Prodigy, Mobb Deep's lead rapper and avid blogger, is currently locked up in Fishkill, NY. With all the time on his hands, he's been reading, writing, and philosophizing. And doing a lot of thinking about how racist the entertainment industry is. And making long, long lists of examples of racist cartoons, movies, TV shows, and advertising, and sending those lists out to be posted on blogs [VIBE]. He has a point! Can you add anything to this rundown?

AP photographer Bilal Hussein, who's been held by the US military on vague, unsubstantiated "terrorism" charges for almost two years, has just been exonerated by an Iraqi Judicial Committee. No word on if or when the US will free Hussein, in light of the decision. Background on the case here. [AP]

Sam Zell is a crazy old man who bought Tribune Company a little while back. Since then, he's laid hundreds off, hired a bunch of nutty radio people, and done a LOT OF SHOUTING. It's refreshing! He says whatever's on his mind! He's irascible! No-nonsense! A breath of fresh air, telling it like it is! And we're fucking sick of it. Here he is shouting about things on NPR. He hasn't turned anything around yet, but he certainly yells a lot! Sam Zell says the YouTube was started in a garage and you don't know your ass from your elbow! Colorful vulgarisms will save journalism! [NPR]

Here is an honorific that we should have been keeping track of more closely: Huffington Post's monthly "Woman of Style." This award is bestowed by HuffPo blogger and author Lesley M.M. Blume, who, according to her bio, "has devoted herself to the study of irreverence, chic eccentricity, and extravagant personas." A worthwhile and rigorous pursuit! Though Blume is—we have to be honest here—a somewhat more over-the-top writer than her skill level and a sense of prudence would dictate. This month's Woman of Style is Faith-Ann Young, "A free-wheeling music reporter and photographer for Monocle, Flavorpill, MOG, and Blender," whose style "at once evokes a 1960s and 70s free spirit — and also the anarchism of the internet generation." Do tell!

Canadian celebrity journalist Malcolm Gladwell got in a bit of trouble recently for telling an embellished story about sneaking a funny phrase into the Washington Post. Canadian less-famous journalist Clive Thompson recently received a minuscule amount of press for admitting that he's jealous of Gladwell. This, Clive, is not the healthiest way to work through those feelings: "These tools raise a fascinating, and queasy, new ethical question." [SilverJacket]

Wal-Mart worked with the same small video production company for 30 years to tape internal company events. But Wal-Mart unceremoniously dumped them as a contractor two years ago,so Flagler Productions decided on a new business plan: selling its old videos of Wal-Mart [WSJ]. And the most incriminating ones sell best! Flagler now gets $250 per hour to let people look through their archive, and since all their customers are Wal-Mart haters, the company is pissed. But they can't do anything about it! They were mean and now they suffer. Which is how life should be, for Wal-Mart. Below, one of the finest examples of repurposing footage from the archives: a 1995 meeting featuring a bunch of company managers on stage in drag. I always knew those Middle America types were kinky like that.

Many months ago, top Washington Post political reporters Jim VandeHei and John Harris left their real newspaper to go be partners in a multimedia cross-platform Web 2.0 venture called Politico, which is actually a tiny little newspaper in Washington, DC. And a website. They lured a bunch of other top reporters over there too, with promises of lots and lots of Internet money, just like the Huffington Post gets, and promises of expansion and fame. It's been a huge success! Maybe! The Observer reports today that Politico is now turning into a TV show, which makes sense, because they are owned by a company that owns TV stations, but there's still not any word on whether this venture is actually making any money, for anyone. Which we're kinda curious about! Is it, as it appears to be, a big vanity project?

MTV, having covered every other aspect of the high school experience including the marching band, has finally made a reality series about a high school newspaper [NYO]. That hotbed of intrigue and sexual tension! As once-professional journalists as well as high school graduates, we have some bad news: the high school paper is simply not that exciting. Neither is the grown-up paper, for that matter. Newspapers are a prime example of things that produce a somewhat glamorous final product, but whose inner workings are drearily workmanlike. It's like visiting the Nike factory and being disappointed that it's populated by silent, sweating Vietnamese peasants, rather than by Lebron James. MTV's trailer for "The Paper" features kissing teens, violent arguments, pool parties, and a battle for editorship of the Cypress Bay High School student paper that "could change their lives(!)." Asdfjklasdfjkl. Sorry kids, nobody has time to read your resume anways! After the jump, the full trailer. The over-under on the number of these students who actually go into journalism: one. Probably the young Laurel Touby doppelganger

Unlike the Good Old Days, when the only thing you had to fear from an advertisement was a scary photo of a possessed-looking child, marketers in this modern era have given into the temptation to cuss motherfuckers out. The New York Times uses a surprising amount of non-cuss words to get to the bottom of the trend that is advertisers who purposely put bleeped-out words into their ads. Sometimes they're real cuss words; other times, they're mundane things like product names, bleeped out in an attempt to be clever. Fuck that. After the jump, the true balls-to-the-wall prototype of ads that bleep real cuss words: "Swear Jar," a famous viral Budweiser commercial in which I honestly think the guy in the meeting room says "We're gonna fuck some ass!" and "We're gonna suck some big cock!" Still, don't drink Budweiser.

Harvey Weinstein is moving Project Runway from Bravo to Lifetime because his company will now be making $1 million per episode rather than around $600,000 per episode, the Post reported. Understandable, even if some fans of the reality show may have to emigrate from their homelands to watch it. But what's kind of gross is how the media mogul exploited (and probably undermined) the show when it was at Bravo in order to earn more money for Wesintein Co.:

Thank heavens for celebrity gossip Perez Hilton and his new radio deal, because otherwise there would be no one to "show how the blogosphere is generating new talent for the traditional media," as the Wall Street Journal puts it. Perez will make three-minute radio shows for stations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere, for use during rush hours. He's also starring in a summer movie called Gays Gone Wild and has a book deal. Hilariously, the Journal said Perez wants to "carefully cultivate" his public image, just like Paris Hilton. Also, This Changes Everything:

The Hollywood Reporter posted the first scene of the widely-leaked script to Oliver Stone's George W. Bush biopic, W, which is about to start filming. Reading it, it's easy to see why some historians are calling the film an inaccurate caricature. It's hard to imagine even Bush, not to mention Dick Cheney, seeming like as much of a strutting fraternity brother as he does at the end of this White House scene:

Fabricating author Ben Mezrich isn't another Margaret Seltzer or James Frey, instead he's part of a far more serious deception. It has emerged that Mezrich invented most of the card-sharking characters in his supposed "real-life" biography, Bringing Down The House, the basis for the hit movie 21. He also appears to have manufactured the bloody beating of a gambler, the smuggling of cash at the airport using hollow crutches, the theft of a safe and the very existence of an MIT instructor. The thing is, his editors knew all about it. But they decided to market his book as a true story, and label it that way on the cover.

In this competitive publishing environment, you need book promotions that are really HOT. So to hype up Charles Bock's heralded new novel about the underbelly of Las Vegas, "Beautiful Children," his PR team is using fake, barely legal porn! They set up a site with a video (SFW) of a teenage girl auditioning for her first porn shoot—then, just before she gets naked, it redirects to a site for the book! This is truly forward-thinking strategic marketing. Either that, or Charles Bock is just a big perv. [SlinkyFoxVideo.com via AgencySpy]

When will the Pulitzer committee allow online reporting to be considered for an award? People have been asking that question for more than a decade. But blog-sympathizing critics of the prize really need to ask is whether including online news would make a difference in who won.

Hey small Gawker sports fan readership, can you believe Memphis lost that game last night? Derrick Rose looked like he was scared to take it to the hole or something. Probably practicing for when he gets drafted by the Knicks. Unfortunately I had Memphis picked to win it all in my New York Times bracket. Now I'll never own that iPod. [Earlier]

A unnamed Trinidadian student was arrested for fabricating his transcripts and recommendation when he transferred to Yale from Columbia, and could do 25 big ones in prison if convicted. There are also possible federal charges for "stealing" thousands in financial aid—although he pleaded not guilty. You gotta admit the kid showed gumption: we think the whole "college-application fraud" thing may have actually been a piece of performance art!

Elisabeth Murdoch—the daughter of News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch, owner of all currently operating media outlets—has a personal story that Horatio Alger would appreciate. Sure, today she's the CEO of her own production company. But she started with nothing. Absolutely nothing. Elisabeth Murdoch was once a lowly, unappreciated "broke acquisitions executive" on the bottom rung of the ladder, according to Elisabeth Murdoch. In a recent speech to a crowd of other wealthy entertainment executives [Hollywood Reporter], she delivered a tale of woe and triumph that will serve as an inspiration to people who, like Murdoch, had to work their way up with pure grit:

Oh noes! Galleycat teaches us today about what "abandoned authors"—those left behind in the publishing-conglomeration downsizing crunch—should do. Their suggestions? Well, "a bouquet of flowers or a bottle of scotch" never hurt an editor. So... no more advances or book parties, and authors bribing their way to some face-time with booze... What should authors do next, dive right into vanity publishing? Well, just keep blogging, everyone. [GalleyCat]

Mike Lacey, the pugnacious chief of Village Voice Media and overlord of alt-weeklies across America, is known to be a man not afraid to speak his mind. In fact, he's the self-proclaimed "asshole in charge." So attendees at a Phoenix Society of Professional Journalists awards dinner last Friday might have expected Lacey to say something interesting when he accepted an award on behalf of one of his papers [East Valley Tribune]. But they were less than amused when (the white man) Lacey referred to his deceased friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning [UPDATE: also white] journalist Tom Fitzpatrick, as "my nigger."