[Via Business Insider.]

Fox Business Network
Pro: Fox has been wooing Dobbs for months; TV chair Roger Ailes reportedly wined and dined him in September. Between the additions of mustachioed libertarian John Stossel and ebullient racist cowboy Don Imus, FBN's on a hiring spree. Dobbs would be a perfect fit; one mere lifetime ago, he was a well-respected business reporter, after all. The fact that he went off the rails into right-wing demagoguery will only sweeten this deal.
Con: Dobbs' intense xenophobia forces him to break from the pro-business pack's love of cheap immigrant labor. They'd bond over their mutual revulsion for Barack Obama, though.
Odds: 1:100

Presidential Run
Pro: Conservative columnist Robert Novak was the first to float Dobbs' name for a third-party presidential ticket. The self-proclaimed "independent populist" has a diehard fanbase in politically sought-after middle America, and is himself from Idaho and Texas. Though bashful about his political prospects, he said in January, "I cannot say never."
Con: He also said this: "I haven't got the personality or nature to be a poitician."
Odds: 10:1

His One True Love: Astronaut Media
Pro: Last time Dobbs cut and ran from CNN, it was to be CEO of Space.com, a start-up venture that indulged his unabiding passion for deep space and extraterrestrials. Space tourism is heating up, and the leap from birther to earther isn't so far...
Con: Space.com is doing just fine without Dobbs—even finagling a content-sharing deal with CNN. Also, it'd be totally insane.
Odds: 40:1

CNBC
Pro: During Dobbs' Space.com phase, he worked closely with the very network that had undermined his business news show on CNN. At the time, CNBC's aggressive formula of stock tips and financial advice was ratings gold. Now, whatwith the financial collapse and all, it's just embarrassing.
Con: Going to CNBC would break Dobbs' trajectory of moving away from his actual area of expertise (finance, economics) and towards his imagined one (the president's birth certificate). That's the kind of momentum that's hard to stop, but if all he wants is a job and a platform, CNBC will probably be willing to listen.
Odds: 5:1

Dobbs would fit much more snugly into the right-wing stable of shouting heads over at Fox than he did at CNN, where he made an awkward lie of the cable network's attempt to position itself as a non-partisan straight-news alternative to MSNBC on the left and Fox News on the right. But Dobbs hasn't exactly been a ratings dynamo: He was recently losing not only to Shep Smith at Fox but Chris Matthews at MSNBC and even Jane Velez Mitchell at CNN's HLN (formerly Headline News). Burn.

Maybe once Dobbs is unshackled from his CNN overlords he can finally make a bright future for himself in a foreign TV land, one that believes in true opportunity for downtrodden and wandering émigrés like himself.

UPDATE: Video of the announcement is above. Dobbs' comments have observers speculating he'll make some kind of political move.

UPDATE: Maybe not; a CNN statement says "Lou has now decided to carry the banner of advocacy journalism elsewhere."

Friends and associates are encouraging Fox News chief Roger Ailes to jump into the political arena for real by running for president in 2012, top sources tell POLITICO.

"Ailes knows how to frame an issue better than anybody, and that's what we need now," says one Ailes friend who is encouraging the Fox founder, chairman and CEO to seek the Republican nomination to run against President Barack Obama.

This is of course a winking meta-joke, though it's not labeled as such. Roger Ailes is a personally loathsome fat man who literally has dozens of dead bodies in various closets around his various homes as a consequence of his 40-year career of killing people with television. The notion that he's considering a presidential run, or that any of his friends would urge him to consider one, exists exclusively in the mind of Mike Allen, who has confused the late-night "campaigns" he conducts in his bedroom with the help of a Roger Ailes doll and a Jon Stewart doll with reality.

But here's the joke: The White House's decision to delegitimize Fox News isn't intended to delegitimize Fox News. It is intended to elevate them into a political force, to fill the vacuum in the GOP leadership. By spinning a "White House v. Fox News" narrative, they've managed to temporarily supersede the "White House v. GOP" narrative, thereby making Fox News the de facto political opposition. Which is what both sides want: Fox News for money and viewers, and the White House because they like the idea of having an opposition that is noxious, untruthful, combative, angry, emotionally unstable, and subject to an unyielding financial incentive to be ever moreso. In that meta-world of jujitsu message wars—if you were trapped, Tron-like, inside Allen's foul mind—an Ailes candidacy makes perfect sense.

So let's put it on Politico and WIN THE MOTHERFUCKING WORLD. Except Drudge hasn't linked to it yet, either because he thinks it's too clever by half or he's not done masturbating to it.

AXELROD: How about you guys give slightly less credence and airtime to America's most vitriolic anti-Obama wingnuts? In exchange, we'll offer Fox News better access to Obama.
AILES: Okay.
(Awkward pause).
AILES: Onion ring?
AXELROD: No, but please, take your time and finish. I...have to go.

More or less.

[Pic: Getty. And look at Ailes using a teleprompter. LOL!]

Business Week tallies Ailes' stunning take, a big chunk of which comes from his cut of Fox News' cashflow, which surged 65% to half a billion dollars last year. Murdoch's bonus, on the other hand, fell 60% because the rest of the company sucks.

That would include Fox Business Channel, Ailes' stillborn brainchild for taking on CNBC, which cost millions and won't earn a penny by Fox's estimation until 2011, which means never. Did Ailes' bonus take a commensurate hit for the $49 million Fox Business lost last year? No! He got an additional $4.4 million in stock, because "the fair market value of the channel 'reached two times its cost.'" We're guessing they calculated the fair market value of a money-losing channel that regularly fails to garner enough viewers for Nielsen to accurately measure by asking Mr. Ailes how much money he would like.

Elizabeth Ailes will serve as the paper's publisher, as she does for the 3,000-issue circulation Putnam County News & Recorder, which the couple bought last year.

The Ailes's newspaper-buying escapade has prompted grandiose comparisons to great newspapermen like William Randolph Hearst and William Allen White. We have a different theory: Ailes just wanted an outlet with a bigger audience than the Fox Business Network.

As Fox called in the FBI to find out who had leaked the film onto the Internet, Friedman posted a column last Thursday marveling at how easy it was to find a copy of the purloined Hugh Jackman comic book film online. The column was quickly removed and over the weekend, reports emerged that he had been fired. News Corp.'s corporate P.R. even released a statement on Sunday saying that the columnist was toast.

But that was a bit premature, and Ailes gave Friedman the chance to come in and tell him and Fox News executive vice president John Moody why he shouldn't be fired. That meeting was supposed to take place this morning, but got pushed back to the afternoon.

Why go through all the bother? Our guess is that, as ridiculous as it might sound, corporate politics were to blame. Power at News Corp. is in flux now that Ruper Murdoch's deputy Peter Chernin has announced his exit. And some of the big winners in the corporate restructurings so far have been the heads of the Fox movie studio, Tom Rothman and Jim Gianopoulos. No matter how inevitable Friedman's exit may have been, it wouldn't be surprising if Ailes bristled at the idea of movie studio people making hiring-and-firing decisions in his cable news outfit.

So, Friedman got his day in kangaroo court. And lost. Here's the official statement from Fox News:

Fox News representatives and Roger Friedman met today and mutually agreed to part ways immediately. Fox News appreciates Mr. Friedman's ten years of contributions to building foxnews.com and wishes him success in his future endeavors. Mr. Friedman is grateful to his colleagues for their friendship and support over the past decade.

Update: Friedman asks that we clarify one thing: He did not not download Wolverine per se. He explains:

I did not download anything. I found Wolverine on the internet by accident on Wednesday night. I was looking for something else—info on another movie, which had a link to this site. I simply pressed "play" and when I realized it really was Wolverine, I skipped watching Lost and watched this instead. Afterwards I discovered that the Times had written about it earlier that evening. I guess what I did was called streaming. But there was no downloading. I am fervently anti-piracy, have written extensively about this, and spent too much money at amazon's mp3 site. Please let's clear up this misconception.

Okay then.

Friedman is set to meet tomorrow with Fox News chief Roger Ailes and John Moody, the news network's executive vice president for editorial, the source said. Friedman will have a chance to plead his case, but the meeting could well end with the columnist losing his job.

Friedman is in hot water for posting to FoxNews.com Thursday a review of the forthcoming movie Wolverine. The freelance columnist based his comments on an unfinished version of the movie that leaked onto the internet last week. "It's so much easier than going out in the rain!" he wrote. "I was completely riveted to my desk chair in front of my computer."

You can imagine how this went over at Wolverine producer 20th Century Fox, which last week called in the FBI to find out who leaked the film. The studio complained corporate sibling Fox News, according to Nikki Finke, and parent company News Corp. publicly condemned the review and requested its removal. Fox News promptly deleted the piece.

Finke wrote that Ailes then fired Friedman, a development seemingly confirmed by a statement News Corp. supplied to the New York Times, reading, "Fox News… terminated Mr. Friedman."

But Fox News' only statement on the affair (also given to the Times) is that "This is an internal matter that we aren't prepared to discuss at this time."

And in fact Friedman has not been fired, according to the Fox News source, although he could well be terminated during tomorrow's meeting. The delay in firing Friedman (despite News Corp.'s announcement) could be read as a play by Ailes to assert the news division's independence from film studio 20th within the News Corp. empire.

The meeting also gives Fox News time to reconcile its own definition of journalistic ethics with 20th Century Fox's. The film studio says Friedman shouldn't have broken the law in the service of a story. But Fox News seems more comfortable with such mischief. Network anchor Shep Smith wasn't fired after he was arrested for running over a competing reporter with his car so he could snag parking space, even though the incident resulted in felony battery charges (later apparently dropped without explanation).

When Bill O'Reilly's former producer accused the Fox News host of sexual harassment, producing lengthy conversation transcripts O'Reilly never denied, sibling publication the New York Post slammed her in a story headlined "'Lunatic' O'Reilly Gal Went Nuts in Bar." O'Reilly settled the suit and, of course, retains his job.

And Fox is unrepentant about stalking a liberal blogger, sending a camera crew to tail her from her apartment across state lines to Virginia.

Aside from her unofficial role as her husband's consigliere, Deng is the chief strategist of MySpace China. So it's hardly unusual for her to show up at the office. Indeed, since MySpace China's CEO abruptly quit last September and still hasn't been replaced amid ongoing boardroom drama, she might as well be running the show.

Yet MySpace China is more or less a failure, with less than 10 million users at last count, against rival Chinese services with more than 100 million users in the country.

Meanwhile, there is what looks like an ongoing smear campaign suggesting that MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and Deng, who both serve on MySpace China's board, had an affair — one that some claim is spread by Roger Ailes, a rival executive at News Corp. We have to wonder: If MySpace China had a business worth talking about, would anyone be dwelling on this rumor?

The problem with lists of billionaires' paper losses, like the one Henry Blodget's Business Sheet has assembled, is that they're frustratingly free of context. Did a particular CEO do anything to make his company's shares worthless, or was he just buffeted willy-nilly by the crashing stock market? Is Rupert Murdoch $3.5 billion poorer because he's a bad manager, or just unlucky? Instead, we're left knowing that they own many millions of shares in their companies and those shares are, ohmigod, totally worth less now than they were last January! That's about as much fun as reading companies' annual proxy statements.

What this list needs is a dose of schadenfreude. Here's an edited version, including only those people we really are happer to see poorer:

• Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, -$3.3 million: Totally deserved, for installing Randy Falco, a useless broadcast-network flunky, as CEO of AOL, thereby destroying whatever remaining value the Internet portal had.
• Roger Ailes, head of Fox's local TV stations and Fox News Channel, -$3.5 million: This News Corp. executive deserves a net worth chop — not for the maddeningly popular Fox News, but for the laughably unwatched CNBC wannabe he championed, Fox Business Network.
• James Dolan, Cablevision scion, -$13.1 million: Bought Newsday, and then gave an interview to a company-owned cable network rather than to the newspaper, which, frankly, could use some help filling column-inches.
• Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., New York Times publisher, -$76.7 million: Almost let the Times run out of cash so his cousins could keep getting paid millions of dollars in dividends by the family-owned paper. Also, rumored to be in annoying relationship with Caroline Kennedy.
• Sam Zell, CEO, Tribune Co., -$315 million (maybe): Zell might lose his investment in the bankrupt Tribune — but he's not out nearly as much as his employees, whose stock-ownership plan was used to buy the newspaper-and-TV conglomerate.

Here's the whole list. Bravo if you can make it to the end — at which point you will learn that you never really cared about EchoStar CEO Charlie Ergen, the richest media mogul you've never heard of and for good reason. Also, you'll wonder why media CEOs aren't more photogenic.

(Photos via the Business Sheet; clockwise from upper left: Bewkes, Sulzberger, Zell, Dolan, Ailes)

This insane theory, though, goes like this: the true target of the smear isn't Wendi at all, but rather Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson, and one of the rising golden boys of the News Corp. empire and therefore a threat to Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News. Thomson, whose life story is uncannily similar to Rupert's, also has a Chinese wife, Wang Ping, who happens to be friends with Wendi. Thus, the damaging suggestion about Thomson would be that Ping had aided and abetted Wendi in her dalliance. The only person who'd try to pull off such a crazy scheme? Naturally, News Corp.'s resident master of dark arts and head of Fox News, Roger Ailes. Which brings us full circle back to Wolff's book, which has supposedly caused a rift between Ailes and Murdoch because it, as the New York Times reported in October, "suggests that Mr. Murdoch is at times embarrassed by Fox News, which he owns, and its chief executive, Roger Ailes, and that he often shares 'the general liberal apoplexy,' as Mr. Wolff writes in the book, toward Fox News and its perceived conservative slant."

So there you have it. A crazy theory so crazy it could be true (but probably isn't!). I'm going to head off to Wolff's party now and see if I can dig up something actually substantial. If you know anything about who's behind the Wendi rumor, please email me.

Smith's line is that he's just a news reporter standing up for objective truth, and that this doesn't put him at odds with orthodox conservative pundits like Hannity. "I know what I do, I do the news," Smith told O'Reilly.

That's often true! But he's also sometimes a bit of a pundit, albeit in a fun, appropriate and satisfying way. The newsman wasn't above letting some contempt show through, for example, when he scolded Nader for using the term "Uncle Tom" in reference to Obama. A disgruntled musing on Joe the Plumber was opinionated enough to close out an editorial at the Times (Fox's conservative peanut gallery must have loved that).

And as Smith bares his teeth like that more often, and as the right-wing punditocracy continues to implode, as reports surface that his right-wing boss Roger Ailes is on Rupert Murdoch's bad side, viewers are naturally going to wonder if Shep Smith is an harbinger of bigger things to come at Fox News. Or at least of more entertaining things.

(Video up top.)

The time: three months ago. The place: some hotel room. The players: Obama, his advisers, Ailes, and Rupert Murdoch.

Obama's angle: You people at Fox News aren't being fair:

"I just wanted to know if I'm going to get a fair shake from Fox News Channel," Ailes recalled him saying...

In a recent interview with Glamour magazine, Obama said Fox News and others went after his wife, Michelle, "in a pretty systematic way. . . . If you start being subjected to rants by Sean Hannity and the like, day in and day out, that'll drive up your negatives."

Fox's angle: We're not unfair, we're just not a part of the biased liberal media bootlickers. Also, who can control Hannity?

"Senator, you're the one who boycotted us," Ailes says he replied. "We're not the ones who boycotted you. Nor did we retaliate for your boycott."...

As Ailes recalls it, he responded to Obama's concern about fairness by saying that "there are opinion shows and there are news shows." Some of the criticism, Ailes told him, has come from conservative commentator and co-host Sean Hannity — whom he likened to MSNBC's more liberal pundits Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews.

The resolution: Obama will be on Bill O'Reilly's show tomorrow night. And let's hope it turns into a huge fight, because, why not? Apparently Rupert is trying to take the friendly route with Obama, much as the New York Post suddenly became soft towards Hillary Clinton when it looked like she might win. But Fox News should take note: times are a-changing. After Obama gets elected, Fox News' ratings will slide and they'll see a backlash for their Bush era broadcasting. Bet. Rupert Murdoch is smart enough to know that a good relationship with Obama might be worth more to Fox than just about anything in the next year.

[WP]

All right, he’s not quite a liberal. He remains a militant free-marketeer and is still pro-war (grudgingly, he’s retreated a bit). And there was the moment, one afternoon, when over a glass of his favorite coconut water (meant to increase electrolytes) he was propounding the genetic theory that the basic problem of the Muslim people was that they married their cousins.

Other hints that Murdoch is still an unpolished, rough-and-tumble media mogul: He is a terrible mumbler, has alienated many of his children from his business and likes to personally report dirt on his foes (Wolff observers him trying to nail down gossip about a Hillary Clinton adviser).

But is no longer the unwavering backer of Fox News that he once was. After begging an audience with Barack Obama, Wolff writes, Murdoch arranged a "truce" with the Democratic presidential candidate and Fox News. Also, he's no fan of Fox shouting head Bill O'Reilly:

Fox has been his alter ego. For a long time he was in love with the Fox chief, Roger Ailes, because he was even more Murdoch than Murdoch. And yet now the embarrassment can’t be missed—he mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it; he barely pretends to hide the way he feels about Bill O’Reilly. And while it is not possible that he would give Fox up—because the money is the money; success trumps all—in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets.

And Murdoch would "really like to own" that temple of liberal New York respectability, the Times:

Now, everybody around him continues to tell him that buying the Times is pretty much impossible. There will be regulatory problems. The Sulzberger family would never … And then there’s the opprobrium of public opinion.

But it’s obviously irresistible to him. I’ve watched him go through the numbers, plot out a merger with the Journal’s backroom operations, and fantasize about the staff’s quitting en masse as soon as he entered the sacred temple.

Given his history with the Journal, it would be a mistake to write off Murdoch's ambitions for the financially-troubled Times. And given his savvy, it would also be a mistake to assume the mogul walked through his acquisition fantasy with a media reporter for any reason other than to broadcast it to the entire world, in particular the Sulzberger family, whose dividend payouts are crippling the newspaper they supposedly would never relinquish.

[Vanity Fair]

Ailes' channel has been flagging over the past 12 months. Fox News is rapidly losing ground among the younger viewers most coveted by advertisers as MSNBC and CNN more cleverly exploit the presidential campaign season.

Ailes' utter failure, meanwhile, to control Fox News' snarling, smearing attack-dog PR department has been an embarrassment to his boss Rupert Murdoch, who has apparently resorted to trying to appease the once-despised Times with scoops to clean up the mess.

Ailes' bonus is a dumb use of News Corporation's money, which perhaps makes it slightly less of a weeping tragedy for lefties.

[Silicon Alley Insider]

Olbermann called Snow "optimistic, funny and courageous," adding, "While we could not have disagreed more on policy, we were in frequent contact, even during his days as Press Secretary."

The temerity!

...a true friend of Snow's says Olbermann had "no relationship with Tony, at all." In fact, Olbermann named Snow his "Worst Person in the World" on Jan. 9, 2007, accusing him of lying about President Bush's 2003 "mission accomplished" speech. Olbermann hissed, "You're just baldfaced lying. You were hired to lie . . . We're not all third-graders out here."

Clearly, Olbermann's parting words for Snow should have focused on their bitterest moments of disagreement rather than on what Olbermann admired about Snow. In fact, Olbermann should have included in his eulogy the phrase "worst person in the world," if only for the sake of consistency.

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