Here are the best bits from former NBC News reporter Irving R. Levine's FBI file, which tells the story of the KGB's attempt to recruit him as a spy and the FBI's detailed surveillance on his personal affairs.

Former NBC News reporter Irving R. Levine, who died last year, was a hilariously nerdy TV presence: A soft-spoken, bow-tied mensch. So it's surprising to learn, via declassified FBI files, that he deftly parried KGB attempts to blackmail him.

The Society of Professional Journalists is scolding NBC News for buying its "exclusive" interview with David Goldman—the father of that Brazilian kid—by chartering a jet to fly father, son, and NBC reporter back to the U.S. Shocking, indeed.

NBC News didn't pay the Salahis for their exclusive Today appearance this morning. They didn't have to: According to rival bookers trying to land the Salahis, they already have a contract with Bravo preventing them from talking to anyone else.

For our next installment of the Spitzer Files—our collection of e-mails between flacks and reporters during Eliot Spitzer's downfall—we bring you the tale of the Today producer who offered to help a flack find a job at NBC.

The 96-hour orgy of navel-gazing, unseemly on-camera veneration that attended Tim Russert's untimely death was not enough, nor was the accelerated career advancement afforded his son. Nope—now Russert's old NBC News office will become a museum exhibit.

So: Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga, Tucker Carlson. What do the three previous posts have in common? None of 'em are nearly as much fun as watching a conservative policy group play the press cycle over a "Jewboy" "email" from NBC.

On the morning he was arrested on corruption charges last December, Rod Blagojevich was the nation's biggest greaseball. So obviously, the national press was willing to say anything to land an interview. And we've got their emails to prove it.

The deluge of media e-mails to Rod Blagojevich's press secretary in the wake of his arrest, obtained from the state of Illinois through the Freedom of Information Act.

"Tea Party Patriots" National Coordinator Jenny Beth Martin got a friendly little "media request" from CNBC: could you crazies maybe go crazy up a town hall somewhere? Sure, a 'Bagger says: how bout the guy who got the swastika?

Friday night is for dumping embarrassing news, as media companies well know. So it is that the New York Times now surfaces a secret deal in which NBC is said to cravenly promise to ease its criticism of Fox News.

Charlie Ebersol, who got into television through his dad Dick and who directed a movie about a snowboarder once, revolutionized TV news with his new Judgment at Nuremberg-meets-Dog the Bounty Hunter show The Wanted.

On the morning the FBI arrested Rod Blagojevich, he was supposed to be doing a live exclusive interview with Matt Lauer. But Today canceled so Lauer could flack the "news" of Jay Leno's new 10 p.m. show on NBC.

ABC News' Jake "The Octogon" Tapper thinks NBC News is totally "slimy" for their gross and "insulting" reporting during South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's disappearance. The nerve of those guys, suggesting that something untoward was going on!