NBC on Tuesday settled a $105 million lawsuit brought by a woman whose brother committed suicide amid a raid involving the series To Catch A Predator. The man, an assistant county prosecutor, had engaged in a sex chat with someone posing as a 13-year-old boy on behalf of Predator, and an NBC crew accompanied police as they raided the man's home, where he shot himself. Probably as part of settlement, NBC scrubbed nearly all mention of the case from the Predator website. But the news network left copies of key documents scattered around the internet, including a blog post and an ardent defense of the suicide case.

The state of American game-show relations achieved a dizzying new high Tuesday night when Ice-T, Joan Rivers and their respective broods faced off in a very special episode of Celebrity Family Feud. It hardly seemed a sure thing at first; we doubted Ice and host Al Roker could outdo their tasteful wife-for-hire exchange at the top of the show, or that Rivers could overcome the tremulous, post-Russell Crowe Fucking SlutGate gunshyness in time to produce for a national audience. But the rapper more than picked up the slack in the very first feud, wringing potty-mouthed ignominy from Roker's loaded solicitation, "Name something that's slippery and hard to hold on to." And while we may never know the true degree of Ice's ensuing, bleeped filth or his earlier, "Watch it, Al" threat to Richard Dawson's debauched spiritual heir, the possibility that we could love again after The Moment of Truth was never clearer or more reassuring. [NBC via RedLasso]

When Meet The Press host Tim Russert died, NBC held the news so it could inform Russert's family first. An employee at Internet Broadcasting Services, which provides web services for some of NBC affiliates, went ahead and updated Russert's Wikipedia page anyway. Then the New York Times saw the update and broke the news before NBC itself. NBC executives heard about the slip, got upset and now, IBS has responded by firing the employee who updated the page. Silicon Alley Insider's Peter Kafka and Henry Blodget say IBS shouldn't have fired the employee and that NBC should get with the times. Citizen journalism happens, Blodget writes, "and the genie isn't going back in the bottle." Except what the IBS employee did wasn't "citizen journalism."

So the guy who posted early news Tim Russert's death to Wikipedia? He's been fired by the NBC News Web contractor that employed him, because the network had been trying to notify Russert's family before breaking the news. In fact, according to the Times, the network waited roughly an hour before putting word of the Meet The Press host's passing on-air and was "flabbergasted" to see it on Wikipedia. The "junior-level employee" who posted the information did not know the news was being kept quiet. But it's still hard to have any sympathy — he or she worked for a contractor that does newsgathering and publishing on behalf of a broadcast journalism organization. The employee had no business spending time writing for any site that didn't belong to NBC News. [Times]

OK, so that didn't happen. But were you going to watch this video if we billed it as "Antonio Sabato Jr. recreates some of the most famous hood ornaments of all time on NBC's ghetto, circus-themed reality experiment?" Every time we tune into Celebrity Circus, we feel like something really awkward and sad just happened the second before—like that weird French contortionist judge lady just broke the news to Rachel Hunter she has trapeze cancer or something. Everyone's always crying and looking down at the floor and snapping at each other. Then they cut to a training video, and Stacey Dash is sliding into an MRI machine and her Hammock of Death partner is standing in a hospital waiting room, tensely explaining that things don't look good. You get the point. This is not fun! This is nothing like a circus! These Z-list celebrities clearly don't want to be there. Would you really want to told by a panel of circus freaks that you failed to maintain a convincing smile while rotating 360 degrees in a little-person gyroscope? Let's face it—this was a terrible idea. [Celebrity Circus]

• Tim Russert's son, Luke, asked Barack Obama and John McCain to sit next to one another at his father's funeral Wednesday. They complied, and listened as he urged them and the rest of the mourners to "engage in spirited debate but disavow the low tactics that distract Americans from the most important issues facing our country." [Times]

Mark Cuban says Hulu is kicking ass because of a simple marketing device: The NBC and News Corp.-backed site is advertising full-length programs on YouTube to get traffic to shows on which they can sell real advertising. YouTube, rather than ban Hulu, is now angling to keep that traffic in-house by allowing partners to upload shows up to 1 gigabyte in size, enough room for full-length film and television programming (though not at great quality).

A half-hour before the news broadcast on NBC, a Wikipedia user hailing from IP address 66.187.200.74 updated NBC's Tim Russert's page to report the newsman's death. Scooped by the world's most authoritative guide to Idaho wine? How embarrassing for NBC. How worrisome for one of its contractors. See, the IP address 66.187.200.74 belongs to a company called Internet Broadcasting, which maintains some of NBC's local news websites. Not a very good way to keep a news organization as a customer.

Wikipedia beat everyone else to the news of Tim Russert's death last Friday (see screen capture here: the hive-minded encyclopedia reported the event at 3:01 p.m EST., about a half hour before Drudge linked to a short New York Post announcement). According to the Wikipedia's "revisions," the person who reported this sad event was someone from Internet Broadcasting (IP address: 66.187.200.74), an IT company that has in the past has done work for — wait for it — NBC. Interesting. So instead of calling the inevitable friend at the Times or wherever, a nameless scribbler with a business tie to the network rushed to his or her computer to alert the world of Russert's passing in the least noticeable way. Can Wikipedia even claim credit for the scoop since only stalkers obsessively refresh biographical entries? Obviously, the site can't propagate every newsworthy addendum that's added to its many zillions of pages because there's a) no top-down authority for fact-checking, and b) if there were, the facts would have to be checked against an established news source, totally obviating Wikipedia's claim to be the first on the scene.

Hulu — the NBC-Universal/Fox owned video website that is not so different from the numerous other websites offering full episodes of television shows, is the subject of a fawning, incredulous profile in today's Los Angeles Times. While all of the major networks already offer the bulk of their primetime line-ups for free online, Hulu boldly puts a bunch of it together on one site, thereby saving precious seconds of web surfing time. In an embarrassing display of old media-ness, reporter Scott Collins rhapsodizes over Hulu's "special features."

The New Yorker profiled MSNBC editorializer Keith Olbermann and the Post, as the designated attack dog of Olbermann enemy News Corp. excerpted only the most damaging bits. But it still left out plenty of juicy scraps of information about the many coworkers the MSNBC Countdown host has insulted and alienated over the years, and about the arguably insulting things even supportive NBC executives said about him. A quick roundup, starting with Olbermann's insults, including the co-host he moved to tears:

Tim Russert's wake is not until Tuesday, but there's already speculation about who will replace the NBC News stalwart as host of Meet The Press. Russert also served as NBC News' DC bureau chief and as a political correspondent on Today, NBC Nightly News and MSNBC, but no one believes a lone replacement will be able to match that hectic schedule. For the Meet The Press gig, the Times came up with the following shortlist, which includes the sure-to-be-controversial option of CBS Evening News host Katie Couric:

While we never expected Celebrity Circus to be a magical panacea that would cure us from the premature onset of the summer television doldrums, it's fair to say that we here at Defamer HQ were all more than a little bit pumped to watch last night's premiere. After all, as proud Gen Xers, we have fond, kitsch-filled memories of watching Lynda Carter dodge knives and William "The Greatest American Hero" Katt rock the shit out of the Giant Wheel Of Death. So when perfect '80s-storm plundering Ben Silverman announced plans earlier this year that NBC would be airing the show, we marked and calendars and began dusting off our bean bags and hot air popcorn poppers in preparation for what we thought was going to be an awesome night of television. But much to our dismay, our dreams were shattered when we found out that Celebrity Circus wasn't a one-time event where everyone comes together to celebrate the spirit of, well, circusness. Rather, we were hoodwinked into watching yet another entry in the tiresome reality "competition" genre, filled with yet another panel of judges with distracting accents and/or speech impediments. What a drag.

If you, like us, have been making involuntary smacking sounds in anticipation of tomorrow's premiere of Celebrity Circus—NBC's marriage of two separately wonderful things into a third, exponentially more wonderful thing—then this amuse bouche from the NY Post detailing the cast's various injuries and near-brushes with tiger-swat death is almost certainly going to get your salivary glands doing double-time:

Time Warner is in many ways a self-sustaining media ecosystem: Their intermittently functioning cable networks and motion pictures wing create celebrities and cultural trends, which then wind up on the covers of their top-tier glossies, migrate online via their internet porthole AOL, and eventually float amidst the other sewage runoff filtered by bad-seed web-holding, TMZ, at which point the entire cycle begins anew. The only pie Time Warner has yet to stick a chubby little finger into is the business of network TV, and recent rumors have indeed suggested that they were hungrily circling NBC Universal. Addressing a media conference yesterday, CEO Jeff Bewkes issued a standard non-denial denial:

Here we go again! VH1 (who else?) has just greenlit Scream Queens, a reality show in which 10 unknown actresses desperate to be the next Jamie Lee Curtis or Janet Leigh will compete for a starring role in an upcoming “major” Lionsgate film. And boy are they excited — one Lionsgate rep tells THR that “discovering new talent is always exciting,” while another chimes in by teaching us that “VH1 has had a tremendous track record in launching alternative programming that captures viewers' imaginations.” Yes, yes it does! Our brains have been expanded by Viacom's ongoing carnival featuring women degrading themselves in hot tubs and music execs attempting to Make A Band, Any Band Will Do quarter after quarter. But with a reputable horror studio behind Scream Queens and the fact that scary movies have launched more than a few major careers, this one may put its You’re The One That I Want and It Factor predecessors to shame. We look back at five recent Next Big Thing reality shows in an effort to place our bets:

For any of you out there who still don’t “get” Kathy Griffin, we now present you with a single clip that will effectively prompt a lifelong love affair with the red-headed, fast-talking, Scientology-bashing spark plug of an entertainer that she is. On the Today Show this morning, giggly Al Roker had the pleasure of speaking with Kathy about her upcoming hosting job of Bravo’s inaugural A-List Awards and not-so-innocently asked her if there was really anything she wouldn’t do on camera, considering her reputation as a truthiness-telling comedienne who never holds back. What followed was a delicious and epic moment in television history, during which Roker was given a lap dance, off-screen staffers were overheard gasping, and images of a Roker/Matt Lauer/Halle Berry threesome in “the big bed” were thrust into our collective imagination.

In light of the news that Ruler of the Universe Ryan Seacrest will soon be hosting a show on NBC called Momma’s Boys, we’re both delighted that the highlighted wunderkind has decided to ignore all the inevitable backlash, and disappointed that the show will be using mere mortals as contestants. Of all the male celebrities out there, Ryan is undoubtedly one of the most clear-cut examples of how we imagine our worst nightmare of a "Mother May I?" type to be, but he’s certainly not alone. Below, we nominate a few of our own submissions to the casting call printed in Backstage this week for “candidates who should be ready to be humiliated,” in celebrity form of course:

ABC has the most popular television network website, just a shade more popular than NBC.com among the six broadcasters sampled by HitWise. But both websites are down in their relative share of the online audience, while CBS has greatly increased visits. Why? Well, for starters, CBS is ahead in the year-to-date ratings race for actual television. The top draws to the network sites are, once again, competitions and other game shows — American Idol was the top draw for Fox, Deal or No Deal for NBC and Dancing With the Stars for ABC. Almost every site, however, kept users on longer, with the average user spending three more minutes on CBS. Only visits to NBC got shorter, probably because some users are going to Hulu to watch full episodes of shows like The Office and 30 Rock

Is network chief Jeff Zucker spinning against NBC's corporate overlords? [Jossip]