole, I mean poll"; or a pitch from the Brooklyn Paper promising "Breaking News," reading "Here we go, folks — a hot one (with video!). Enjoy." Which was, disappointingly, for this inane video of two dudes sitting in an office discussing marginal news. Don't overpromise! Cast your vote below:

For some reason, CBS called Indiana for Hillary Clinton at 8 p.m. or so last night, hours before anyone else dared. Katie Couric interrupted whatever nonsense they had on at the time and the CBS news website dutifully posted their story. They even got a Drudge link! So there's a lesson for you: better to be first than right. Maybe as a network without a cable news station CBS just decided to let their election coverage team go home early? Because everyone else had to stay up until 1 a.m., when the hanky panky in Lake County, Indiana finally ended and Clinton won her tiny, tiny victory. A tiny vicory that was immediately stomped upon by everyone from Drudge to Tim Russert. It's over, all the pundits said. You can go to bed! But America can't go to bed, because Hil's still staying up for that 3 a.m. call. The death march continues!

Hannah Montana, the kids' show starring exploited teenager (or, alternately, picture-posing strumpet) Miley Cyrus, ran its first new episode in two months last Sunday. And the ratings were down 24%! Could this be the end for our hero—done in by Annie Leibovitz, Vanity Fair, and a child-unfriendly wave of bad publicity?

Stanley Fish—public intellectual, Times blogger, and man of secret ethics—has been doing a lot of thinking about rental car ads, and their relation to cheating on your wife and/ or gay lover. "The genius of the commercials is that they foreground the sexuality that informs the relationship between the car owner and the object of his/her affection," Fish wrote. That's what I'm saying! Because many rental car ads play on the theme of leaving your old car for a new one, Fish believes they are deserving of deep deconstruction. About his favorite Avis ad, he concludes "Lust is lust and betrayal is betrayal, whether the relationship is gay or straight." Others might just like the part with the car, and the guy, and the joke. The ad, and his deep, sexy analysis of its genre, below.

The headline of this post is also the actual headline of a story in the New York Sun today. We didn't even change it, because it was already funny! The peppy little broadsheet reasons that since London just elected an ex-journalist as mayor, hey, why not here? And the neocon paper rounds up the very cream of the city's third-tier columnist crop to explain why such a feat be might hard for a member of the embittered, self-important writing class to pull off: because columnists "have too much integrity."

There are so many possible stories for the front page of a national business newspaper this morning. The new Democratic primary votes, for example, or the UBS banker detained amid a tax evasion investigation, or the multi-billion-dollar loss at home loan giant Fannie Mae. And The Wall Street Journal made room for some of that today, but it also decided its cover wouldn't be complete without a first-person account of the trial of Uma Thurman's stalker. Reporter Emily Steel was lucky enough to be allowed on the jury in the movie star's case, and as you read her story, you can just see Rupert Murdoch, head of Journal owner News Corp. and frequent presence at the newspaper, rubbing his hands together in glee, his taste for the sensational and drive to broaden the WSJ beyond business both satisfied.