In your undeserved Tuesday media column: Luke Russert speaks unconvincingly, sports columnists issue predictions unwisely, NYT ad revenue descends gently, and a PR guy threatens a journalist. Jokingly!

Here's a twist on the classic "complain to a reporter's editor" school of aggressive media relations: a male Navy commander has filed a sexual harassment complaint against a female Miami Herald reporter. She called people "bitches!" And much more, allegedly.

China's having some wee riots by a few troublesome dead-ender Uighurs. Hundreds are dead. The media always wants to "cover" things like this. China has a new media management strategy, though: savvy PR! The Uighurs have a counter-strategy: breaking shit.

An actor named Kevin Byrd sent a bad, self-composed press release to reporters, which one of them posted on Facebook. A PR blogger picked it up to point out how bad it was. That's when Kevin Byrd came unhinged.

That was fast. Not only has BoomTown confirmed our earlier report that Elliot Schrage, Google's top flack, had interviewed at Facebook; he's been hired, too, according to an internal memo sent by CEO Mark Zuckerberg from India. Which is odd: At a meeting earlier today, asked about the Valleywag item on Schrage, COO…

Are Elliot Schrage and Sheryl Sandberg about to stage a policy-wonk reunion in Palo Alto? When she worked at Google, Sandberg, now Facebook's COO, helped recruit Schrage from the Council on Foreign Relations. Having taken charge of Facebook PR, Sandberg is looking to hire a VP of communications with experience in…

I agree with the popular take on Sarah Lacy's Zuckerberg interview at SXSW to this degree: The audience was revolting. Lacy threw an unbecomingly petulant tantrum on stage. But the Twitter reaction was equally self-indulgent. The debates over her performance obscured the man who should have been under the…

When you're a freelance writer and blogger forced to come all the way from Connecticut just for a Suzie Wong event, you'd better get in or there will be hell to pay. When Adam Bernard was shamefully denied entrance to the party last week, he decided to take out his wrath on the organizers, the PR firm of society…

Brad Garlinghouse, the controversial Yahoo executive who won fame by accusing management of spreading investments around like a "thin layer of ... peanut butter", has a sister, Meg, who also works at the company. Who got whom the job at Yahoo is a matter of testy debate. What's undebatable: the brother-and-sister…

Back when we had party correspondent Megan McCarthy to kick around, I made a point of assigning her all interviews with the German press. But now Leggy's headed to Wired, so when Der Spiegel called to interview me about Larry and Lucy's wedding, I had to handle it myself. And I think I acquitted myself pretty well.…

Facebook has bigger problems than the possibility of an FTC inquiry. 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl recently visited the company's Palo Alto offices, says Kara Swisher of AllThingsD. According to Swisher, Stahl interviewed CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Kelly, the network's chief privacy officer. Which can…

When we first began to cover the many close relationships between flauntrepreneur Scott Jones's ChaCha search engine and Indiana University, the Indiana Herald-Times was one of the few local newspapers to closely question the relationship. Steve Hinnefeld of the Herald-Times was even following Valleywag's coverage,…

OutCast PR held an AfterHours party at Frisson, the restaurant co-owned by Facebook board member Peter Thiel. So cozy, since Facebook is OutCast's biggest new client! The place was overrun with hacks and flacks. No surprise, since OutCast wants to show off its chummy press relationships, and other flacks are drawn…

Magazines, whose bread and butter used to be breaking news (exclusive photos) or making news (silly pronouncements like "Person of the Year"), are scrambling to beef up the security wall between their content and the Internet. But let's face facts: The exclusive is dead. Embargoes are pointless. Computers isolated…

Huffington Post's Esther Wojcicki gushes over Google's Lunar X Prize. It's not the $30 million those nice Google boys, Larry and Sergey, are offering whomever can successfully land a rover on the moon. This Palo Alto schoolmarm is keen on all the teaching tools the Lunar X Prize is providing educators. She writes,…

After reading Tuesday's post on Apple unresponsive PR department, a tipster sent us the following juicy tidbit about the miserable life of Apple's PR staff. Apparently, they're kept almost as unenlightened as the press they work so hard to keep away. And a social life? Forget about it. More after the jump:

An article in Ad Age purports to expose something that every Valley reporter has long known, but never come out and said: Apple's PR department is the biggest group of slackers to grace the tech world. What, exactly, do they do all day long? It's a mystery. For the uninitiated reporter looking to get a quote, the …