As it turns out, "burn in hell you heartless beast" was not actually the worst thing said about late Journal-Register Co. CEO Robert Jelenic by bitter former employees.

Arianna Huffington may have raised $25 million last month, but with her traffic tanking post-election, the Huffington Post publisher is clinging to old desperation tactics. Like straight jacking other people's content.

Woo, the feud between Conrad Black and Michael Wolff—an incarcerated media mogul fraudster and a self-absorbed media gossip—is heating up! Which of these two ridiculous men is more deserving of your scorn? Let's see:

Spotted: World's fanciest former magazine editor Tina Brown in Tulsa, Oklahoma, spreading the gospel of microfocused Princess Diana gossip-rehashing to interested citizens of the Sooner State. The local paper relives the magical encounter:

The $50 billion Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme claimed lots of big-name victims. Now, a few days into the investigation, the Hollywood connections are coming out. Fun!

Donald Trump is currently getting sued by Deustche Bank for refusing to pay $40 million on a loan that he personally guaranteed. He's probably having some (relative) money troubles. But none of this is his fault! Which is why he is countersuing the bank for $3 billion. It's really the least they can do to make up for their wanton persecution of Donald Trump:

IAC boss Barry Diller could not give a fluff about this "recession" you speak of! While pessimists like our own boss here are laying people off in anticipation of economic doom for media companies in the coming year, Diller is prescribing just the opposite strategy. Yesterday he slammed profitable companies for making layoffs and throwing workers out into an unforgiving environment, and said now is a great time to buy companies. He also railed against "indiscriminate spending." So does Diller measure up to his own expectations? Ehhh...

As predicted, Viacom chief Sumner Redstone sold his stake in Midway Games for pennies on the dollar, just for the tax benefits. We still think he'll eventually have to sell some or all of CBS to pay his $1.6 billion debt. [WSJ]

For the most part, Rupert Murdoch courts controversy. "He likes to set the house on fire and watch all the fire engines drive maniacally down the road," Michael Wolff writes in a biography of the News Corporation chairman. But he's touchy about his third wife, Wendi Deng, nearly 40 years his junior. He was upset when the Wall Street Journal decided to profile her in 2000. And he is suspected to be behind the spiking of a Fortune contributor's Deng profile for an Australian newspaper chain he partly owned at the time, and the subsequent sanitization of Deng's Wikipedia entry. So Murdoch can't be tickled that Wolff says Deng has him by the short wires, according to the Times' new review of Wolff's Murdoch bio:

If Sumner Redstone had just sold his CBS stock back when it looked like he was in trouble, he might have gotten $10, even $15 per share. Instead he sold only what he was forced to, then wasted a lot of time huffing and puffing in the press about how he would never ever sell another CBS or Viacom share, even though $800 million was due in December. In the meantime CBS shares plummeted to less than $5, and only now is Redstone admitting the obvious: He may have to sell some of that stock. Reports the Times:

Embattled Porfolio editor Joanne Lipman interviewed embattled Tribune publisher Sam Zell recently, in a dynamic meeting of the embattleds! Zell is a well-known asshole, but kind of lovable too (if you don't work for him), because he tells the hard truth no matter what. He admits that newspapers' business model was screwy and outdated. He admits that newspapers will never again be able to "break news" in print on a regular basis. He talks shit to Arthur Sulzberger. And he charmingly scoffs at the expensive pursuit of Pulitzers by newspapers that can't even cover daily news in their own cities:

The financial reports of the New York Times Co. yesterday were predictably awful. Print ad revenue was cratering even before the stock market collapsed, so it's hard to see any turnaround in the near future. And as if the economy itself isn't giving the Times enough problems, they're also dealing with Rupert Murdoch trying to crush them, advertising-wise, in a pincer grip; the Wall Street Journal is falling on their head, and the New York Post is coming right up their ass. Rupert made a lot of noise about taking on the Times directly when he bought the WSJ. But he has a big advantage: another major newspaper in the same market. So while the WSJ is trying to steal away the NYT's high-end advertisers (and succeeding)—luxury watchmakers, Tiffany & Co., expensive liquors, and corporations running "message" ads—the other News Corp. paper, the unprofitable Post, is competing with the Times for middlebrow advertisers and upper middle class retailers in New York City—Bergdorf Goodman, Macy's, Bloomingdale's, car dealerships, cell phone companies.

When it moved Project Runway from Bravo to Lifetime, Weinstein Company transformed the latter cable network from overearnest television for spinsters into something more chic and cheeky, or so some people said at the time. Weinstein Company was promptly sued by Bravo parent NBC Universal, which won an unexpected victory in court and impounded the show. Lifetime has been stewing, bitterly, and yelling at its cats, like a spurned mistress, and now Lifetime has decided it's going to sue Harvey Weinstein's company, presumably for being a slimy jerk who said the divorce was final when really he wasn't even separated yet. This makes 2008 the year of total meltdown for Weinstein:

So, former MSNBC guy Dan Abrams is starting a "consulting" firm full of random media people to give advice to rich corporate clients about how to handle media-related issues. Do you know what that's called? It's called a PR firm. But this PR firm would never call itself that, because that would make the media people it employs sound corrupt. The thing is, this firm's business plan is so annoying that the rest of the media (us) is going to cover its clients even harder to make up for it. For example! Abrams' first client is billionaire Ron Perelman. Now why would Ron Perelman need to worry about his reputation?

Arianna Huffington is guest-hosting Rachel Maddow's show on MSNBC tonight, and the lineup looks impressively ambitious: Google CEO Eric Schmidt, HBO talk-show host Bill Maher, stat-whiz Nate Silver and Cory Booker, the Newark mayor to whom the internet publisher was once rumored romantically linked (absurdly, her staff thought). The high-profile lefty gig is an appropriate laurel for an ambitious woman whose left-leaning site produced landmark coverage and gangbusters traffic amid the 2008 election. But as former Huffington Post staff can attest (and have), television appearances also mean a frenzy of last-minute research for editors like Roy Sekoff or Colin Sterling who prepare Huffington's talking points. With an entire, hourlong show to host, rather than a brief guest appearance, it would be reasonable for staff to fear another of the screaming, teary emotional breakdowns described to us by several former HuffPo staffers.

Does super deluxe magazine publisher Conde Nast have trouble "getting" the internet? In a macro sense we'd say they have trouble "getting" the entire magazine business at the moment, since they're in the midst of hacking 5% of their staff off every title, including dozens of online staff at CondeNet. So in that sense their troubles are equally distributed! But as Big Money points out today, Conde has been particularly slow to embrace the web, especially considering the company's level of prestige. Could the problem be.... ego? Big Money says, correctly, that even the magazines with good websites have a relatively weak online presence considering their role in the media power structure. Conde, which was late to take the internet seriously, is even worse, although it owns some of the best magazines in the country.

Ted Turner: simultaneously a crazy old coot and a totally awesome and admirable ex-media mogul! The CNN founder is out promoting his new autobiography, which gives him a chance to go on and on and on about his pet grudge, the scalawags at Time Warner who blew up his fortune by merging with AOL. Dude, it was only seven billion. Let it go! Here he is on David Letterman talking about how CNN sucks these days, without him, Ted Turner, around. Ted, we sincerely want you to come back, you crazy, crazy wild man. It would be great for us. He was also interviewed at the Time/Life building today, where he talked about nothing but how much Time Warner sucks (and prairie dogs):

Had Ted Turner's old rival Rupert Murdoch just issued an "autobiography" written by a former lieutenant, as Ted Turner has, one suspects it would not have been embraced so eagerly by sympathetic journalists at 60 Minutes, the Times, the Wall Street Journal and even AP, which meditated whimsically on the CNN founder's chapter titles. Maybe that's because the News Corporation chairman still enjoys the blood sport of media feuds in his old age, coordinating multi-outlet attacks on relative small fry like Keith Olbermann, while Turner is in the business of moving on — and making plenty of media friends in the process. He has forgiven Murdoch for what he suspects was the hiring of private investigators to prove him insane in the 1980s, as he explains in the attached 60 Minutes clip, and put behind him the loss of $7 billion, a devastating divorceand a bad prescription for Lithium.

Desperate mogul Sumner Redstone may be able pay off some of his $1.6 billion in debt before half of it comes due in December. The solution: Sell off Midway Games, money-bleeding maker of classic arcade hits like Rampage, Spy Hunter and Mortal Kombat. Some $800 million in cash infusions for Midway were a major contributor to Redstone's debt and pissed off daughter Shari, according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported Monday morning that Shari just resigned as chairwoman to Midway, signaling a sale may be in the works.In addition to Midway, the Redstones are said looking to unload their slot machine company. What the hell is divorced ole Sumner supposed to do for fun??

Has Rupert Murdoch made a terrible miscalculation? Michael Wolff thinks so! Wolff, Murdoch's newest biographer, says that the New York Post's uncharacteristically fawning Obama-centric cover today is Murdoch's way of apologizing to the future president (Obama) for the Post's endorsement of McCain. In fact, it's been widely rumored for months that Murdoch wanted the Post to endorse Obama. So what's going on here? Rupert Murdoch has always been canny about getting in good with those in power, even if they're from the party he opposes. He made nice with Tony Blair in the UK. And the Post did in fact endorse Obama over Hillary Clinton, once it was clear Obama would win. Besides that, Murdoch's pet paper the Sun in the UK pretty much deified Obama. And even Fox News managed to work out an Obama interview with Bill O'Reilly, when they weren't calling him "Osama" and such. So why didn't Rupert just get the Post to go ahead and endorse Obama in the general election? Two reason. One of those reasons is named "Sarah Palin." Murdoch flirted with her coyly, and ended up tentatively supporting her convoluted policy proposals in public. It may be that he fell in love with her personality (the same mistake McCain made), or just came to the conclusion that, dumb as she is, at least she wasn't likely to push for any more regulation of his business if she came into office when McCain keeled over. The second reason is more basic: a Post endorsement of Obama just wasn't practical. It would defeat the paper's very reason for existence, which is to be a rabid conservative voice in the midst of the liberal NYC media. So Rupert Murdoch just allowed them to endorse McCain, then set about sending every possible signal that he's willing to be friendly with Obama after he wins. Not that dumb after all.