Always at the ready to swat away a junket reporter when the questioning strays off movie-pimping topic, or phone in a craftily worded, 4 a.m. denial ("Not only was my client not acquainted with the dead hooker in question, he wasn't even in Las Vegas this weekend. He was shooting his upcoming guest appearance on Entourage!"), it's time Hollywood's hard-working plate-spinners get the recognition they deserve.

Without further ado, then, we proudly present The 2008 Defamer Flack Honors. Winners, please come forward to collect your trophy (a clipboard-wielding thirtysomething woman hurling herself upon a grenade, cast in the finest bronze), and say a few carefully chosen words of appreciation.

Most Loyal
Elliot Mintz
Taking on Paris Hilton as a client is not a task for the fainthearted; but doing it with the gusto and blind obedience demonstrated time and again by Elliot Mintz elevates him from the rank-and-flacky-file to the level of some kind of publicist archangel. Not only did Mintz return to his post after his client's failed attempt at tossing him under a bus during her suspended license trial, he slathered himself, for reasons still not completely understood, in orange face paint for her birthday festivities. We're choking back tears right now.

Best Liar
Liz Rosenberg
Madonna's rep Liz Rosenberg had the publicity equivalent of SoCal wildfires to contend with this year, as if dropped by parachute with nothing but a watering can and her own slippery wits to fend off the singer's raging divorce inferno. It was enough to make a flack long for the relative innocuousness of new-new-face scrutiny, tales of corset-crappings, and other assorted moustache rides.

Still, even the most gifted of professional liars are bound by human constraints. As we tried in vain to place all the appropriate pushpins in our increasingly convoluted MadgeRod CynthRavitz Clusterfuck case map, Liz & Co. themselves could barely keep track of which fibs were meant for us, and which were never meant to leave the walls of Spin Control HQ.

The Worst Publicist in the World
Jonathan Jaxson
True, we crowned Jonathan Jaxson The Worst Publicist in the World back in November, with two months and one Jeremy Piven handroll-related P.R. nightmare to go before 2008 closed out. Didn't matter. The second we met Cheetah Girl Adrienne Bailon's spokesperson, and listened to him tell an Atlanta CBS affiliate's morning show audience of his plan to fake a nude photo scandal that (surprise!) backfired, eventually leading to his client and her fellow Cheetahettes being disinvited from the Macy's parade, we knew we had met a bold new breed of publicist, far deadlier than any that came before. This is the P-2000: Incompetent Robot P.R. Killing Machine. Fight the future.

That the fiercely loyal flack had finally succeeded in doing what publicist-watchers had long feared he would, managing to squeeze not just his nose, but his entire head and neck up his demanding client's hindquarters.

[Photo: WENN]

• Frock horror! Paris celebrates her birthday as a punk princess [Daily Mail]

The hiring of Sitrick proved that the Hiltons are taking this latest crisis involving Paris very seriously indeed. It's a problem that clearly could not be managed by Paris's longtime spokesman, Elliot Mintz, who is "more of a PR footman," snipes one entertainment journalist. (He was also not long ago off the job for a while, if the tabloids can be believed.) "It's not like Mintz really has a strategy or anything." Others expressed surprise that Sitrick was taking on Hilton as a client: "He usually works with people like Ron Burkle, not Paris Hilton," said one magazine journalist.

So just who is Mike Sitrick, whose fees are reportedly up to $700 per hour? And why did the Hiltons turn to him? Well, he's a PR pit bull, and even Howard Rubinstein gives him respect—though he seems to regard him warily. He's a master of spin (he wrote a well-regarded PR book in 1998, Spin: How to Turn the Power of the Press to Your Advantage). And he's known as someone who will stop at nothing to turn public opinion in his clients' favor.

Sitrick's Los Angeles-based "strategic communications" firm Sitrick & Company are known in the business and entertainment communities as the place to turn in the face of a potentially huge public relations disaster. Billionaire businessman Burkle is indeed a longtime client of his—Sitrick orchestrated the sting of Jared Paul Stern last year, then defended Burkle in the press when the whole thing threatened to blow up in his face—but his client list is staggeringly wide-ranging. He currently represents fired Wal-Mart marketer Julie Roehm. Atoosa Rubenstein hired him in October 2006 when items about departing staffers at Seventeen started appearing in Page Six. He represented Naomi Campbell when she was accused of assaulting her former housekeeper. He was retained by the law firm that represented the Archdiocese of Los Angeles when it was embroiled in the pedophile priest scandal. He helped Halle Berry when she was accused of a hit-and-run, and he was retained by Rush Limbaugh during his prescription pill addiction scandal. He's also represented people whose interests seem to be at odds; Ron Burkle sued former Disney chief Michael Ovitz over Internet ventures they were both involved in, but Sitrick reps both of them (and managed to get sympathetic coverage for both of them in the heat of the Anthony Pellicano scandal). Another longtime client of Sitrick's is Roy Disney, who, of course, has been at odds with Ovitz for several years.

His methods are aggressive and strategic. He uses what he calls "truth squads" to monitor the media (including blogs) to ferret out inaccuracies about his clients and "wheel-of-pain" tactics against his client's foes—a campaign of negative publicity intended to spur a quick settlement. Of course, to be effective, Sitrick employs a veritable public relations army. He's known for luring well-connected former journalists (presumably for a massive raise). Two of his more high-profile hires in the last couple years were Wall Street Journal reporter John Lippman, who wrote a weekly Hollywood column and had covered the TV business for the paper, and Los Angeles Times senior editor Mark Saylor. He's also fond of hiring corporate executives and lawyers.

So it's perhaps no surprise that the Hiltons hired Sitrick—Paris could certainly use some PR help. But the mere act of hiring Sitrick sends a strong signal that the Hiltons are spooked by the way Paris's sentencing and jail term were woefully mismanaged from a PR standpoint. The family lost control of the story in a major way, and the only way to start to try to fix it is with a big gun. Already it seems to be working—Hilton will go on Larry King Wednesday night after her release, and, so they say, won't be paid for her appearance—which seems to have given her just the tiniest bit of legitimacy back.

[Image via]

• A spokesman says that style guru Isabella Blow's death was caused by cancer, but her 'friends' suspect otherwise, based on previous suicide attempts. [Gatecrasher]
  
• Poor Elliot Mintz is still hoping that Paris will rehire him even though he testified against her. "I gave her a call and she was warm and personal, and we're going to sit and have a conversation about her future." [NYP]
  
• Or maybe they've already reunited? Us caught up to the embattled publicist with Paris at last night's "Sober Day USA" event (wtf?), where he said that "the rumors of our professional separation were overexaggerated." [Us Weekly]
  
• Also, more details have emerged about that eerily prescient photo spread in June's Harper's Bazaar featuring Paris and Nicole Richie being chased by cops. [WWD]
  
• Brittany Murphy finally got some dude to actually marry her. [Page Six]
  
• Comedy power couple Amy Poehler and Will Arnett have moved to a larger West Village apartment. [Page Six]

"I told the truth," Hilton told photographers waiting outside her Los Angeles home on Saturday night.

"I feel that I was treated unfairly and that the sentence is both cruel and unwarranted. I don't deserve this."

Her 45-day sentence looming, set adrift without even a single dependable flack who'd gladly fall upon his pen for her, we imagine the next few weeks will be both challenging and critical for the embattled heiress and fragrance mogul, filled with emergency family meetings in which she chokes back tears explaining to her entourage of teacup-sized dogs, pellet-pooping farm animals, and tree-dwelling marsupials that, "Mommy's going away for a little while, but she'll be back real soon—you hear me? Real soon. And things will be hot again. I promise you that," as a symphony of concerned bleats, mews and simian yelps responds in dismay.

• Paris Hilton says jail term cruel, fires publicist [Reuters]

Another Paris Hilton sex tape? Photos of the porn-prone heiress in a compromising position with Gnarls Barkley singer Cee-Lo surfaced on MediaTakeOut.com yesterday. But her rep, Elliot Mintz, tells us: "Note the positioning of her hand and the absence of the thumb. It appears to me to be a cut-and-paste job." Well, it's certainly some kind of job! Paris sent along word from "The Simple Life" set that "she's only met [Cee-Lo] once, backstage at a concert."

Mintz makes a strong case for the tampering argument, as every other image of Hilton mid-fellatio to yet surface has prominently featured the party heiress's sturdy thumb, in a trademarked hold she calls the "clutch and anchor." Its absence is a tell-tale fraud giveaway that seems to have eluded the editors MediaTakeOut.com, who have pulled the photo from their site after receiving a strongly worded letter from Hilton's lawyers, and whose tales of Cee-Lo-servicing, for now at least, appear to be untrue—as much as we wanted to believe the recipient out of camera range was breathing heavily in a Darth Vader helmet, and exploded into an ecstatic "Ha ha ha bless your soul" at the precise moment of climax.

• Side Dish [NY Daily News] [First item]
• HA HA! PARIS THREATENS TO SUE US [Media Take Out]