Fashion's favorite chic hackerette is hosting an event again! This Friday night from 7-9, Wise will be on-hand at the Alice + Olivia pop-up shop at Scoop on 73rd and 3rd Avenue along with Bettina Prentice, Dabney Mercer, Tinsley Mortimer, Cory Kennedy and more.

On March 10, 2008, the New York Times broke the story of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's hooker habit, and cable news went insane. One of the gratifying things we found in the 1,300 pages of e-mail correspondence between Spitzer's flacks and reporters (which we obtained under New York's public records law) was that some reporters who were booked as talking heads actually made an effort to know what they were talking about before they went on TV. Of course, it's hard to get too much information at the last minute — which is one reason no one on cable television knows what they are talking about — and often the natural impulse of reporters is to check in with a flack for guidance.

The day after the Spitzer news broke, as speculation over his future was at a fever pitch, Financial Times reporter Brooke Masters, who wrote a book in 2006 about Spitzer's rise to power, was booked to appear on CNN. She sent a frantic e-mail to Spitzer's communications director Christine Anderson ten minutes before she was scheduled to go on, asking, "what tone should I take when asked if he will resign?" She signed off with, "Help."

Anderson responded that no announcement would be coming that day, but that Masters' "tone should probably be that the options aren't good." On CNN that night, in a taped segment for Anderson Cooper 360, Masters said, "Unless he can completely reinvent himself, his old method of dealing with the world and his old attraction as a politician is gone."

When we let Masters know that we were publishing the exchange, she wrote in an e-mail that "I knew I was going to be asked what Mr Spitzer would do, and I am a reporter not a pundit so I was trying to gather the facts." Which we commend her for. Still, it's worth remembering the next time you see a reporter analyzing a story on cable somewhere, that — at least for the ones who did their homework — the facts, and the tone, sometimes come unattributed and off the record from people who are paid to manage reporters.

Another reporter who checked in with Anderson before going on TV was them-Time magazine deputy managing editor Adi Ignatius, who now edits the Harvard Business Review. Oddly, Ignatius — who had covered and profiled Spitzer for Time — was booked on ABC News and NBC News as a supporter of Spitzer's, to balance out the detractors offering gleeful quotes on his self-immolation.

On March 10, a few hours after the story broke, Ignatius e-mailed Spitzer's chief of staff Marlene Turner asking if he could speak to Spitzer or anyone else in his office about the governor's state of mind before going on ABC News's World News Tonight. Turner referred him to Anderson. World News didn't use any of Ignatius' tape, but the next day, NBC Nightly News invited him to speak as "someone who knows and likes Eliot," and he asked Anderson for access to Spitzer or anybody else who might know his thinking. Anderson responded that she'd be happy to talk to him.

That night, Ignatius was identified on a Nightly News segment as a Spitzer "supporter," and he told correspondent Mike Taibbi that "it's going to be very, very, very difficult for him to stay in office."

Ignatius and Masters were right to find out as much as they could before being presented to television audiences as informed analysts (or in Ignatius' case, a partisan). But it's interesting, to us at least, to see laid bare the role that flacks can play behind the scenes in managing the tone and direction of talking-head coverage during a PR disaster.

Earlier this week, we used New York's open records law to obtain email exchanges between reporters and Eliot Spitzer's communications director during last year's hookergate fiasco — a story that the Times broke. We turned up examples of Times reporters asking for permission to call sources, previewing copy for sign-off, and generally being surprisingly collaborative with a woman who was paid to manage and mislead them.

In an editorial, PR Week's response is, What's so wrong with that?

True, there are places where it seems the journalists went above and beyond what was necessary in a professional relationship, such as asking for permission to call a source, but let's not forget who broke the story. The fact is that it often takes negotiation to get a great story. We can only see the emails; we don't know the content of the phone calls and meetings that no doubt also took place to put the initial piece and continuous follow-up stories together. It takes trade-offs with your sources and, yes, many times those sources are communications staffers.

So there you have it. Sometimes good journalism requires engaging negotiations and trade-offs with the people who are paid to make sure reporters have to engage in negotiations and trade-offs, according to the people who are paid to make sure reporters have to engage in negotiations and trade-offs. And, to judge by the response we got to that item, according to a lot of reporters, too.

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.

On March 10, 2008, few people on the planet had more difficult jobs than Christine Anderson and Errol Cockfield. They were the communications director and press secretary, respectively, for New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, and at roughly 1:07 p.m. on that afternoon, the Times went live with a story documenting their boss' entanglement as "Client No. 9" in a federal investigation of a high-end prostitution ring. We were curious what the inside of a PR meltdown looks like, so—following in the footsteps of The State's investigation into the media's efforts to land an exclusive interview with Mark Sanford while he was hiking the Appalachian Trail—we used New York's open records law to obtain e-mail traffic between Anderson, Cockfield, and the dozens of reporters barraging them with inquiries in the days following the Spitzer revelations.

The e-mails total 1,300 pages, and we're still reading through the stack of paper. Any other interesting finds will be going up in subsequent posts. But what we've seen so far has been surprising: You'd think that, with blood in the water, the traditional coziness that develops between official flacks and the beat reporters who have to talk to them every day would break down into some kind of last-man-standing slugfest. But in the Spitzer case, the opposite happened. The revelations upended the worlds of both reporter and flack alike, and the uncertainty, long hours, and breakneck pace of the scandal actually seemed to throw them together as they worked toward what seems, if you read the e-mail exchanges, like a common goal of getting the news out and behind them.

Which makes sense on a human level. But sometimes good reporting—especially of the government watchdog variety—requires an inhuman suspension of compassion. The infractions documented in these e-mails are misdemeanors, but—in addition to being an unvarnished peek inside the media machinery—they're indicative of the creeping social and professional alliances that inevitably develop between PR handlers and their overworked, easily manipulated charges in the press corps. And they give the lie to the myth of the vigilant watchdog press that keeps the government on its toes. Next time you hear New York Times editor Bill Keller claim that newspapers are uniquely situated to do the "hard, expensive, sometimes dangerous work [of] quality journalism," remember that his reporter broke the story of Spitzer's dalliances with prostitutes. But also remember the time his reporter e-mailed Gov. Paterson's flack to request permission to call Paterson's former mistress.

This first installment documents the shocking amount of control that Keller's Times allowed Anderson, a former Good Morning America producer and PR veteran of the Clinton White House, to exercise over his paper's coverage. After bringing Anderson's world down around her head by breaking the story, Times reporters previewed portions of their stories with her before publication, asked for her permission before contacting sources, and let her tell them how to characterize its reporting in the paper.

We'll begin at the beginning: On March 9, 2008, Anderson had not yet been informed of Spitzer's transgressions. Which makes this e-mail exchange with Times reporter Danny Hakim, who broke the story along with William K. Rashbaum, almost painfully poignant in retrospect.

Clueless, Anderson tried to sniff out what Hakim was up to, apparently to no avail (Spitzer himself broke the news to his staff early the next morning):

Hakim and Rashbaum's story went live the next day at roughly 2:08 p.m., using the Drudge Report Archives' timeline as a chronological guide. At 1:34 p.m., Hakim was still working his scoop, and e-mailed Anderson to make sure he had a detail right about how Spitzer broke the news to his staff. The subject line was, "can i do this?", and the message body appears to be the actual text Hakim planned to write—in other words, he appears to have been previewing his copy for the woman charged with managing Spitzer's image crisis, and seeking her signoff.

Anderson had a minor quibble with the facts—there was no single meeting at which Spitzer made the announcement—but she objected to the idea of repeating the phrase "ensnared in a prostitution ring," and asked Hakim to simply say Spitzer told his staff about "the matter."

The original Times story has been repeatedly updated, but the current version renders that detail thusly: "The governor informed his top aides Sunday night and this morning of his involvement."

Two days later, Spitzer announced his resignation, and the media scrum's attention turned to then-Lt. Gov. David Paterson. Paterson had his own press aides, but Anderson stayed on while Spitzer was still nominally in office and managed the coverage of the transition. On March 14, Times reporter Jeremy Peters was working on a profile of Paterson's chief of staff, Charles O'Byrne. He interviewed O'Byrne for the story, apparently working under an agreement that any quotes had to be cleared through Anderson.

Anderson replied that none of the quotes could be used, and recommended some of O'Byrne's friends for Peters to call for (presumably positive) quotes, a fairly routine practice.

Peters didn't push back. He simply asked Anderson how best to characterize O'Byrne's refusal to be quoted. "Say he declined to be interviewed?" asked Peters. Of course, O'Byrne didn't decline to be interviewed—he just declined to be quoted, a distinction that Anderson caught:

It's a bizarre world where flacks are more vigilant than reporters when it comes to trying not to mislead readers. The exchange continued, with Peters trying to gather competitive intelligence from Anderson and Anderson trying to make sure Peters spoke to the sources she wanted him to speak to.

Peters' O'Byrne profile eventually ran on March 20, including a proviso that "Mr. O'Byrne would not comment for this article" and several positive quotes from Ethan Geto and Eric Schneiderman, another source recommended by Anderson.

The PR disaster didn't end with Spitzer's resignation: Just days after Paterson ascended to the governor's office, the New York Daily News reported that both Paterson and his wife had engaged in multiple infidelities. The question of the hour on the afternoon of March 18 was the identity of the governor's office employee mentioned in the Daily News story as one of the new governor's ex-flames. Hakim knew who it was, but the Times would never stoop to delve into someone's private life so tastelessly. Unless the Daily News does it, in which case, yeah, maybe they would. So Hakim checked in with Anderson to find out if some filthy tabloid was getting ready to be first out the gate with Kirton's name, in which case he'd try to beat them.
Worried, Hakim sheepishly—"again, if others are calling her"—asks Anderson for permission to make the call.
Astonishingly, Anderson gives him the go-ahead, and provides him with her phone numbers.

Kirton's name came out a few hours later online. The Times never ended up mentioning her name, because only filthy tabloids do that.

For a sense of the differential treatment that flacks dole out to reporters, have a look at how Anderson responded to Daily News political correspondent Celeste Katz's request for confirmation about Kirton after the name came out—Anderson confirmed it off the record, but offered no contact info unbidden. Perhaps Katz should have asked for permission to call Kirton.

Newsday's Melissa Mansfield made the same request of Anderson's deputy Errol Cockfield, and got even colder treatment:

Mansfield didn't mind the brush-off, and responded with the same sort of sheepish, we-don't-do-gossip ass-covering that Hakim employed:

LOL, indeed. This is just from our first read of the batch of e-mails. There's much more to come. We contacted Hakim and Peters for their responses, but neither reporter agreed to comment for the record.

UPDATE: Diane McNulty, a New York Times spokeswoman, responded in an e-mail to Poynter's Jim Romenesko:

Any suggestion that the Times went too easy on the Spitzer administration seems a bit absurd in this context.

Our goal, always, is to get the facts right. Dealing with sources responsibly and professionally serves that goal, and that is what our reporters did in this case.

TV critics get thousands of promotional e-mails every day, and when Fox News sent one to Barnhart last week trying to generate excitement over Glenn Beck's batshit conspiracies about the swine flu vaccine, he thought it was kind of funny. So he posted this to Twitter:

Fox News PR just emailed to let me know Glenn Beck will be raising fears tonight on his TV show. No poop, Poirot.

It's funny because it's true. Fox's unabashed fearmongering—indeed, it's proud promotion of fearmongering as such—tickled Keith Olbermann, who mentioned the e-mail on his show.

But then something strange happened: On Monday, the Huffington Post's Danny Shea posted a story calling bullshit on Barnhart and Olbermann. Shea quoted an anonymous Fox News spokesperson saying the network never sent any such e-mail:

"We never sent anything to Barnhart and he refused to respond to us when directly asked who he received that from," a Fox News spokesperson said.

The distinction is important, as e-mails from the PR department can be perceived as on-the-record and thus legitimized as the network's official position on a subject.

Yes, what a vitally important distinction! Barnhart sadly—and stupidly—deleted the e-mail immediately after he wrote about it on Twitter, so he was left defenseless after Fox denied it and implied that he's a liar who makes up fake mean Tweets about Fox's upstanding public relations professionals. He searched far and wide for a copy of the errant fear-raising publicity blast to prove that he's not, but to no avail. He wrote a mild blog post saying he could have sworn he got that e-mail, but in the face of such a strong denial from Fox, it didn't amount to much.

Then Barnhart remembered his GMail account and—lo and behold!—found the e-mail that Fox said it did not send him:

The e-mail, as you can see, was a "Fox Fan Scoop"—a newsletter sent out by the network to people stupid or lonely enough to describe themselves as "Fox fans." It's an important distinction, because Fox Fan Scoops can be perceived as on-the-record and thus legitimized as the network's official position on the subject of how the swine flu vaccine "scares the heck" out of Glenn Beck.

So when the anonymous Fox spokesperson said "we" never sent such an e-mail to Barnhart, was she talking about "we" the Fox News PR department, or "we" the network that the PR department actually represents?

"'We' as in the Fox News PR department," says Fox News spokeswoman Irena Briganti. "And Barnhart's blog post confirms that it did not come from the Fox News PR department." No, it just came from the part of Fox News that relates to the public by sending out e-mails to promote it's television shows. Again, it's an important distinction. Anyway, Aaron Barnhart—whom, by way of full disclosure, we know and like—is not a liar, and the anonymous Fox News flack who told the Huffington Post that "we" never sent the e-mail is.

Earlier this week, Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.) went on MSNBC's Morning Joe and made some rather reasonable remarks about the racists who hate Obama: They exist, he said, and some of them go to town hall meetings. But not everyone who hates Obama is a racist.

But that was too much for the GOP, which seized on the comments and started sending the video around, saying, "Tom Perriello thinks we're all racists!" A "tipster" sent the video to Politico's Glenn Thrush, who found it "interesting" inasmuch as it was an opportunity to WIN THE DAY by talking about race all the time.

Here's what Thrush saw Perriello say when he played the video:

I conducted over a hundred hours of town hall meetings in my district in central and Southern Virginia, and the vast majority of them were civil; people disagreed passionately on ideological grounds. And there were the rare cases where very racist remarks were made. Sometimes they were called out by neighbors in the audience; sometimes they weren't. Clearly, race remains a factor in America, but there's also a lot of disagreement here that is genuine and not based on race, so I think we have to have both conversations.

Since he's interested in reporting things that actually happened, Thrush dutifully sat down and took the five minutes or so required to transcribe Perriello's remarks—just kidding! No, of course he didn't. Instead, he just cut and pasted a "transcript" of Perriello's comments that he got via e-mail from a GOP hack, who had conveniently cut out the parts where Perriello said "the vast majority of [meetings] were civil," and "people disagreed passionately on ideological grounds," and the racist remarks were "rare."

He also copy and pasted the GOP hack's comment that Perriello is exactly like Jimmy Carter and Nancy Pelosi and cries race all the time and is a pointy-headed college boy: "Much like Jimmy Carter and Nancy Pelosi, Tom Perriello is mistaking genuine opposition to the president's agenda for bigotry. These insulting remarks are yet another indication that Perriello's Ivy-bred elitism is impeding his ability to represent everyday Virginians."

Apparently he got caught, because today Thrush posted an apology:

As I was transcribing, I got an email from a NRCC spokesman Andy Sere, who wanted to comment on it, appending what appeared to be a full a transcript of the exchange.

A time saver, I thought, so I cut-and-pasted. What I didn't immediately realize was that Sere had replaced key words — that provided important context —with elipses. When the error was pointed out, I quickly fixed it.

Anyway, lesson learned, right, everybody? The lesson being that Politico will take literally anything, so keep up the good work, Andy.

NOTE: This post has been edited to reflect the fact that we misspelled the hell out of Tom Perriello's name.

Here's the text of an email we received tonight from a Star Magazine flack:

Breaking News! Star Reporter Dating Jon Gosselin

It's a stunning turn of events that even Star couldn't see coming, father-of-eight Jon Gosselin and one of our reporters have fallen for each other.

Kate Major confirmed tonight that she and the Jon & Kate Plus 8 dad are an item, five days after they were first photographed together.

"I didn't mean it to happen, it just did," Kate, 26, says. "I went to do a story on Jon and ended up falling for him."

The release included a link to a post on the Star website with a request for us to link back to their story if we happened to post anything on the subject, a request we're more than happy to oblige. Here you go Star:

Star, You Are the Fucking Worst, You Know That? [Star]

Spin is big and thick and getting a roll out from St. Martin's next month, but really the first few pages of the prologue tell it all. A blowed-out, little-black-dress-clad, ogre-handed orange menace named Jennie blowing lines at 6am while complaining about black people. Seriously! Take a look for yourself! The fictional Robert wakes up one morning to the following scene:

Click on each image to make larger

Um, brutal! Be afraid Mr. Rave, be very, very afraid. We can't wait to get to the part about some sort of horrible "accident" outside a Hamptons nightclub.

See you at the book party, Rob. If you make it that long.

All night last we were giddy with anticipation thinking we'd definitely get an email from the wacky Charmaine Blake. Unfortunately, we did not. But a "dear personal friend" of hers, a Spielberg no less, did take the time to write in to inform us that some unknown evil goblin recognized Charmaine Blake as she was enjoying a tasty dinner last night with John Ratzenberger at Wolfgang Puck's Cut in Beverly Hills, which prompted the hellion to spring into action with a diabolical plot to destroy Charmaine Blake, expertly crafting a press release that just so happens to read exactly like something Charmaine Blake would write, based on what we've seen of her work, and then blasted it out to slew of press contacts that this rogue rascal just so happened to have laying around.

See for yourself:

From: MelissaSpielberg@aol.com
Date: July 1, 2009 2:07:05 PM PDT
To: melissa.spielberg@gmail.com
Subject: Media Alert: Celebrity News Retraction

To Whom if May Concern:

My name is Melissa Spielberg. I am a dear personal friend of Charmaine Blake's. Ms. Blake is very upset about the email that went out about her and John Ratzenberger having dinner last night. Apparently someone witnessed Charmaine Blake and John Ratzenberger having dinner at Wolfgang Puck's "Cut" in Beverly Hills last evening. Unfortunately, word leaked out and someone emailed a tip from a fictitious email address claiming to be Charmain Blake. The email address CharmaineBlakePR@aol.com and ExclusivePRFirm@aol.com do not belong to Charmaine Blake and have no affiliation whatsoever with Charmaine Blake. These emails does not exist and we sincerely apologize to everyone for this most unfortunate miscommunication.

Please be advised, if you received this email yesterday, you were being deceived.

Charmaine Blake and John Ratzenberger are very good friends and I hope everyone will respect their privacy.

Thank you for your kind understanding with this matter.

Sincerely yours,
Melissa Spielberg

Wow! Such are the perils of being "the most famous publicist" we suppose. Charmaine Blake's enemies are powerful and determined and will stop at nothing to destroy her. This is obviously the work of the Godless, child-raping David Letterman.

Charmaine Blake PR [Charmaine Blake PR]
Charmaine Blake's Blog [Charmaine Watch]

So today Rihanna appeared in court to testify against a man who nearly beat and strangled her to death, but the dirty business of public relations will rest for no one, especially if there's an angle with which a publicist can attach a client to a well-known celebrity. With that said, here's the body of an email we were sent tonight by Michele Marie PR:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Rihanna's Court Style

LOS ANGELES - June 22, 2009 - While attending the Chris Brown preliminary hearing, Rihanna wore a vintage [redacted] yellow gold and diamond bracelet watch (Retail price, $8,500) and vintage [redacted] 18 karat yellow gold, ruby and diamond earrings (Retail price, $13,000), both from [redacted].

Ha! You see what we did there? We published the statement but redacted the names of the clients represented by Michele Marie PR. This is what we do when shameless flacks, like the folks at Michele Marie PR, send us this sort of crap, so just stop clogging up our inboxes with it, okay?!

Are you still getting emails begging for money for Hillary Clinton's failed presidential campaign? Yes? You sucker. Well don't give her one gaddamn dime because the one outstanding debt is to Penn, Schoen, & Berland Associates LLC. This is the Mark Penn market research and polling firm that helped make Hillary Clinton our nation's not-44th President! And Hillary still owes them $2,307,740.82 for coming up with that brilliant "I am the only person who can win this race because I'm white" strategy.

Not surprisingly, many Clinton allies are decidedly unsympathetic to Penn's situation. Fumes one: "He should have to eat it." But it isn't that simple. The money is owed not to Penn personally but to his company, which is a subsidiary of the worldwide public relations and advertising firm WPP Group, based in London. The bills the Clinton campaign ran up included $5 million for the polling that apparently failed to pick up on the public mood. And then there was the cost of sending out 20 million pieces of direct mail, with postage alone reaching $8 million, according to an official for the firm. Many would argue that it was money ill-spent. At a minimum, that big a bill for snail mail suggests that Clinton's campaign was relying heavily on tactics from the 20th century, while Obama was running circles around her by using the far more cost- (and politically) effective Internet.

Of course, as Ezra Klein points out, the Clintons are fucking rich, so it's unclear why, if they insist on making sure Mark Penn gets his cash for being a pathetic, out-of-touch loser, they don't just pay him with Bill's Burkle money or something. That would seem a little more morally defensible than asking your broke-ass donors to continue helping you pay the man whose work made their candidate fuck up what shoulda been her race to win!

DEMOCRATIC POLITICIANS (AND MIKE BLOOMBERG) BE ADVISED: if you're at Union Pool and the bartender hands you a cocktail napkin from "Microtrend Jordan" reading "I want to give your campaign a winning media strategy with my mouth" alert the authorities immediately.

Joann Killeen and her husband and partner Mark Furney have decided to drop their high-profile, extreme IVF client after receiving threatening phone calls and letters. Killeen told the Los Angeles Times:

The American public has just lashed out. I think it has to do with the economy, healthcare ... there are not a lot of jobs, people are unemployed and are trying to take care of their families.

This doesn't bode well for anyone (including Nadya?) hoping for a reality show version of this whole ugly circus, as the court of public opinion coming down so harshly doesn't really equal high ratings, especially for a feel-good network like supersize family aficionados TLC. A rep for that network says that they're "waiting to see what happens next." Though, we kinda already know, don't we? Oprah! It's inevitable. And then a cheesy, terrible book. Or maybe book first. Oh how will it go??

I don't think they will give her a show at this point. It's just too much. Though, they do employ that crazy Duggar family. So who knows.

Disney recently issued this release for all those female NHL fans who might be in the market for a hot new romcom and the ultimate public humilation"

CONFESSIONS OF A SHOPAHOLIC Ice Block Challenge

WHO: New Jersey Devils' female fans

WHEN: Saturday, February 7, 2009
5:30PM-6:30PM (Pre-Game)

WHAT: With only a high heel shoe as their tool, two women will each try to break through a block of ice to win a $102 gift card to Mandee.

Poor, poor Isla.

• 'Confession of a Shopaholic' Ice Block Challenge [Reuters PR Wire]

To set the scene, December is the season where all the PR companies are throwing out 50x the normal amount of emails in order to gear up interest for their clients for January's CES (the largest consumer electronics show in US of the year). This means massive distribution lists, massive list blasts and everyone having to wade through piles of pitches that may or may not be right for their publication.

This particular event all started with a blogger (not us) asking politely to be removed from an email distribution list because they don't cover the products the firm was pitching. Then, this happened:

CES publishes a list of press. You are one of a few thousand.

Everyone has access to that list for all kinds of reasons.

It is publicly published.

As a PR agency we use that list so we can solicit press for booth appts

I hope you can appreciate that.

If you don't, let me introduce you to the "delete" button

Or in the future do not sign up as a press person for CES.

Furthermore, do not make any threats to my company.

I don't need you to tell me what is right or what is wrong.

I have been in the CE business for 42 years

I have seen nasty people like you melt away faster than a snowball going
up hill in the rain

I am waiting for an apology

Maybe we can meet at CES for a hug or a slug

P.S. I just visited your web site. I would hardly call your blog a
publication,

However, you do have very interesting content and we have lots of client
you would like to know more about to help you in your endeavors.

Call me

[redacted]
President/Owner

Yeah, the president and owner of the firm sent that email. Wow.

C'mon folks, if we can't get along, let's just be civil. Thanks for passing on the email dudes.

Update: The emailer added his original email here.

Please remove me from your list. My publication does not cover these types of products.

I did NOT sign up to receive info in this category, nor anything close. By CES guidelines, I should not have received this, making it dangerously close to spam. That reflects poorly on your company.

Thank you.

Guess this could be a great Christmas gift for your right-wing family and friends...

See, Dr. Pepper promised a free can to everyone in the US if GnR released Chinese Democracy before a certain date. They did it! But sadly the company's server crashed when they tried to give out coupons online, and they have now sold out the soul of rock, or something, according to Axl's attorney:

Ultimately, both parties are involved in thoroughly meaningless endeavors. [Ad Age]

“I think that people are being more conservative… There’s a dichotomy: On one side, people are skimping on certain things and then, on the other side, you see these fabulous clubs again. There are extremes on both sides. From being in the PR industry, maybe deciding not to serve hors d’oeuvres. Or, instead of a big name DJ, let’s get an unknown. Instead of paying an appearance fee for an actor, maybe go with a socialite.”

We might direct him to the film Bon Voyage, set in France in 1940. As the NYT said, it "juggles myriad characters in various states of panicked self-absorption at a turning point in history."

[Photo: Nikola Tamindzic for Home of the Vain]

Lindsay ran squealing to gossip show Access Hollywood, calling her father "out of control" and just sorta, you know, defeating the purpose of telling someone else to rein it in. But later on, Lindsay decided to close the barn door herself and write a "sensible" and thorough blog post, perhaps not realizing that a whole Assateague Island's worth of horses had already escaped. Samantha demurely (as far as "demurely" goes in this festering hellhole of a world) circumvented all the conventional channels and went right to the people first. Via her MySpace blog of course! Lindsay and Sam are not the first people of note to do this, but they are embroiled in some pretty high profile antics, unlike other MySpace celebrity bloggers like the low-profile, dim and withered Courtney Love. Which is to say, right now these girls are pretty famous and wouldn't it be interesting to see someone huge like, say, Katie Holmes, respond to scandal with a humble blog entry?

While it's debatable just how modest and un-self-possessed a blog entry, aimed at the public, about oneself, really is, it's certainly less middlemany and corporate and hungry than going on a television show to air one's delicates. Plus you have control over your own words! (Though, you do run the risk of drunk-blogging.) It may seem suicidal, but it would be fascinating to watch the celebrity-to-civilian relationship develop into a one-on-one internet relationship, completely strangling the gossip industry, which would be forced to just repurpose blog entries that everyone had already read.

I mean cause that's totes not what we do already.

You, too, could be America's Next Top Whatever.

[via Essentially Emily]