The generous explanation for Schmidt's statement is that he's revolutionized his thinking since 2005, when he blacklisted CNET for publishing info about him gleaned from Google searches, including salary, neighborhood, hobbies and political donations. In that case, the married CEO must not mind all the coverage of his various reputed girlfriends; it's odd he doesn't clarify what's going on with the widely-rumored extramarital dalliances, though.

Schmidt's philosophy is clear with Bartiromo in the clip below: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." The philosophy that secrets are useful mainly to indecent people is awfully convenient for Schmidt as the CEO of a company whose value proposition revolves around info-hoarding. Convenient, that is, as long as people are smart enough not to apply the "secrets suck" philosophy to their Google passwords , credit card numbers and various other secrets they need to put money in Google's pockets.

It's enough to make one pine for the more innocent Google bursting forth in the c. 1999 group picture at the top of this post, also gleaned from CNBC's special. The hair might have been sillier — dig co-founder Sergey Brin and VP Marissa Mayers' cuts, top center — but no one was yet audacious enough to argue against the very idea of a secret.

Fox Business Network
Pro: Fox has been wooing Dobbs for months; TV chair Roger Ailes reportedly wined and dined him in September. Between the additions of mustachioed libertarian John Stossel and ebullient racist cowboy Don Imus, FBN's on a hiring spree. Dobbs would be a perfect fit; one mere lifetime ago, he was a well-respected business reporter, after all. The fact that he went off the rails into right-wing demagoguery will only sweeten this deal.
Con: Dobbs' intense xenophobia forces him to break from the pro-business pack's love of cheap immigrant labor. They'd bond over their mutual revulsion for Barack Obama, though.
Odds: 1:100

Presidential Run
Pro: Conservative columnist Robert Novak was the first to float Dobbs' name for a third-party presidential ticket. The self-proclaimed "independent populist" has a diehard fanbase in politically sought-after middle America, and is himself from Idaho and Texas. Though bashful about his political prospects, he said in January, "I cannot say never."
Con: He also said this: "I haven't got the personality or nature to be a poitician."
Odds: 10:1

His One True Love: Astronaut Media
Pro: Last time Dobbs cut and ran from CNN, it was to be CEO of Space.com, a start-up venture that indulged his unabiding passion for deep space and extraterrestrials. Space tourism is heating up, and the leap from birther to earther isn't so far...
Con: Space.com is doing just fine without Dobbs—even finagling a content-sharing deal with CNN. Also, it'd be totally insane.
Odds: 40:1

CNBC
Pro: During Dobbs' Space.com phase, he worked closely with the very network that had undermined his business news show on CNN. At the time, CNBC's aggressive formula of stock tips and financial advice was ratings gold. Now, whatwith the financial collapse and all, it's just embarrassing.
Con: Going to CNBC would break Dobbs' trajectory of moving away from his actual area of expertise (finance, economics) and towards his imagined one (the president's birth certificate). That's the kind of momentum that's hard to stop, but if all he wants is a job and a platform, CNBC will probably be willing to listen.
Odds: 5:1

On Friday morning, Goldman announced on CNBC's air that Microsoft was reducing its revenue guidance by $200,000,000. Because sophisticated investors know that means that Microsoft was making less money, they dumped the stock—volume spiked instantly from 1.3 million shares traded to 6.9 million, and the price dropped by about 1%. In the words of the network's own Mark Haines, "the Microsoft news just bombed the NASDAQ." The rapid drop on the left-hand side of this chart of Microsoft's performance Friday just before 11 a.m. coincides with Goldman's announcement.

Unfortunately, he got it precisely backward: Microsoft was cutting its operating expenses by $200,000,000. Goldman never corrected or apologized for the error, though he did offer a "clarification" shortly after and reported the guidance accurately in order to "make sure we all understand." Business Insider asked CNBC if that was it, or if an apology was in order:

Given the damage the report caused, we were surprised by this. We asked CNBC whether it planned to issue an apology. The answer was no. The network rep said, simply, "We corrected [the mistake] on air."

Frankly, we share CNBC's contempt for its audience. If you're stupid enough to spend money based on what CNBC says, you deserve to lose it. On the other hand, there's a killing to be made in CNBC fuck-up arbitrage.

For all his bluster, Gasparino can be a bit thin-skinned. His primary beef with Sorkin is over this passage from Too Big to Fail, in which Sorkin quotes Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein's thoughts on Gasparino's reporting:

While the 53-year-old Goldman C.E.O. kept a television in his office, he was so disgusted with what he believed was CNBC's Charlie Gasparino's "rumor-mongering" that he had turned it off in protest. "That's not my thing," he told [Morgan Stanley CEO John] Mack. "I don't do TV."

Do not call Charlie Gasparino a rumor-monger, or quote someone else doing so. He doesn't like it! Especially when it appears not to be true: According to Business Insider, a Goldman Sachs spokeswoman confirmed the anecdote about Blankfein turning off CNBC, but said "'rumor-mongering' is not a direct quote."

Gasparino was so broken up about the alleged misquote that he had his lawyer send letters to Sorkin's publisher Viking and to Vanity Fair, which reprinted the anecdote in an excerpt this month, demanding corrections. When we heard that Sorkin was going to be on Gasparino's turf twice today, we gave him a call to see what he thought about that.

"I don't own the network," he said. "But if he repeats what he said about me in his book on the air, there's going to be a big problem. Blankfein didn't say it. I like Andrew a lot, but I did tell him that I thought he was incredibly stupid and sloppy. He never even called me. I said, 'Why didn't you mention this rumor-mongering thing?'" On top of Blankfein's apparent walk-back on the quote, Gasparino is angry that Sorkin didn't depart from the book's narrative to investigate precisely what rumors Blankfein was allegedly accusing him of mongering: "What did I say that merits that description?"

"When I first saw that quote, I doubted it was real," Gasparino says. "It makes me wonder if the rest of the book is real."

And wonder he does: Gasparino is also keyed about this passage, in which Mack calls GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt at the height of the meltdown last year to complain about CNBC:

Mack believed negative speculation was purposely being spread by his rivals and repeated uncritically on CNBC. He was so furious with what he believed was "bullshit coverage" that he called to complain to Jeff Immelt.

For some reason, Gasparino thinks Sorkin is implying that the "bullshit coverage" remark was directed at him. "It made it sound like Mack was complaining about me," Gasparino says. "Mack himself point blank told me he wasn't talking about me—it was someone else at CNBC." OK then.

Thirdly, Gasparino disputes a quote that Sorkin attributes to hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller in response to a request from Goldman Sachs's Gary Cohn that Druckenmiller re-invest some of his money in the firm to help keep up appearances:

Druckenmiller, however, was unmoved. "I don't really give a shit-it's my money!" he shot back. Unlike most hedge funds, Druckenmiller's consisted primarily of his own money. "It's my livelihood," he said. "I've got to protect myself, and I don't really give a shit what you have to say."

"I got the same quote," Gasparino says. "I didn't use it in my book. Druckenmiller told me that he didn't say it. 'What he said I said—I didn't say.' He said that Sorkin called him and asked him if he had a conversation with Gary Cohn, but that he didn't run the quote by him."

The "my book" Gasparino is referring to is The Sellout, a book that, like Sorkin's, tells the story of the crash and the bailout. And, like Sorkin's, it has been heavily promoted on CNBC—Gasparino's hits on the network have lately been preceded by the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey to herald the tome's arrival. Unlike Sorkin's book, however, The Sellout won't hit stands until November 3. Sorkin's book came out today, and is already ranked No. 13 on Amazon. So we can understand why Gasparino might be a little bit peeved.

"The only thing I can think of is that he was jamming to get the book done," Gasparino says, "and he didn't dot all his I's and cross his T's." Well, that's one way to describe a competitor getting his book into stores two weeks before yours. "My advice to Andrew next time is, quote them right. Especially when it comes to quoting them about me." UPDATE: Gasparino called to make the fair point that he didn't get beaten in a footrace—the books' respective publication schedules were laid out long ago.

Sorkin didn't return e-mails seeking comment. Druckenmiller did not immediately return a phone call.

Brian Stelter reports in today's New York Times that Fox Business is hoping to simulcast Imus' utterly unlistenable radio show in the same way MSNBC did before they fired him after the "nappy-headed hoes" incident involving the Rutgers women's basketball team a couple of years ago.

Stelter says that the deal is in "advanced negotiations" and that Fox hopes Imus' shitty program can be effective at "motivating new viewers to turn on the hard-to-find network for the first time." The show would reportedly run from 6 to 9am, replacing a show that currently doesn't garner enough viewers to even register a rating by Nielsen, and the idea seems to follow a blueprint for success that Fox has used effectively in the past.

In turning to Mr. Imus to bolster Fox Business, the News Corporation is taking a page from the playbook of its sibling channel Fox News, which now drives the company's financial growth. Fox, founded 13 years ago, successfully translated talk radio values to TV, sometimes by directly hiring radio talkers like Sean Hannity. Already, Fox Business counts two radio veterans, Dave Ramsey and Tom Sullivan, as hosts.

Well it's about time! Seriously, have there ever been two entities more perfect for each other than Don Imus and Fox?

Martin emailed the Tea Party listserve explaining that CNBC needed "lots of energy and lots of anger." She asked: "where are the big events this week and where can TPP best be represented on the news?"

Patriot and Teabagger Pat Wayman responded with a great suggestion: let's throw a riot at a health fair sponsored by Rep. David Scott (D-GA), the Congressman who got a swastika painted on his office sign last night!

Martin explained to TPM Muckraker that the Teabaggers would not be protesting that particular health fair, but the bit about CNBC specifically asking Tea Baggers to display "lot of anger" for their cameras was not disputed.

So. There you go. Maybe we should all join Bill O'Reilly's fight against GE! It actually really is a pretty shitty corporation!

Also commendable: The response of Deutsch's co-host when the homewrecking lothario tells her, "You're going to be thinking about that [picture] later on:" "I'll be thinking how I'm sick." That's empathy for the viewer, right there.

Sporting some kind of hideous quarter-goatee, Kneale, then at Forbes, allowed the Today show to confiscate his BlackBerry, back in 2007. He surely though it would be a glorious publicity stunt on a national stage; that Kneale only lasted 40 hours out of a week indicates he lost control of the situation, and that his on-camera tears were real.

Kneale has trimmed himself up nicely since this was shot, but we hear he's still partial to journalistic theatrics. And NBC is still turning his humiliation into easy buzz.

After Kneale's repeated on-air outbursts against bloggers, in which he has called them "dickweeds" (see June 30 video above) and "digital imbeciles," Kneale told our source who spoke privately with him that the crusade was dreamed up with his producer, former Fox News man Jerry Burke. The idea was to draw attention and drum up buzz.

Which is kind of pathetic, if you think about it, that a major cable news channel is trying to scare up viewers in the puny financial and media blogosphere. Still, there's an outside chance the strategy could eventually produce PR gold; Kneale scored yesterday with a friendly article in the Observer.

Without specifically addressing what he's said to other people, Kneale told us in an email his feelings are "particularly heartfelt:"

My "animus" toward vicious, anonymous bloggers and blind comments pre-dates my joining CNBC... Look at the scary and brilliant Forbes cover story on net anonymity, which I edited, in October 2007: it should make bloggers feel ashamed.

Kneale's campaign against shame is something of a transformation for the one-time Forbes editor whose antics became legendary after editor Bill Baldwin lured him from the Wall Street Journal in 1998. The most famous story — we've heard others, but this is the one that was widely told on the Forbes staff; i.e. the kind of gossip that pre-dates blogs — occurred at the company Christmas party shortly after he was hired. As relayed by people who worked for the magazine at the time, it goes like this:

After the party, Kneale shared a cab back to Park Slope, Brooklyn, with three other people: a female Forbes writer, a male Forbes staffer and the staffer's wife. Somehow, in the course of the ride, Kneale managed to grope both women. The next morning, the male staffer showed up at Kneale's house to avenge his wife's honor, and when the story reached the office Kneale had to beg several layers of the Forbes masthead to keep his job.

The incident was purportedly the foundation for this Feb. 12, 1999 Page Six blind item:

WHICH business-magazine editor, who keeps a jar of blue jellybeans on his desk labeled Viagra, was called on the carpet for feeling up an underling's wife? The co-workers and their spouses were in a taxi heading to Brooklyn after an office party. The underling later went to the groper's home to get an apology. The groper's boss told him that if it ever happened again, he'd be fired.

Kneale declined to comment on the story, writing, "As a rule I do not respond to blind comments... if Gawker will publish the names of the people behind these 11-year-old rumors, maybe I'd have more to say." We know the names of two of the people said to be in the cab with Kneale and emailed them for their version of events. We'll update if we hear back.

We don't begrudge Kneale some purported drunken mistakes in his past. We all have them. Though the number of tales that have crossed our transom in recent days suggests Kneale has more than his fair share. And so we have to wonder if his hype-seeking crusade against gossipy, anonymous bloggers is less about principle and more an exercise in self-defense.

Yes CNBC, fresh from being shamed to the nth degree in recent months for the vigorous handjob they pass for coverage of the financial firms that brought a mightly nation to the brink of collapse, ran a special, "Porn, the Business of Pleasure," last night, and the ratings are in! Looks like a score for CNBC.

According to Nielsen, CNBC, which aired the one hour special at 9pm and repeated it again at 10pm, scored 1,063,000 viewers in the 25-64 age range over the two prime time hours, which was dramatically up from the 232,000 viewers in the same combined time slots on Tuesday, an increase of almost 500%. Hey, ratings baby! Score!

So what did CNBC uncover in their "investigation?" Allow us to run down the highlights:

• The porn industry was birthed in the early 1970s by this movie called Deep Throat. It was shot for $25,000 and made millions.
  
  
• Throughout the 80s and 90s, coinciding with the proliferation of VCRs and DVD players, porn flourished as people could enjoy it in the privacy of their own homes. Many people in the industry became very wealthy.
  
  
• Nowadays, the internet is crimping porn's style, what with online pirating and all. What will they do to survive? Nobody knows.
  
  
• There's this one porn star named Sasha Grey who just starred in a "mainstream" film. She'd like to "crossover" more, but it's going to be hard, what with the gangbangs she's been filmed doing and all.
  
  
• There's this other porn star named Jesse Jane. She lives in Oklahoma City, like a "real American," and lives her life like a "normal" wife and mother. She could be sitting next to you in a PTA meeting!
  
  
• Throughout the program, scenes from porno movies were shown with the naughty bits blurred out, of course.
  
  
  And that was about it. The whole thing didn't really provide any information that the average person couldn't get off of Wikipedia. Here's a snippet from the program last night.
  
  
  

  Congratulations CNBC. You are a complete fucking joke.

• ABC: 3-1. Barbara Walters? Hello? She was made for this.
• CBS: 4-1. Madoff could easily fall prey to the charms of Katie Couric; then at the last minute CBS could swap her out for the 60 Minutes people. Maybe all the 60 Minutes people, at once, hurling questions at Madoff press conference-style, as he squints into a bright spotlight, confused. That's good solid television.
• NBC: 5-1. They have the resources of a network, but who are they really going to send in there, Stone Phillips? Heh. NBC's correspondents would all seem to wear too much hair gel to be considered top-tier contenders.
• CNBC: 9-1. They could appeal to Bernie like so: "Those other networks just want to make you look like a monster in front of an audience of unsophisticated, bloodthirsty, oafish Americans. We can make you look like a flawed but intriguingly brilliant financial genius in front of an audience of slightly more sophisticated, bloodthirsty, greedy investors, who are more than willing to suspend moral judgment if you toss off a few stock tips." Then they can send Jim Cramer to do the interview and just imagine how fun that would be.
• Fox News: 12-1. Hey, Republicans respect self-made millionaires. Plus they could agree to send Bill O'Reilly to interview him and talk only about how New York was a better place when white guys lived in Flatbush.
• Youtube: 18-1. This is what Madoff would do if he was really smart. Get a flip cam, start his own YouTube channel, and do the interviews himself. All the networks would be forced to run them anyhow, and he wouldn't have to tolerate one god damn second of Steve Kroft's mock-surprised look.
• PBS: 25-1. Charlie Rose or Jim Lehrer are both incapable of showing outrage on their faces, which would serve Madoff well, PR-wise.
• CNN: 30-1. Were Larry King to be the guy chosen to conduct the first Madoff interview, the public outrage when the interview devolved into two guys trading stories about women and baseball could potentially get CNN's headquarters burned to the ground.
• NY1: 80-1. Bernie's been transferred out of Manhattan jail now, but still. Roger Clark and Bernie Madoff, on roller skates, at the Central Park Zoo, feeding the sea lions. DO IT.

The CNBC Reports host clearly wanted to push back at the "cowardly" critics, and a CNBC segment about his feud gave him the chance to call his online enemies "dickweeds" and slam one in a live interview (see heavily-edited excerpt above). In the end, though, it's the bloggers who win: Whatever his ratings, Kneale's on-air pushback against a lone, anonymous blogger is sure to be a traffic boon to the targets of his ire — and a revelation to viewers who might never have heard them.

Full video:

The tape dates to last summer, when Susan Krakower, a CNBC executive and co-creator with Ratigan of Fast Money, dared to speak into his earpiece during a commercial break in the newscast. Ratigan didn't like that—it seems the pair had been going through some communication problems:

I'm available all day, every day, and yet you choose not to communicate with me in any way, shape, or form. So I consider it rude and disrespectful on your part, Susan, to decide to communicate with me for the first time in months in the commercial break between the A and the B block.... You're effectively a liar. You lie to me routinely.

The New York Post reported on the exchange back in March, and indicated that Ratigan's issues with Krakower were partially responsible for his decision to jump to MSNBC—after promising himself to ABC News as a negotiating tactic to get more money—in May.

Sounds like a fun guy to work with.

The Guardian says year-end bonuses will be record-breaking at Goldman; Cramer's critique is that you don't know what Goldman's bonuses will be until the end of the year, when they actually are determined. In other words, Jim Cramer is attacking a journalist for speculating about the future value of Goldman's bonuses. Replace "Goldman's bonuses" with "Bear Sterns' stock" and wait for your mind to be blown.

"They just make it up," Cramer said. "I get fired if I make stuff up." No you do not, Jim. You don't get fired. Trust us, we've been paying close attention to this.

"One of the great things about our political system is that you can lie in print," he continued. He meant that ironically, because he's hip. He actually means that it's not great that you can lie in print. Except he also means that it actually really is great after all, since that's how he makes his money. Here's Cramer on how to make money shorting Apple stock by spreading lies about the iPhone, to reporters, who will lie in print because Jim Cramer asked them to:

Apple, it's very important to spread the rumor that both Verizon and AT&T have decided don't like the phone, and that it's not going to be ready for MacWorld. And this is a very easy one to do because the people who write about Apple want that story, and you can claim that it's credible because you spoke to someone at Apple, because Apple doesn't talk.

Update: As for what Obama actually said during the interview, Politico reports that he took a swat at Fox News.

"I've got one television station that is entirely devoted to attacking my administration…That's a pretty big megaphone. You'd be hard pressed if you watched the entire day to find a positive story about me on that front," Obama said.

"We welcome people who are asking us some tough questions. I think I've probably been as accessible as any president in the first six months…..I think that actually the reason people have been generally positive about what we've been trying to do is people feel as if I'm available and willing to answer questions and we haven't been trying to hide the ball."

What did Goldman have to say? Forget the underwhleming new version of OS X, AT&T's crippling of the best new iPhone OS features or the hubub about iPhone upgrade prices: The conference was a "home run." Video:

In another case of tech pundit disassembly, a different tipster was thrilled to find this picture of Walt Mossberg's bald spot on Gizmodo's liveblog:

The cable network's Silicon Valley bureau chief has been something of a parrot for Apple's public relations flacks, but Bartz found him too antagonistic, at least after Goldman asked a lengthy, tortured question that implied Yahoo has contended itself with its rival's leftovers. See the top clip at left.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Missing were the flashes of humor that had the audience at the D tech conference eating out of Bartz's hand after she cursed Swisher. (All Things Digital has finally posted video of the f-bomb; it's included in the lower clip.)

Goldman didn't seem to take the anger personally; he later laughed that "to call [Bartz] the straight-talking CEO of Yahoo would be... an understatement." Hopefully, if only for their sake, Bartz's underlings are able to take her bluntness in the same good humor.

CNBC executives are concerned about Macke's health, insiders say. He is in the midst of a contract dispute with the network right now, and CNBC has been strengthening its hand by limiting Macke's airtime in recent weeks, which seems to have increased the amount of stress he is under. After yesterday's bizarre outbursts, he won't likely be back on the air too soon. We hope he gets better!

Since loudly leaving CNBC in late March, Ratigan had been rumored to be going to ABC, perhaps to Good Morning America.

"In ABC's mind, they had—and have—a deal with Ratigan," says a source with knowledge of the negotiations. "This wasn't a handshake deal. This was a deal deal. ABC got fucked, royally."

Ratigan, who has said his ambitions run more toward David Letterman than David Brinkley, will anchor MSNBC from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.

News of Ratigan's departure from CNBC were accompanied by a leak to Page Six of a tape of him screaming at his producers: "I'm not going to host a fucking TV show that consists of reading fucking e-mails to fucking traders."

ABC News and Ratigan couldn't consummate their agreement because CNBC had a noncompete clause in Ratigan's contract, which barred him from negotiating with competitors until six months after he left. But CNBC could waive that clause, which it clearly did in order to let its sister network snatch Ratigan from ABC News's grasp.

Ratigan's move from CNBC to MSNBC, which are both units of NBC Universal, was expertly orchestrated—instead of simply working his way over internally, he left suddenly, with an attendant tabloid story making the announcement, and put himself on the open market so ABC News could bid up his price. Then he wound up back in the embrace of the same company, presumably with a tidy raise.

"If MSNBC is paying this guy what ABC would have paid him," the source says, "then they are way overpaying him."

An ABC News spokesman, citing the noncompete clause, denies that the network was ever in negotiations with Ratigan: "You can't lose something you never had."