As applicants to appear on Bravo's The Real Housewives of Washington, D.C., Tareq and Michaele Salahi had signed a contract with the network limiting their television appearances. And according to a booker at a rival network, an NBC staffer has admitted that Bravo prevented the Salahis from giving their initial exclusive interview to anyone other than NBC News, which is under the same NBC Universal corporate umbrella as Bravo.

"They had a Bravo contract before the state dinner," the NBCer said, according to our source. "Bravo just held them to it," comparing the situation to what the TLC network did with John and Kate Gosselin after that pair became front-page news.

Bravo's contract with Real Housewives of New Jersey participants has been posted online, and the relevant portion of that contract—which we'd imagine would be quite similar to what the Salahis signed—is here:

In addition to obligating participants to make themselves "reasonably available" to market the show, it prevents them from appearing on any "unscripted, reality-based programs" without Bravo's written consent. If the Salahis signed a contract like this, Bravo could have prevented them from giving their exclusive to anyone other than Today.

The Salahis had been scheduled to break their silence on CNN's Larry King Live last night, but the appearance was "rescheduled" without explanation. ABC News and CBS News were also pursuing the Salahis, and the Associated Press has reported that the couple was demanding "a payment in the mid-six figures range" in exchange for access.

It's an open secret that morning news shows will pay money to land interviews — they are just very clever about it, never cutting a check directly for an interview. The spurned rival saluted former Today honcho and present NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker's creativity in securing the biggest get of, well, the month so far.

Still, Lauer insisted this morning that NBC News hadn't paid the Salahis:

Matt Lauer: Based on some of the things that have been reported over the last 48 or 72 hours I feel the need to say this and ask this : are you appearing here today in any way because of any financial deal that you have made with this network? Are we paying you for this appearance in any way?

Michaele: No you're not.

Tareq: No, absolutely not.

Michaele: And at no time, Matt, have we ever even talked about doing that with anyone.

It depends on what "this network" means. Did they have a financial deal with NBC? No. Did they have one with Bravo? Absolutely.

"I'm OK losing," said a rival booker, "but to watch Matt Lauer say 'we didn't pay them'" when NBC News' corporate sister Bravo used its contract to force them to Today was too much. Not to mention that the Salahis will be paid, handsomely, when they are inevitably selected for the final cast of Real Housewives, which they almost certainly will be.

UPDATE: Cameron Blanchard, a Bravo spokeswoman, says "it's categorically false" that Bravo played a role in the booking: "Bravo was not involved at all." When we asked Blanchard whether Bravo had, as the Real Housewives of New Jersey agreement seems to indicate, a contractual right to determine which television programs the Salahis appear on, she said "we don't comment on the contents of contracts." Then, commenting on the contents of the contract, Blanchard added that "every contract is different, and to imply that the Salahis signed something like the Real Housewives on New Jersey contract is not accurate."

SECOND UPDATE: NBC News spokeswoman Lauren Kapp says, "Bravo was not involved. This was a separate situation. While I can't speak for the Salahis, the fact that they chose to appear on the number one morning news show should not seem odd." Asked if Bravo had a contractual right to sign off on the Salahis' television appearances, she said, "You would have to ask Bravo about the contract." When we asked Kapp why the Salahis would initially decide to appear on CNN's Larry King Live instead of the "number one morning news show," she said, "They chose to, and then they changed their minds, and you'd have to ask them why they did."

As soon as the New York Times broke the news of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's habit of patronizing high-end call girls on the afternoon of March 10, 2008, his communications director Christine Anderson pretty much knew she was out of a gig. But along with managing the media frenzy surrounding Spitzer, she also had a new boss, Gov. David Paterson, who almost immediately stirred up his own press storm by disclosing past affairs and drug use.

But before all that happened, Anderson was getting buried with requests for Spitzer. Among the first out of the gate was Matthew Zimmerman, Matt Lauer's booker at the Today show. He didn't land the exclusive Spitzer interview everyone was clamoring for—that went to CNN's Fareed Zakaria a year later—but in the course of pursuing the get, Zimmerman casually mentioned to Anderson that he'd be more than happy to help her find work at NBC News. He also turned up his nose at a shot at Paterson just hours before news broke of Paterson's past infidelities, at which point Zimmerman immediately did a 180 and begged for an interview with Paterson. Because governors are boring unless they're fucking people they shouldn't be fucking.

Read on to see how the exchange unfolded in e-mails, which we obtained by filing a public records for correspondence between the press and Spitzer's communications office during the crisis.

This is Zimmerman's first e-mail seeking the interview that every news producer wanted, just a few hours after the Spitzer story broke. It has the standard expression of sympathy common to television bookers ("I'm sorry to be reaching out to you in such circumstances") but reminds Anderson that he's not your run of the mill news lackey: "I am Matt Lauer's producer at NBC." Anderson politely brushed him off with a terse "will get back to you as soon as I can," which considering the circumstances could be a way of saying don't hold your breath.

Two days later, Zimmerman and Lauer decided to up their efforts and go the direct route. Lauer had written "a personal note" to Spitzer, and Zimmerman wanted to know if he should it "walk it over" to Anderson's office or leave it with his Spitzer's doorman. Anderson says, "Feel free."

Five days later, on March 17, Spitzer's resignation became effective and Paterson was elevated from lieutenant governor to become the first African American governor of New York. Zimmerman circled back to thank Anderson for "all her help" during the crisis of the previous week, and to let her know that he's thinking about her. Anderson wrote back to say she heard Today was interested in talking to the first African American governor of New York, and she seemed to be willing to entertain the idea. How about it? At this point, though, Paterson was, in national news terms, the previously unknown politician who had replaced the celebrity governor who had been accused of sleeping with a hooker. Zimmerman's response to the offer is underwhelming and puzzling: "Believe it or not, I think it might have been related to the weather for Gov. Paterson... I'll check with Missy Dunlop who would be handling that request." The weather?

We're not sure what Zimmerman's "weather" comment referred to, but it could have been to this request of March 15 from another producer for Paterson to appear on the weekend edition of Today to talk to Lester Holt about the crane collapse that had killed seven people in Manhattan that day. Weather, cranes—both involve things falling from the sky, right? In any event, Zimmerman didn't exactly jump at the chance to book Paterson for Lauer, and Dunlop's request was for Weekend Today, which has a different staff. The Spitzer story had sex, scandal—the things people want to see Matt Lauer talking about at 7 o'clock in the morning. Paterson was kind of boring.

And Today has shown that it can be picky about the governors it books. We know they spurned an interview with some another lame boring governor who would become newsworthy because of scandal just a few hours later. Back in December 2008, Today had booked Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on what turned out to be the morning of his arrest by FBI agents. But they bumped him at the last minute in order to make room for a segment flogging the announcement of Jay Leno's 10 p.m. show.

But back to the conversation Anderson and Zimmerman were having on March 17. Once Anderson told Zimmerman that she wouldn't be sticking around the governor's office, Zimmerman—who seemed to be aware that Anderson once worked as a producer for Good Morning America—thoughtfully offered to help her secure a new job: "If you ever want to get back into tv (and not ABC!) let me know and i can see about openings here."

Gosh, that was nice of him, wasn't it? Then, in the very next sentence after he offered to help her get a job, he got back to business, letting Anderson know that he'd been in touch with a flack at Sard Verbinnen & Co., the PR shop that Spitzer's law firm hired to handle media requests, and expressing doubt about his chances. But Anderson promised to keep Zimmerman "apraised" of Spitzer's thinking, and thanked him for the "kind offer."

Was it a generous and human thing to do for Zimmerman to offer to keep his ears open on the job front? Yes, it was. Was he also trying to get Anderson to help him secure access to Spitzer at the same time? Yes, he was. Both things are true, and the casualness with which he made the offer speaks volumes about the relationships between flacks and—oh, who are we kidding? It's Today.

Anderson's quip about how dealing with a hooker disclosure is nothing compared to working for Shelley Ross, the legendarily horrible producer who was her boss at GMA, gave them a chance to gossip together. Zimmerman joked about how awesome it must be for Spitzer that former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey's one-time aide recently claimed that he'd engaged in threeways with McGreevey and his wife. There would be more news to take the pressure off Spitzer in just a few hours....

...when the Daily News story detailing Paterson's past marital troubles hit the web that night. All of a sudden, Zimmerman was much more keen on having Matt Lauer talk to the first African American governor of New York on the Today show, because he had screwed state employees in the past. Anderson hadn't even seen the story yet, so Zimmerman sent it to her.

Anderson promptly forwarded it along to political consultants Ryan Toohey and Jeff Pollock to brainstorm how to spin it. Hilarity ensues: "Unreal." "Ideas?"

Neither Spitzer nor Paterson ended up appearing on Today during the height of the scandal, and Anderson wound up getting a job as vice president of communications at the Blackstone Group, a private equity firm. But eventually Today got their man: Spitzer sat down with Lauer this past April as part of his public image rehab campaign and told the nation that there were "no excuses" for his behavior.

Zimmerman didn't respond to requests for comment, and Anderson declined to comment.

The Newseum will display Russert's office "reassembled to look as it did June 13, 2008, the day Russert died of a heart attack at age 58," beginning in November. The only other journalist to merit an office recreation at the Newseum is Edward R. Murrow.

It's been more than a year since Russert's death, so by now it's OK to say about his memory what we were saying about him when he was still alive: He was a handmaiden masquerading as a watchdog, and the reason people went on his show wasn't because he was an "institution" or "tough but fair"—it was because he was safe and predictable but had the unearned reputation of being aggressive and relentless. But whatever: Let's stipulate that he was a towering genius. We're still recreating his office in a museum?

Here's what Lewis Lapham had to say on Russert's funeral, attended by all the grandees he claimed to torment:

Long ago in the days before journalists became celebrities, their enterprise was reviled and poorly paid, and it was understood by working newspapermen that the presence of more than two people at their funeral could be taken as a sign that they had disgraced the profession.

Anyway, what's in the office? A WHOLE BUNCH OF JUNK ABOUT THE FUCKING BUFFALO BILLS.

The story so far: conservative policy group Americans for Limited Government sent out an email blast. NBC and Stone say that Stone wrote the following email back:

From: Stone, Jane (NBC Universal)
Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2009 1:57 PM
To: 'arosenwald@getliberty.org'
Subject: Re: ALG Calls on Congress to "Put Up or Shut Up" on Defunding ACORN

Take me off this list!

—————————————
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

Right? Who hasn't sent back a pissed off "UNSUBSCRIBE!" to an email chain letter, their mother, or the New York Observer's Very Short List? So Stone doesn't feel like putting up with the shit that comes in her Inbox anymore, and as someone with an email address who works at a news website, I feel her pain:

And that's moderate. The shitty releases we get in our respective inboxes can't stop, won't stop. Sometimes, I want to tell the world UNSUBSCRIBE, but I can't, so I usually just delete them. But Stone was fed up with this kind of shit, and fired something off as such. So how does ALG respond? By contacting media outlets and letting them know that Stone wrote them back the following email:

Let's get this straight:

1. A conservative policy group got rebuffed by a bigtime news producer at a network which—because it's not Fox News—commonly receives a designation from conservatives as "liberal."

2. Why would Stone—a producer at NBC News—resort to Anti-Semitic slurs? How would she know that its sender were Jewish? His last name is "Rosenwald," but still: persecution complex, much?

3. Americans for Limited Government is a small fish policy group looking to attract attention.

4. Why would NBC be so quick to respond to accusations if they weren't substantiated with bullshit? They have tech guys working around the clock. They could easily reproduce the email from the back-end on a moment's command. Which they did—as evidenced above—and provided to Politico the following statement:

Americans for Limited Government has chosen to launch an outrageous, reckless attack and smear campaign against an NBC News employee. Faced with irrefutable evidence that our employee did nothing more than ask to be removed from an email mailing list, the organization has maliciously published a fabricated email.

Our employee never sent any such email.. She is completely innocent of the outrageous charges and is being used by an organization to make a self-serving point. This is a shameless, hateful and defaming act which should be roundly denounced.

In other words, ALG's completely full of shit, and they did this to get into a news cycle. So who bit?

Michael Caldrone played this as a news story and didn't provide much perspective, so call it "reporting," but really: kind of like a pussy.

This kind of thing was made for conservative blogs—where they get their fundraising bread and butter—so, of course, guys like this:

Exit question: Will the liztards at Little Green Gulag blame this on 1) Glenn Beck, 2) Robert Stacey McCain, 3) the entire conservative blogosphere, or 4) All the above?

Mediabistro's lede is a question:

Did an NBC News producer really respond to an email from the group Americans for Limited Government with, "Bite Me Jew Boy" or did she write, "Take me off this list!"?

Mean Megan McArdle at the Atlantic thinks it's ridiculous, but also, strangely plausible:

It's so bizarre that I simply can't believe that an NBC producer did this. But it's also so bizarre that it's not actually all that much more plausible that Americans for Limited Government made the thing up. It's not like they're playing to the common stereotype that the television world is hostile to Jews.

Zeke Turner at Mediaite runs with a big headline:

‘Bite Me Jew Boy' Email Starts War of Words Between NBC and Right-Wing Think Tank

But gets the ball through the goalposts:

The he said–she said can only go on so long. Both sides should trot out their evidence now that this has become public and Stone's reputation is on the line. In the meantime, ALG has gotten some serious face time from a major news company. But will all the buzz turn into embarrassment once the case is closed on ‘Bite me Jew Boy'?

Yes. Turner's right about one thing: there will be embarrassment, but mostly, for people who think this was anything but a complete crock.

Update: My commenters are, as often is the case, crazy, and crazy on top of their shit. Baroness points out that the founder of AFG had a fawning profile front-and-center in the New York Times today. Also, Dragonhorse asks why the name on the email sent and the name on the return were different (and also asserts the cliched nature of the slur). And Mediaite's Anthony DeRosa asks ALG for their header. Teamwork!

We reported a little over a month ago that the Today show had booked Blagojevich to appear on the morning he happened to be arrested by the FBI, but bumped the interview so they could flack for Jay Leno's new show. We found that out through a Freedom of Information Act request to the state of Illinois asking for e-mails from representatives of the media to Lucio Guerrero, Blagojevich's press secretary (we got the idea from South Carolina's The State, which did the same thing—to comic effect—after Mark Sanford's Argentinian Rhapsody).

The first raft of e-mails we got were from December 8, the day before Blagojevich got popped, and it included one from Today producer Lexi Dauber apologetically canceling a scheduled remote Q-and-A with Matt Lauer to make room for Leno news. We just got another batch covering the 48 hours after the arrest, and guess what? Dauber and her fellow Today producer Stephanie Siegel all of a sudden really wanted to talk to Blagojevich!

The traditional route for a reporter desperately trying to convince someone to submit to an interview when it's obviously not in their interest to do so is to drop all pretense of toughness and objectivity and lie to them: We will be your friend! Not like all those other mean reporters. While Dauber and Seigel's e-mails to Guerrero are understandably sympathetic, an internal write-up of a phone call with Siegel outlining the terms of her interview request shows what they were really willing to give up. Matt Lauer or Meredith Vieira would call Blagojevich before the interview to "go over the line of questions," and Seigel stressed that "they are sensitive."

CBS's Early Show also went the simpering route, telling Guerrero that there is "far too much hearsay going around" and offering Blagojevich an opportunity to "set the record straight" and "clear his own name." They were even willing to "rent a private space to keep him away from the rest of the media's view." We all know how annoying prying reporters can be.

ABC News' Diane Sawyer, on the other hand, didn't try to buddy up to Blago. To her credit, Sawyer's producer offered a fairly straightforward pitch that managed to avoid over-the-top sycophancy.

Larry King's producer relied on the rogue's gallery that has traipsed through King's studio in the past, positioning the host as the go-to guy for crooks, liars, and other humiliated figures—go with us and you can be in the fine company of Jeffrey Skilling, Gary Condit, and Bob Packwood!

King's CNN colleague Anderson Cooper wasn't even trying: His producers sent in a perfunctory, We-asked-Governor-Blagojevich-to-come-on-the-show requests that they knew weren't going to open any doors.

Likewise the producer for CNN's Campbell Brown dashed off an email that would allow her to dutifully report that a request was in.

Sometimes brevity is your best bet when dealing with a harried flack who's clearly deluged with requests. That's what Andy Shaw, a political reporter for Chicago's local ABC station, decided to go with.

That kind of approach is important when you know your target is dealing with all manner of zany proposals. Like a request for comment from "a representative for Dan Ackroyd [sic] and Jim Belushi" on their call for Blagojevich's resignation. When a press aide forwarded that message to the governor's press assistant, she responded, "What? I want you to explain."

(For the record, it looks like that was a hoax call—we can't find any evidence that one-half of the Blues Brothers and the talentless brother of the other, dead, half ever made such a demand.)

The most pathetic request comes from Pat Curry, the news assignment editor for WGN, a local Chicago station. He wasn't even asking for an interview with Blagojevich—he wanted Guerrero himself to come on, and delivered a masterwork of flattery and faux sympathy. "I wouldn't expect you to be able to comment on a federal investigation, and could easily brush that off," Curry wrote, signing off with, "Humbly, Pat Curry."

A producer for a local Chicago talk radio show hosted by husband-and-wife pair Don and Roma Wade wins the award for discretion, declining to put in writing the "incredible offer" he had for Guerrero.

We'll never know what that offer was, but guess who got the first post-arrest interview with disgraced Gov. Rod Blagojevich?

You can read the whole batch here. Interestingly, not one e-mail from Fox News turned up. It could be that they relied solely on the phone, or that their e-mails somehow got missed by our FOIA requests. Or maybe they figured it wasn't worth trying.

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!

Such an agreement would mitigate the most high-profile battle within contemporary media, a feud that hearkened back to the newspaper wars of the early 20th century and which offered heartening — ever so slightly heartening — evidence that, in an era of 500 channel television sets, corporate media didn't have to be toothless or dull media.

But it's last chapter is all too predictable: A powerful, suited overlord got embarrassed by all the boat-rocking and called things to a halt. The suit, in this case, would be GE's Jeffrey Immelt, a frequent target of Fox shouting head Bill O'Reilly and his professional stalker Jesse Waters; according to the Times, Immelt sealed a deal with News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch this past May, "with a handshake" at Microsoft headquarters.

Details were left to underlings Jeff Zucker, at NBC, and Gary Ginsberg, at News Corp:

[They] agreed that hosts on Fox and MSNBC would resist lobbing mortars at each
other or their parent companies, according to an employee with direct knowledge of the agreement.... "For this war to stop, it meant fewer headaches on the corporate side," the employee said...

Then the orders went out to the troops — meaning, to journalists, now being told what true things they should avoid saying or investigating, because it was not in the interests of their corporate parent companies. Or at least that's what the Times' sources say:

Phil Griffin, said on a daily conference call with producers that he wanted the channel's other programs to follow Mr. Olbermann's lead and restrain from criticizing Fox directly, according to two employees. At Fox News, some staff members were told to "be fair" to G.E.

The feud between the two corporations dates back at least five years, to the first of MSNBC Countdown host Keith Olbermann's relentless attacks on O'Reilly, who uses his highly-rated Fox News show to attack various lefty targets, including an abortion doctor, "Tiller the Baby-Killer," who O'Reilly railed against some 28 times on his show, until someone finally murdered the guy.

O'Reilly attacks ginned up Olbermann's ratings, but the feud spread; O'Reilly, who refused to utter Olbermann's name, lashed out at General Electric and NBC News; News Corp.'s New York Post was enlisted to repeatedly jab at Olbermann.

Olbermann can be an insufferable blowhard, and there was no small amount of ego and self-interest behind his O'Reilly slams, a point emphasized in the Times' story. His attacks could go too far; Olbermann once wore an O'Reilly mask and gave a Nazi salute, on air. "It was time to grow up," a source told the Times.

But it's out of a swamp of impure motives and foolish mistakes than good journalism must arise, and for those who distrusted Fox News there was something comforting in the idea that MSNBC was ready to jump on the network's misstatements, tasteless moments and overreaches. Fox-lovers no doubt relished monitoring of the liberal media housed at 30 Rock.'

Olbermann protests to the Times that "I am party to no deal," but the paper documents how he appears to have led the way on this one. Our jaded hearts twinge only slightly for those NBC News staff who consider themselves journalists but swallow these sorts of orders from above; far more upset is our id, at the prospect of relinquishing the great fun of a vigorous — and vigorously cleansing — media feud.

It's about "journalists" and prosecutors and Navy SEALS tracking down "war criminals" and bringing them to justice. Like this professor of French at Goucher College, Leopold Munyakazi, who either personally participated in the Rwandan genocide or had nothing to do with it beyond upsetting the current repressive Rwandan government. See, that's the problem, it's not clear which one of those is the case.

A "journalist"—even a TV "journalist!—might try to shed light on the matter and figure out, to the best of his investigative ability, what the truth about the situation actually is. Charlie went in with a camera crew and a Rwandan prosecutor and got Munyakazi arrested, and now he faces possible deportation and a maybe-politically motivated prosecution back in Rwanda that will probably lead to life in prison for something he might not have had anything to with.

But, you know, Charlie has no time for this "shades of gray" bullshit. That's why his new show is a favorite of red-blooded conservative bloggers!

"How often is it that one hour of TV viewing can annoy terrorists, The New York Times, and Human Rights Watch?" Mary Katharine Ham of The Weekly Standard wrote on Monday.

Pretty often, actually! E's Wild On probably fits the bill.

Unfortunately, the show's premiere was not watched by anyone, and even fewer people watched episode two, and now they will not air any more of it. But at least they brought Munyakazi to what is either justice or a ridiculous miscarriage of same!

It seems crazy now, but there was a moment when Blagojevich was actually sought after by news organizations, and not the other way around. But according to e-mails obtained by Gawker, Today dumped him because of an "NBC related" story that the show "need[ed] to cover—Leno getting his own show at 10 p.m."

Back in early December, Blagojevich was making a name for himself both as a crusader for the victims of the recession and as an obviously corrupt thug who was about to be arrested—the Chicago Tribune reported on December 5 that the feds were listening in on his phone calls. Sounds like a good guy to interview, for news and such! So on December 8, 2008—the day that Blagojevich appeared at a sit-in held by laid-off workers at an Illinois window factory and announced, "I don't care whether you tape me privately or publicly, I can tell you that whatever I say is always lawful"—Today Show producer Lexi Dauber set up an exclusive interview with Blagojevich for Matt Lauer. Here's the e-mail exchange between Dauber and Blagojevich's press secretary Lucio Guerrero confirming the interview for the morning of December 9 (click on the image for a larger version):

Unfortunately, "news" intervened. By 8:30 on the evening before Matt Lauer was set to interview a sitting governor who was being wiretapped by the federal government, Dauber e-mailed Guerrero with her regrets, citing the fact that the show had to make room for a segment about the announcement of Leno's new show at 10 p.m.:

It was obvious to anyone who was watching MSNBC and NBC on the day of the Leno announcement that the company's news properties were ordered to cover the story like a missing white girl. But it's nice to have the directive in handy e-mail format, and to know just what sorts of stories NBC News is willing to shitcan to make way for in-house press releases. Indeed, on the morning of December 9, Matt Lauer sat down with the New York Times' Bill Carter to talk about Leno and how "you're going to get to laugh along with him a little earlier in the evening."

Hmmm, what else happened on the morning of December 9? Oh—Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested by FBI agents at his home in Chicago. So, yes, in NBC's defense, the interview almost certainly would never have happened anyway. But according to the e-mails—which Gawker obtained from Illinois under the state's Freedom of Information Act, because we really thought the State was onto something—Blagojevich was scheduled to show up at NBC News' Chicago studio for a remote at 5:45 a.m. He was arrested at his home at 6:15 a.m., after an FBI agent woke him with a phone call to let him know they were outside. So it's possible that if Today hadn't bumped him for Leno, he might have left his house before the feds got there. Or maybe they were sitting on his house 24 hours a day and would have just popped him as he was leaving. Or maybe they would have tailed him to the studio and arrested him live on the air! We'll never know, because NBC News is Jeff Zucker's personal PR shop and makes a mockery of the the "values" that Brian Williams and his colleagues claim, preposterously, to stand for.

After being contacted via e-mail for comment for this story, an NBC News spokeswoman asked us not to publish it until she could talk to us about it on the phone. So we called her, and she refused to comment for the record.

Also, here's what Guerrero e-mailed back to Dauber after she cancelled the interview, about 10 hours before his boss was arrested:

South Carolina's The State has once again put the state's open records law to excellent use by getting a hold of more obsequious e-mails from exclusive-hungry reporters to Sanford's press secretary during his disappearance, including a doozy from ABC News' Jake Tapper (click the image for a closer look):

At the time, no one knew exactly where Sanford was, and the Argentinian Connection had not yet been revealed. Tapper was engaging in the age-old reporters' practice of trashing the competition to official gatekeepers in the hopes that said gatekeepers will be goaded into believing that you are "on their side" and and will therefore be the best choice for their client/principal to talk to. Needless to say, the only side Tapper was on is his own. Never believe anything a reporter ever says to you.

The "slimy" spot in question did little else aside from report (gullibly) Sanford's staff's contention that the governor was hiking the Appalachian Trail, recount the previous conflicting explanations for his absence, and raise perfectly reasonable questions—questions that we're sure Tapper himself had—about Sanford's political prospects in light of his strange behavior. There was nothing "insulting" about it.

Tapper followed up with another e-mail, tattling on NBC News's David Gregory for writing about Sanford on Twitter:

Politico reached Tapper for comment about the e-mails:

Busted. In retrospect, the story I was referring to wasn't slimy enough — at that moment the only ones who knew of the governor's affair were Sanford, his wife, his mistress, and the State newspaper. But I shouldn't have said that, and I'll try to leave the media criticism to others from now on.

Good idea! We've e-mailed Mike Viqueira, the NBC News reporter whose spot Tapper trashed, for comment. We were all like, "Tapper's a total tool, I can't believe what he wrote about you! You should totally respond to Gawker. Also-FYI!—he's Tweeting about it. Slimy!" We'll let you know if we hear back.

Rachel Sklar attacked NBC News' Pete Williams for interviewing de Nugent (what is it with right-wing extremists and their foppish names?) for the Nightly News last night because de Nugent claims to have spoken with the accused killer just two weeks ago. Williams wasn't alone—as Sklar notes, de Nugent has turned up on ABC News, CBS News, Fox News Channel, the Washington Post, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Bloomberg, the Associated Press, and the BBC to offer his insights into von Brunn and the vicious right-wing extremist views that the two men share.

We know why NBC News and the rest gave de Nugent a platform: They wanted to report his claim that von Brunn didn't mention Barack Obama in their last converation, and that he was complaining about his Social Security benefit being slashed in half and having trouble making ends meet.

We also know why de Nugent wanted that platform. He wrote about it on his blog:

Dear comrades,

I am sure you are aware of the James von Brunn situation. At least I was able to turn some bad PR lemons into lemonade last night and yesterday, and I got to 1) explain how understandable white anger is, and 2) how Obama needs to assuage heightened white fears about gun and speech control or he will, by everything he does, provoke even more incidents.

I was interviewed at length by ABC Good Morning America, ABC Nightly News, the CBS Early Show, Fox News (Sheppard Smith Report), NBC Nightly News, the Washington Post, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Bloomberg, and Associated Press.

I talked to all the electronic and print media about "White Heritage Safety Zones" in every interview - and the cameramen at least were all enthralled!

What gratified me was that major news reporters were interviewing me in-depth on my own racial project as well as the Von Brunn tragedy, and although they used on live TV only the direct Von Brunn information I gave them - none of it hostile, but just explanatory – they seemed quite impressed with my Solutrean vision as well. After scheduling me for ten minutes, they often let the cameras roll for 30 minutes (even using up a whole 30-minute-block of satellite time).

And I am happy to say that I 1) put the onus on Obama and liberals for white rage, and I helped the truth win out that 2) James von Brunn was indeed acting alone, and thus there was no reason to have any mass government round-up of WN leaders or followers.

So there you have it. A right-wing extremist neo-Nazi says he spoke to von Brunn two weeks ago and that von Brunn seemed totally normal and just under financial strain and therefore acted alone so move along folks, nothing to see here. While you're at it, though, do you mind if I tell you about my interesting ideas on race? Or, barring that, at least let me look respectable in a coat and tie on your air?

There's nothing wrong with gathering information from someone claiming to be one of the last people to have spoken to von Brunn before the attack. But did Williams and everybody else have to put him on the air to do that? Or report his claims without mentioning that they are likely lies coming from a damaged mind and designed to support his agenda of dissociating his "white nationalist" movement from the utterly predictable actions of one of its members?

De Nugent is reveling in his media moment. He even made sure that his interlocutors described him according to his own deranged taxonomy, as opposed to the truth:

I am also happy to say that most media more or less correctly called me a "white separatist" and NOT a "white supremacist" after I made that point crystal-clear.

As you can see from the image above, NBC News happily obliged.

P.S. Along with being a right-wing extremist, it also appears that von Brunn was a Republican.

If we're analyzing the statements of a guy who launched an attack that killed 3,000 Americans in the same terms that we use to assess the efforts of a comparatively harmless hack like Rep. John Boehner to keep his head above the political waters, then we guess that's a good thing. And there's certainly nothing wrong with pointing out the obvious political and media-relations elements to bin Laden's strategy. Still, Chuck—the political analysis game has its limits.

Let's put it in crass political terms: Your chief political opponent for the hearts and minds of the Muslim world is about to come to the two most important countries in Islam—Saudi Arabia and Egypt. And he's going to give a speech. So of course you want to try to give a prebuttal. In many ways, this is just what any political opponent of the president would do. You want to get into the stories.

Of course, Obama can hit back at bin Laden's charges by painting him as out of touch with the concerns of working Muslims, and by subtly hinting at his age and health issues, which polling suggests is a problem. The big worry in the Obama camp is whether bin Laden will play the "infidel card," and whether the folks who live in Saudi Arabia—which some describe as "Riyadh and Jeddah with central Pennsylvania in between"—can be persuaded to see Obama as one of them.

UPDATE: Jake "The Octogon" Tapper, who earlier today decided to remind Matt Drudge of Obama's "Muslim roots," reports that the White House has responded to Osama's message:

"This president and his outreach are very threatening to bin Laden and al Qaeda," said a senior administration official. "It's terribly bad news to bin Laden and al Qaeda. They're beginning to lose the propaganda war."

We thought "war room" was a dead metaphor—when you hear that phrase, you don't think of generals planning attacks anymore, you think of George Stephanopoulos lying to someone on a gigantic cell phone. Looks like it's alive again, though.

On last night's show, O'Brien aired footage from Williams' Obama sit-down of the newsman asking the president about the Leno-O'Brien transition. Here's the exchange:

Williams: I couldn't help but notice your trip this week coincides with Conan O'Brien's first week on the air. Is it because of that, or were there considerations perhaps that you almost cancelled to stay and watch his first week as host of the Tonight Show?

Obama: Well, I think that Conan will do an outstanding job. This is something we've discussed several times in the Oval Office—how to manage this transition between Leno and Conan. And I think he's up to the task. But I just want him to know that there's not going to be any bailout coming from Washington if he screws it up.

HA HA HA.

Brian Williams is so caught up in his persona as an indie-rock loving hipster funny guy that he's actually doing bits for comedy shows on the job while interviewing the President of the United States. And Barack Obama is so caught up in being cool and relatable that he went along with it. Both of these men have very serious jobs, and many, many people have very important questions to ask Barack Obama. Instead of asking one of them, Williams wasted a little time yukking it up so that he could help promote one of his parent company's entertainment properties.

We're all for having a cool president, and for news anchors with a sense of humor. But interviews with the president are not a fucking joke. And if you're going to turn one into a fucking joke, it should at least be a funny one.

As our colleagues at Gizmodo have reported (see update), when Goldman told On the Money's Carmen Wong Ulrich that Windows PCs are more expensive than they appear, each of his talking points was taken from this BusinessWeek article by Arik Hesseldahl. (The arguments, a list of costly extras supposedly required to make Windows machines as good as Macs, are neatly summarized in the CNBC graphic below. A clip of the appearance is above.)

The duplication of six data points between the BusinessWeek story and Goldman's CNBC segment would be enough, on its own, to give away Goldman's cribbing. But the real tell that Goldman didn't do his own work was his sloppy copying of BusinessWeek's comparison: Hesseldahl wrote that a PC buyer would need Adobe's low-end Photoshop Elements to match the Mac's built-in iPhoto. In the CNBC graphic, Goldman rendered this as "Photoshop" — a much more expensive program that doesn't come with a PC or a Mac. (Hesseldahl has now accused Goldman of "borrowing" his column, and pointed out other errors.)

Perhaps Goldman should go back to taking his lines direct from the mouths of Apple flacks. At least then there wouldn't be a paper trail of his copying, as there was this time around. Or the probability of an uncomfortable discussion with his boss about the exact boundaries of plagiarism.

Moe Tkacik (hey, that name sounds familiar) over at Talking Points Memo had a chat with her own CNBC source, present at the now-famous 30 Rock meeting between GE chief Jeff Immelt, NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker and top personalities and executives from CNBC.

The source "took offense" to the idea that the meeting was "creepy," saying it had been convened to give network reporters the chance "to pick Immelt's brain," since he not only heads GE but is on the president's economic advisory council and on the board of the New York Fed.

It's worth noting that this is third explanation of why the meeting was called, CNBC having said previously it was convened "to thank CNBC for a job well done" and an aggrieved insider having told Page Six it was all about bowing down before General Secretary Barack Obama.

Tkacik's source acknowledged that the meeting did turn to "soul searching", but only as part of an ongoing self-examination at the network:

Our source said some CNBC employees and executives now accept that the network was too willing to play cheerleader to the financial engineering-based economy, but expressed surprise that anyone felt political "pressure" after the dinner.

Conservative anchor Dennis Kneale agreed there's been no political pressure.

Which raises the question: If CNBC's corporate overlords won't smack the broken network's most intractable elements into a serious reform program, who the hell will?

[Talking Points Memo]

Page Six "has learned" — such credible language from a gossip sheet — that such pressure was applied. But CNBC disputes any political overtones to the event, which it said was a "to thank CNBC for a job well done." Uh, really? A job well done?

In any case, someone at NBC clearly has an axe to grind. Six's source insists GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt and NBC Universal President Jeff Zucker (pictured) want the network in the tank, for the socialist in chief:

There was a long discussion about whether CNBC has become too conservative and is beating up on Obama too much... The whole meeting was really kind of creepy.

This account is definitely disconcerting, if only because there are far better reasons to call CNBC on the carpet: failing to warn investors about the pending financial meltdown, actively mocking experts with enough foresight to do so, swallowing so many CEO lies whole, and just generally being a part of the dysfunctional, broken Wall Street system rather than a check on it.

Rick Santelli's cheap Fox News schtick is the least of the network's many problems.

[Page Six]

Todd's wonky explanations of the primary calendar and superdelegates made him a fan favorite to replace Tim Russert as the host of Meet the Press, but that gig went to David Gregory, and Todd got the White House as a sort of consolation prize.

But now MSNBC's working on giving him a cable news platform from which to bring back some of that crazy talking-head magic we used to love so well. He will presumably be keeping the White House gig; the Observer has no other details.

NBC is said to be buying the news dinosaurs out of their very, very expensive contracts. Scarborough, who just marked his 35th anniversary at WNBC last week, makes a reported $3 million per year.

Moyer is reportedly one of the models for Will Ferrell's Ron Burgundy character, and Scarborough (pictured above) looks and behaves on the air precisely like Kent Brockman.

It used to be that, in local news at least, the anchor meant everything and was worth outsize salaries some of them have commanded in major markets. If Scarborough and Moyer, both of whom are giants in the business, get axed, it means that "NBC is essentially getting out of the local news business," one NBC source says.

We put in a call to KNBC and WNBC flacks but haven't heard back yet. UPDATE: WNBC spokeswoman Anna Carbonell says "it is not true. He is not being bought out. Chuck is a big part of our station."

Another source says similar moves are underway at all of NBC's stations, which are aggressively cutting costs: "NBC no longer sees the local news business as a star-driven product. It's more of a utility, and they're going to pay accordingly." NBC will start axing sports anchors, who often get paid $500,000 and more to introduce packages from other sports reporters, and doing away with the two-anchor, ethnic-lady-plus-white-man format.

In buying out Scarborough and Moyer, NBC would continue to pay their salaries, but the cost would be moved off of the news budget, a source says. And concocting fake gimmicks to reduce the news budget is all the rage at NBC these days. Expect an uproar from lonely old ladies who are losing their TV boyfriends.

A tipster tells us that NBC News—and probably all of NBC Universal, though we're not sure—is discreetly calling around and asking its on-air and off-air employees to take one for the team and voluntarily delay any contractually obligated salary increases for six months. Anyone who has a contract that spells out a raise, of course, is free to say, "No, give me my money." But word is that the network will remember any untoward responses and take them into account when they work out the next budget.

It's kind of odd, at a time when NBC Universal is bizarrely one of G.E.'s best performing divisions, that employees in the unit have to pay the price for the rest of the company's stupid mistakes. But they're being told that they are all employees of GE, and need to be as generous and magnanimous as that asshole from AIG who gave his bonus away.