If the deal goes through, Comcast-NBC Universal will be an entertainment squid with tentacles wrapped around cable channels—USA, Syfy, Bravo, E, NBC and more—websites, theme parks and a film studio. Now it's up to regulators to determine if it will be a blood-sucking vampire squid or a fun, benevolent squid. In order to soothe anti-trust fears, Comcast has promised that they won't pull NBC content from competing providers like DirecTV. But they would say that, wouldn't they? [LAT]

•Fox is fighting back at rumors that James Cameron's "Avatar" will be the most expensive movie ever made with a budget more than half a billion dollars. No, they say, it will cost a measly $400 million. And, according to The Wrap, this should put it in reach of actually making a profit. As long it doesn't make people throw up. [The Wrap]

•A 46 year-old Christmas special beat out everything on TV in the ratings yesterday: the classic stop-animation "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" drew 10.7 million viewers compared to second-place "So You Think You Can Dance" at 6.3 million. Why do networks even make new shows anymore? [Variety]

•Directors get no respect: Director Peter Jackson ("Lord of the Rings") complained to the Carpetbagger that, while the Academy Awards' best film category has been expanded to 10, there are still only five best director slots. Which means five movies were awesome despite having terrible directors? [Carbetbagger]

•This one goes out to anyone who thinks Hollywood is filled with smut-peddling sleazeballs: According to the FTC, the entertainment industry engages in "explicit and pervasive targeting of young children" for violent and sexual films rated PG-13 or even—gasp—R. [NYT]

•Here's a funny fact: The infamous Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa's last words were "Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something." Maybe Johnny Depp will say these lines when he possibly stars in the biopic "Seven Friends of Pancho Villa and the Woman With Six Fingers." [Variety]

•Nobody in America cares about soccer—but what if it's shown in 3D!? FIFA has announced that the 2010 World Cup in South Africa will be broadcast in 3D. [The Wrap]

•This is exciting: The producers of the Herzog film "Bad Lieutenant," have optioned the rights to Jonathan Lethem's novel "Gun, With Occasional Music." It's a sci-fi noir, nerds. Goodnight! [THR]

The subtext of the Times story is that Obama is classless, and that he snubbed the GOP in his first state dinner. Even though he did actually invite Minority Leaders John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, both of whom snubbed Obama by declining to attend. (He also invited Republican governor Bobby Jindal, who did attend. And Dick Lugar was there, for some reason. And Eric Cantor, who wasn't invited to the dinner, was invited to the pre-dinner reception.)

So it doesn't look like much of a snub to us, at all. But whatever—it is fair game for a basically openly conservative paper to publish a news story with a partisan premise, so long as it's factually accurate, which this one is.

Then, of course, Fox picks up on this breaking news. Suddenly, the headline switches from "Top Republican lawmakers not attending State Dinner" to "Top Republican Lawmakers Not Invited to Obama's First State Dinner."

"Top Republican lawmakers," taken literally, means Boehner and McConnell, who were invited, and chose not to attend.

But Fox doesn't even acknowledge that.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner won't be there; he's on Thanksgiving break and home in Ohio. His deputy, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, also didn't get an invitation to the dinner.

Cantor also didn't get an invitation? That's a weird word choice, considering that the guy named in the previous sentence did get an invite. But that fact is, weirdly, edited out.

This is why Fox is way more successful than the Moonie Times: a grown-up could read that Times story and, based on the facts presented in that story, end up disagreeing with its premise. In order to preclude that possibility, Fox just makes up the facts to suit the premise.

(Thanks to readers Ronald and James Allen for alerting us to this very instructional case-study in modern journalism.)

Moyers, who is 75, had planned on ending his weekly news show at the end of the year, but PBS convinced him to stay on through April 30, 2010. This means, in O'Reilly's fantasy world, that Bill and Jesse totally embarrassed PBS into firing Moyers.

Bill ambushed Moyers again in 2008, but he didn't show that clip, because Moyers upstaged the second-string ambush producer that time.

According to Dylan Stableford: "A rep for Fox says that Hannity will address the issue on his show tonight."

Seriously, what will he say? The video evidence is obvious, and Hannity is heard babbling about how it is "Thursday" over footage from a Saturday in September, thus making some sort of "we didn't intend to deceive we just used rally file footage" argument a nonstarter.

But, you know, this is Sean Hannity, who does not care about "the truth" or "honesty" or "not booking insane antisemites on the show and not mentioning that they are insane antisemites," so who cares what he will say.

It will probably just be something like "the Jews sneaked in that other footage and tricked me into airing it, because I, Sean Hannity, am an antisemite who hates the Jews."

The highlight is probably the unveiling of the conspiratorial internal organ chalkboard. All the notes—references to old and discredited texts, the Founding Fathers, transparently phony stabs at nonpartisanship, crying—are hit, though Stewart never quite reaches the operatic unhingedness of a genuine Beck performance. The glasses are a wonderful touch, though.

It was during his radio program, so sadly there is no video of Glenn clutching his abdomen, vomiting, and finally collapsing in pain.

Beck is expected to make a full recovery, after his appendix was removed at "an undisclosed hospital."

Let's hope things go better than they did the last time he went to the hospital, when he had to wait for 40 minutes in the emergency room! This was back when he was with CNN, so he blamed the health care industry instead of secret Maoist-ACORN Lizard People.

To be fair, it was ridiculous back when ABC allowed Stossel to give keynote speeches at conservative/libertarian think tank gala events while still calling him a "reporter" for 20/20 and not a "pundit" or whatever. He's always had a very specific political agenda and he's always been more than willing to distort the truth in the service of that agenda. In that respect, he's not so different from a Michael Moore, except that he's on the side of evil and also no legitimate news organization has ever tried to pawn off Michael Moore as a regular plain-old "reporter."

But! John Stossel is different! He is not fat, first of all, and second of all he has a mustache, and thirdly it is considered a corrective to "liberal bias" to have a dude straight-up lying to prove conservative points on your newscast.

Obviously he is much more at home on Fox, where they only pretend to be unbiased for the purposes of annoying people like us. So the fact that Stossel is actively promoting and co-hosting this Americans For Prosperity anti-health care event is not even really News.

But it is coming as everyone in DC is dropping their monocles at the fact that the White House has been criticizing Fox News. This is Nixonian! The White House is not allowed to say a tv station is not legitimate! It is classic Nixon dirty tricks, to punish Fox by... not granting them interviews with administration officials for the rest of the year, which is two months.

Because, you know, they so often make themselves available to representatives of the RNC, various right-wing think tanks, and Ron Paul's newsletter.

Anyway Joe Conason has a very good little piece that begins to explain what, exactly, Nixon did in his war on the press. He did not criticize the Washington Post for being mean to him. He used the power of the federal government to hurt them financially so that they'd stop reporting truthful thing about him. Calling it "Nixonian" every time a president is upset with a news organization cheapens that man's amazing legacy of bastardry.

Why bother? Because the TV news portion of the White House Press Corps is an exclusive country club of identical privileged tools who've convinced themselves that arguing with a stonewalling flack for an hour a day is doing the dirty work of democracy. And insulting one of them is tantamount to censorship.

White House communications director Anita Dunn said Fox News doesn't behave "the way that legitimate news organizations behave," which is an objectively true statement, as long as your definition of "legitimate news organizations" means organizations in operation after the death of William Randolph Hearst.

This outraged Tapper!

Tapper: It's escaped none of our notice that the White House has decided in the last few weeks to declare one of our sister organizations "not a news organization" and to tell the rest of us not to treat them like a news organization. Can you explain why it's appropriate for the White House to decide that a news organization is not one –

(Crosstalk)

Gibbs: Jake, we render, we render an opinion based on some of their coverage and the fairness that, the fairness of that coverage.

Tapper: But that's a pretty sweeping declaration that they are "not a news organization." How are they any different from, say –

Gibbs: ABC -

Tapper: ABC. MSNBC. Univision. I mean how are they any different?

Gibbs: You and I should watch sometime around 9 o'clock tonight. Or 5 o'clock this afternoon.

Tapper: I'm not talking about their opinion programming or issues you have with certain reports. I'm talking about saying thousands of individuals who work for a media organization, do not work for a "news organization" — why is that appropriate for the White House to say?

Gibbs: That's our opinion.

First, they didn't say that Fox is "not a news organization." We just said what they said, and it's true. Eric Boehlert lays out many examples of Fox's "news" programs fucking the truth up, though really their sponsoring of, promotion of, and reporting on the fucking tea parties is all the proof you need that they don't behave anything like ABC News.

Back when Jake Tapper worked for Salon, would he have considered it a ridiculous attack to say that that online 'zine was not objective? Would've he really have quibbled with the idea that a site run by liberal journalist David Talbot might not be considered "legitimate" by a Republican president? Even if they were sending real-life good journalists like Tapper and, later, Michael Scherer to cover the White House? (Of course, no site that publishes Camille Paglia and Cary Tennis can be considered legitimate, but their terribleness transcends partisanship.)

Does Tapper understand that despite the fact that he is very good, personal friends with Major Garrett, Garrett's employer is actually a research and communications arm of the conservative movement? In a much, much, much more direct and partisan fashion than almost any liberal "equivalent" news source? Like, The Nation and Keith Olbermann and The New Republic and Air America are liberal news organizations staffed and run by liberals dedicated to achieving liberal political goals, but if they've ever all joined together to organize a partisan campaign as PR-savvy as the Tea Parties (or the Iraq War) while still maintaining poses of objectivity, we've missed in next to the thousands of op-eds and Special Comments on how Obama is continuing Bush's torture regime and Senate Democrats are spineless cowards.

But now, once again, Jake Tapper is a hero to the right-wing blogs. Because he knows that it is the objective reporters job to always object, to everything. If the President says the ocean is quite large, it is heroic reporting to demand that his spokesman acknowledge that outer space is even bigger.

Reuters says both Murdoch and Liberty Media's John Malone are sniffing around the 20 percent stake in NBC Universal that Vivendi is prepared to sell, but neither man has actually approached NBC Universal owner GE about a deal. As much as we'd love to imagine MSNBC under Murdoch's gentle-but-firm leadership, here's why it's not going to happen:

1. The report of Murdoch's interest comes via CNBC, which is the preferred in-house avenue for GE getting its messages out there on this deal. So it's almost certainly just a way for GE to keep pressure on Comcast and let them know that it has other options.

2. The FCC would blow a gasket. News Corp. already owns two television stations in nine markets, and is maxed out in terms of how many the FCC will let him own. It's unclear to us whether a minority stake in NBC Universal would trigger the FCC's limits on ownership and require Murdoch to sell off some of his assets in order to satisfy regulators, but the anti-trust implications of one television, cable, and movie giant owning a significant stake of another television, cable, and movie giant—especially when radical leftists control the White House and the Justice Department—make it a far stretch.

3. The Comcast purchase is a done deal, because the mellifluously named prognosticator Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's computer has ordained that it will happen. Bueno de Mesquita, whom the CIA hires to predict the future using Microsoft Excel and has a purported 90 percent accuracy rate, was asked by the Wall Street Journal's Dennis K. Berman to weigh in on the acquisition, and he says it will happen, based on what Berman told him about the players' intentions:

For the Comcast-NBCU game, I provided Dr. Bueno de Mesquita a crude approximation of the positions of the dozen parties most likely to influence a deal.

[snip]

Of course, these were rough estimates done on the fly. As Dr. Bueno de Mesquita reminded me, my evaluations could be flawed. His work was done over a weekend, which may influence the quality of the results. Most assignments can take three weeks, at an opening price of $50,000.

Oh, OK. That settles it then.

See, the Obama administration just called out Fox as "an opponent" instead of a "legitimate news organization." But Ailes and Axelrod had coffee last week! What's up?

If the Obama White House treats Fox News as the research and propaganda arm of the opposition, Brian Stelter and the Times treat the cable channel more like a foreign nation that the current administration doesn't officially recognize. With Roger Ailes as Foreign Minister and flacks acting as diplomats, Fox and MSNBC work toward detente, the Obama administration refuses to normalize relations without a reduction in arms, the network seeks high-profile defections from John Stossel and Lou Dobbs, and there are rumors of secret treaties between O'Reilly and Olbermann.

As always, Fox pretends to be a regular news station that broadcasts actual news, but, amusingly, they admit to keeping to that high standard only when the unemployed are watching:

Fox argues that its news hours - 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. on weekdays - are objective. The channel has taken pains recently to highlight its news programs, including the two hours led by Shepard Smith, its chief news anchor. And its daytime newscasts draw more viewers than CNN or MSNBC's prime-time programs.

Yes, they are at pains to point out that they have one fantastic, independent, entertaining news anchor, who adheres to a reality-based interpretation of events. And besides: isn't nine hours of truth a day enough for you monsters?

There is a degree to which the entire "war" is mutually beneficial, with both sides firing up the base. But we imagine the Obama White House has also been surprised by the depths of Fox's irresponsibility (witch-hunting, actively organizing and promoting protests of the president's legitimacy, everything Glenn Beck does and says). It's within their power to rein in O'Reilly with flattery, but there's obviously nothing to be done about the rest of Fox's non-"news hours" personalities. They're a bunch of Ahmadinejads.

Why, it's this Lou Dobbs fellow, a famous host on the CNN network!

Kevin Jennings holds a Bush administration-created post overseeing a Reagan administration-created department dedicated to keeping schools safe. This makes him one of Obama's unconstitutional Czars. Whereas Reagan wanted to keep them safe from drugs and Bush wanted to keep them safe from, uh, terror or something, Obama's hire would like to keep them safe from harassment and bullying. Also—did we mention?—he's a gay.

Noted execrable piece of shit Dobbs is not even creative enough to come up with his own smears. The immigration hysteria he stoked for a brief period of attention has died down, so he's reduced to borrowing Sean Heannity's crusade, which was itself stolen from Beck.

Here is the case against Jennings, again:

• He is a gay.
• He got mad at God, once, because he was a gay teenager.
• He got stoned.
• He is a gay.
• He thinks gay kids—and kids who aren't gay but who are called gay slurs—should not be beaten, murdered, or driven to suicide.
• He tries to educate kids on the importance of not abusing one another.
• He is a gay.
• This one time this troubled, suicidal, closeted teenager told him he met an older man and maybe had sex with him and Jennings sympathized with him and then said "I hope you know to use a condom."

It is that last story, of a troubled student confiding in a sympathetic teacher and receiving sensible and important advice that allowed that problem student to grow into a satisfied and happy adult, that has made right-wingers apoplectic. In order to make their rage at that successful show of liberal compassion sound less like hysterical homophobia, they have been saying that Jennings "failed to report" "statutory rape." Even though Jennings never explicitly said the kid had had sex with anyone yet and also, much more importantly, the kid was sixteen years old, which is the age of consent in Massachusetts.

Does that seem like a problem? That they can't spin this into a horrible act because no crime was committed? So in fact they're just mad that Jennings didn't destroy this kid's life by telling his parents or something about the kid's gross gay sex with a gross old gay guy? Here's what you do: you repeatedly and shamelessly lie, even when the reporters on your own network correct your lying with "reporting."

On October 2, Lou Dobbs repeated the "statutory rape" thing. He was corrected by Joe Conason. And if he watched his own network he would've seen Jessica Yellin correcting Fox's reports the same day!

Which means, of course, that yesterday Dobbs repeated a thing he knew to be untrue because Gay Immigrants Are Going to Turn Your Children Into Well-Dressed Mexicans.

As many of you pointed out, the dancer was actually wearing flesh-colored briefs under her dress. The network provided photos to the Washington Post's TV Column today, where you can clearly see the underwear. Guess everyone who said a female dancer was too smart to go on a TV show wearing a skirt without any protection was right.

However, the mock scandal was good for ratings. The ratings went up by about two million viewers for the show that aired the day after the news broke. And when the show's ratings are just at 7 million people, they need every pair of eyeballs they can get, even if that means using a transparent pair of undies to get them there.

It means that we will miss out on our favorite part of the television season, where, after all the months of hype, a bunch of shows fail spectacularly and are canceled after only a few weeks. Usually that time of year is right now, and so far we only have one casualty (RIP TBL). Fuck this series of slow deaths, we miss our annual massacre!

It also means that we're going to be stuck with NCIS: Los Angeles and a host of other crap for the long haul. It also means that, while many are performing well, thanks to NBC and their awful Jay Leno experiment, there are actually fewer series premieres this year than usual. It even further means there are fewer people watching network television. You know when your show doesn't even crack 10 million and it's considered a big victory times are getting tough.

Here's a breakdown of how everything is doing so far:

The Good:

• NCIS: Los Angeles (CBS) is the clear breakout hit with 18.7 million on its debut, proving once again that Americans love shitty television.
• The Good Wife (CBS) bobbled most of it's lead in, but pulled in an excellent 13.7 million viewers and won its time slot. Way to go, Carol Hathaway!
• Modern Family (ABC) rode positive ratings to a 12.7 million bow and its companion Cougar Town (ABC) was right behind it with 11.6.
• Flash Forward (ABC) predicted itself 12.4 million viewers, so we'll at least see how the mystery ends. Still, it's no Lost.
• The Vampire Diaries only scared up 4.8 million (shit more teenage girls than that stand wailing out front of Robert Pattinson's hotel room on a daily basis), but that was The CW's highest debut ever.
• The Cleveland Show (Fox) did just about as well as Family Guy with a 9.4 million on a Sunday night.
• Accidentally on Purpose (CBS) made 9 million people not laugh.
• The Forgotten (ABC) and Eastwick (ABC) were just on the right side of average with 9.5 and 9.3 million respectively.
• Though the numbers for Glee (Fox) weren't the highest at 7.3 million, it's still being considered a victory since a show this good and quirky actually seems to be finding some sort of audience.

The Bad:

• The Jay Leno Show (NBC) started out nice and strong with an amazing 18 million, but then fell to 5.7 million a week later and its ratings continue to go up and down a bit, but usually lands at the bottom of the pile. Please, please, make the unfunny stop!
• Community (NBC) also had a strong debut, keeping most of the run-off from the Office for an audience of 7.7 million. However, the next week, more than 2 million checked out and its ratings were down to 5.4 million.
• Medical drama Mercy (NBC) will be on life support soon, with only 8.2 checking it out on it's first Wednesday night. Yes, NBC officially sucks.

The Ugly:

• Brothers (Fox) started off with 2.8 million. Let's see how long it holds on.
• Melrose Place is hobbling along with only 2.3 million viewers in its opening week, and not much more since then. The network has ordered more episodes and Heather Locklear is set to come back in November, so lets hope she can breathe life into this thing for the second time.
• The Beautiful Life (CW) already got it's ass canceled. We blame Mischa Barton's wisdom teeth.

Here is a video of various popular television news show hosts and elected officials—well, Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann (R-MN)—explaining that the census was part of a plot to round up patriotic Americans and place them in internment camps.

Also included: a fun amateur short-film in which a young man in fatigues aims an assault rifle at a census taker. The best part is when the crazy patriot holds up his handy copy of the Constitution, which explains that you only have to answer one question from the census taker and if they try to ask anymore you are free to shoot them.

Authories have not yet declared Sparkman's death a homicide, Oviously, there is a hell of a lot we don't know about the case, and we are actually leaning toward "killed by meth producers" instead of politically motivated domestic terror, but it is still worth pointing out that these people in this video are insane.

Huh. Here's the old "Worst Person In the World" chatting with a Heritage Foundation Hack about health care reform.

He, uh, he has just endorsed a public option, basically.

I want, not for personally for me, but for working Americans, to have a option, that if they don't like their health insurance, if it's too expensive, they can't afford it, if the government can cobble together a cheaper insurance policy that gives the same benefits, I see that as a plus for the folks.

So there's that!

Bill is, of course, an avowed independent, beholden to no party, but what that usually means is that he will occasionally tell his audience that a certain Democrat it not necessarily a traitor. In the past, as far as we can remember, his independence has not led him to actually support any actual liberal policy proposal.

In an historic breakthrough bringing us one step closer to the moment when all media folds in on itself and swallows the universe, Fox TV has announced plans to develop the website, "Texts From Last Night" into a TV series.

The website invites people to share "the text messages you shouldn't have sent last night," streaming classics of modern literature such as, "Do you remember peeing on the wall and then yelling at us to stop looking at your dick?" — which will no doubt form the basis of the pilot episode's B-plot.

The Variety story reveals the writer, "will loosely base the show's characters and plot on the whole idea of racy — and sometimes embarrassing — communication, particularly among the twentysomething set."