Name: Sumner Redstone
Age: 85
Position: Chairman, National Amusements (Viacom, CBS, MTV, etc.)
What kind of old man is he?: Befuddled
Trick in staving off old age: Fights with daughters.
Key quote: "I'm gonna fight death as long as I can. I like it here. I don't want to go anywhere else"
Health threat: Face of porcelain

Name: Rupert Murdoch
Age: 77
Position: Chairman, News Corp
What kind of old man is he?: Vindictive
Trick in staving off old age: A much younger wife.
Key quote: "You can't be an outsider and be successful over 30 years without leaving a certain amount of scar tissue around the place."
Health threat: Enveloped in skin folds.

Name: Sam Zell
Age: 66
Position: Owner, Tribune Company
What kind of old man is he?: Gnomish
Trick in staving off old age: Fights with his employees.
Key quote: "Fuck you [OLD AGE!]"
Health threat: Balding

Name: Barry Diller
Age: 66
Postion: Chairman and CEO, IAC
What kind of old man is he?: Angry
Trick in staving off old age: Fights with fellow businessmen.
Key quote: "I thought they were talking about eye charts. I don't see anything full-blown." [On being called a "visionary"]
Health threat: Tooth gappage.

Name: Hugh Hefner
Age: 82
Postion: Owner, Playboy Enterprises
What kind of old man is he?: Desperately youthful
Trick in staving off old age: Parties, hordes of women, pajamas.
Key quote: “In many ways, I'm younger than I was 20 years ago."
Health threat: Priapism.

Think of how easy it might have been to understand Arianna Huffington's bloggy animus toward Tim Russert if there were a book out chronicling all the sordid details of their decade-and-a-half-long secret feud. (There is.) Every gossip-mongering gadabout should know the full backstory on every spat, falling out, and long-running mutual antagonism in media. Below are the volumes no shelf should be without.

1. The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood, by Tom King

The Gist: A gay Polish-Ukrainian Jew from Borough Park moves to Hollywood and enters the mail room at the William Morris Agency. After forging a letter suggesting he had a college degree when in fact he did not, Geffen rises through the ranks to become an agent, then leaves WMA and founds Asylum Records and produces albums by Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. Asylum is sold to Warner Communications, and Geffen becomes Vice Chairman of Warner film studios. He then retires and un-retires after a minor but erroneous health scare, founds Geffen Records, courts John Lennon and Yoko Ono (see below), produces Cats, Risky Business (see below), co-founds Dreamworks SKG, produces Saving Private Ryan, backs Bill Clinton, gives lots of money to AIDS research, falls out with Bill Clinton over one of the sleazeballs he didn't pardon, and now backs Barack Obama. Along the way Geffen throws many temper tantrums and raises his voice to the point where even Steven Spielberg asks him politely to lower it. He also shows a remarkable ability for betraying the confidences of good friends and business associates in order to charm potential clients he’s just met. The night Lennon was shot, Geffen was in bed with a male prostitute and loves to boast about it.

The Pull-Quote: “’What about my music?’ [Yoko Ono] asked. ‘Well, I’ve never heard any of your records.’ ‘Really,’ Ono said. ‘That doesn’t sound like a very good reason for me to make a deal with you.’ ‘I’m a big fan of John’s, and I have a great deal of respect for the two of you, and we do a very good job. We’re a good record company.’ ‘What do you mean you’re a good record company?’ Ono fired back. ‘You haven’t put out a record yet!’”

The Takeaway: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Be enlightened and progressive on your own time, but cunning and ruthless on corporate time. Respect for others’ privacy won't make you rich and powerful. Endear yourself to those you want to impress by gossiping about people you know behind their backs. It'll smack of such poor judgment that would-be clients will assume you're either crazy or brilliant, and guess what? You are.

2. Tina and Harry Come to America: Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and the Uses of Power, by Judy Bachrach

The Gist: Gifted writer Tina Brown makes her fellow students feel small at Oxford, dates a host of famous men (including Auberon Waugh, who washes frantically after sex, Martin Amis, whom she adores, and Dudley Moore, whom she does not), deflects charges of arrivisme, and becomes editor of UK tabloid Tatler at age 25. She meets Harold Evans, then married and famously editing the The Times of London and The Sunday Times, which names her Most Promising Female Journalist. Brown and Evans marry in 1981, then move to New York three years later, whereupon Brown revives the moribund Vanity Fair by turning it into the must-read glossy on celebrity doings and the leisure class. She hires true crime reporter Dominick Dunne, photographer Helmut Newton and inaugurates a new wave of magazine journalism, operating under the assumption that "intellectuals should be read and not seen." Meanwhile, Tina and Harry are now East Coast socialites whose fiercely guarded life together aspires to shape headlines, not become them. (Their best friend is British libel law.) Brown takes over The New Yorker in 1992 and remakes that antiquated smart sheet, too, acquiring Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Lane and David Remnick, who later replaces her as editor-in-chief. On a manuscript submitted by Yiddish Nobel laureate, Brown writes, "Beef it up, Singer," which more or less encapsulates her style of feared-but-respected-or-hated tenure. She founds Talk magazine in 1999, which folds after just two years, an over-sensationalized failure from which this unauthorized biography derives all of its rise-and-fall schadenfraude. (Bachrach is a contributing editor at the new VF, edited by Brown’s archnemesis Graydon Carter.)

The Pull-Quote: "We live in a time when infamy sells.... There is no honor, no reticence, no loyalty." Spoken by Maureen Dowd on Brown's New Yorker reign, and quoted by author to make a clichéd point.

The Takeaway: Develop a nose for future A-listers. Sleep with as many as you can all the while adopting an “amused” air about them. Overpaying the talent means you can bully them into submission, so don't be cowed by easily tossed around phrases like "national institution" or "greatest living writer." Fuck 'em if they can't take a kill-fee. Oh, and marry old men.

3. How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, by Toby Young

The Gist: Son of highbrow sociologist Michael Young, who coined the term "meritocracy," Toby Young devotes his life to testing how much strain that already weakened concept can take. He writes for the British Times, gets fired from the British Times. He founds celebrated Modern Review, which traffics in "low culture for highbrows," then shuts it down, much to the dismay of everyone else involved. Young moves to New York in the early 90's, gets hired by Graydon Carter as a contributing editor (read: sinecurist) at Vanity Fair, then proceeds overlong tenure as a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of Graydon Carter’s shoe (this is G.C.’s description of him, not ours). Young cracks dud jokes to celebrities, refers to doormen who won't let him into parties he'd end up hating anyway as "clipboard Nazis," does blow while on assignment, asks Nathan Lane if he's gay, gets fired from Vanity Fair. Now back in London (this isn't in the book), Young edits The Spectator, a conservative weekly, and boasts of his "negative charisma," probably as a way to boost paperback sales. HTLFAAP, much like Young himself, has been up and down the wicket of sadomasochistic success. A film adaptation is said to be in post-production, starring Simon Pegg and Kirsten Dunst.

The Pull-Quote: “Cool Britannia was a cry of independence, a howl of protest against the all-enveloping cultural hegemony of the United States, yet, paradoxically, it didn’t really mean anything—it hadn’t really happened—until it was noticed by the American media. That explained the schizophrenic attitude of people like Damien Hirst, Keith Allen and Alex James: they wanted to assert their indifference to the attentions of glossy, New York magazines, and yet they wanted to be photographed striking this insouciant pose in Vanity Fair. Like rebellious schoolchildren, their protest wouldn’t have counted unless it was registered by the authorities. Unfortunately, in this scenario I was cast as the toothless substitute teacher.”

The Takeaway: The memoir is a good object lesson in what not to do if you want to hang onto a job or a masthead listing, or cast the impression that deep down you really had high expectations for the world of glamour-besotted New York media. Also, it pays to be obnoxious in a way that only you find ironic.

4. Spy: The Funny Years, by Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, George Kalogerakis

The Gist: In 1986, Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen found the future of piss-taking journalism in the form of Spy magazine. Épater le bourgeoisie never had it so good, or so the editors – now all dressed up and fixtures of the very culture they once lampooned – are the first ones to remind you. Spy pioneers satire as a clever agglomeration of facts, and specializes in the infographic, the listicle (just like this one!) and the blurb cloud. It attempts to decipher just who, exactly, is on the New Yorker’s indecipherable masthead. It follows Anthony Haden-Guest into the dank reaches of his own nightlife. It refines hatred of Donald Trump into an art form. Features include the Liz Smith Tote Board, Separated at Birth, and Logrolling in Our Time, without which everything from The Onion to Conan O’Brien’s pre-interview fooling would be unimaginable. The self-conscious prose style is a cocktail of H.L. Mencken, A.J. Liebling and Wolcott Gibbs, and its been swigged by every glossy editor in search of a readership ever since. Once G.C. leaves, it all goes to shit. Like Studio 54, the new owners can’t make it work, ergo the justified hubris of the book’s title.

The Pull-Quote: “How easy is it to steal the sour cream?” – in a chart surveying the various Manhattan cafeteria chains.

The Gist: You need only ask yourself if you read Radar to determine whether there’s any pedagogic value to be mined from Spy.

5. Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney

The Gist: Nameless 24 year-old fact-checker for elite New York glossy (a thinly veiled New Yorker) moonlights as an aspiring novelist, or wants us to believe he moonlights as that while he’s busy Hoovering coke by the suitcaseful and partying through the vertiginous 80’s club scene with a yuppie twat called Tad Allagash. Tad calls the narrator, who writes annoyingly in the second person, “Coach.” His mother has recently passed away, so we’re shin-kicked into wondering if a life of artifice and glitz is simply an emollient for real pain. Behind the hatred there lies a plundering desire for love. Or something.

The Pull-Quote: “Just now you want to stay at the surface of things, and Tad is a figure skater who never considers the sharks under the ice. You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you clean up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside.”

The Takeaway: Once Tina Brown takes over Coach’s magazine, he’s fired. Sort your soul out before you move to the metropolis of infinite distractions, otherwise you, too, will wind up a shiftless anonymity with withdrawal symptoms. (Your apartment can still be a mess, however.)

6. The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger

The Gist: Recent Brown graduate Andrea Sacks wants to write for the New Yorker (sigh) and blankets the media world with her resume hoping to get a dues-paying job somewhere that will eventually allow her to become Larissa MacFarquhar. Whoops. She gets hired by fashion bible Runway’s bitch supreme Miranda Priestly (Anna Wintour, not even thinly veiled) as her junior personal assistant. Next thing Andrea knows, she’s chasing down lattes at Starbucks and sirloins at Smith and Wollensky instead of learning about ledes and nut grafs. Not what she had in mind but she loves the clothes and even develops a knack for being a second-string slave to a subhuman narcissist. Unlike in the film, Andrea doesn’t quit – she gets fired for saying “Fuck you, Miranda. Fuck you.” Ballsy, sure, but she does get to keep some of the Dolce and even snags an interview for a real writing position at another magazine in the same building. (N.B. Author Weisberger was Wintour’s personal assistant, so this novel is a bildungsroman, which is a word Andrea learned at Brown but seldom got to use after graduation.)

The Pull-Quote: “Fuck you, Miranda. Fuck you.”

The Takeaway: How many bright young girls have come to New York hoping to fill these Cinderella slippers, only to discover that not only is Wintour not hiring, but she’s honed her filter for confessional opportunists more interested in publishing advances than making sure her Apple Fritter is extra flaky. If you want to be a bona fide reporter, save yourself the aggro and dashed hopes and apply for an internship at the New York Sun your junior year. Also, while it’s true that some ball-breaking editors respond well to self-assertiveness, telling your boss “Fuck you” isn’t the wisest career decision.

7. Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, by John Gregory Dunne

The Gist: The story of Dunne and wife Joan Didion's attempt to transform the life of anchorwoman Jessica Savitch, who died in a car wreck after more or less proving on air in 1983, during a broadcast of NBC News Digest, that she was a drug addict. Instead of a sadder version of Network, the screenplay transforms into the Disneyfied Up Close and Personal, which makes absolutely no mention of Savitch and which even Robert Redford doesn't remember filming.

The Pull-Quote: “The purpose of such a meet-and-greet is to allow the executive to size up the supplicant. [Disney studio chairman Jeffrey] Katzenberg had not read Golden Girl, but he was aware of the less savory details of Jessica Savitch’s life. He liked the ugly-duckling idea; it was the kind of narrative he wanted, and he was also responsive to the television background against which it would be played. He did have reservations, and here I quote Joan’s notes of that first meeting: ‘Wants to know what is going to happen in this picture that will make the audience walk out feeling uplifted, good about something and good about themselves.’”

The Takeaway: Dunne is witty and disarming, especially when he quotes Jack Warner's definition of screenwriters: "schmucks with Underwoods." Interestingly, the "monster" in question is not the industry or any particular studio executive, but rather the money that governs all, including Dunne.

8. You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, by Julia Phillips

The Gist: Scandal-sponge Jewish producer reveals the vast corruption, drugs and sexual indiscretions that motor the movie industry. Phillips gets fired by Steven Spielberg on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, accuses Goldie Hawn of body odor, and, on the night she becomes the first woman to win a "Best Picture" Oscar for The Sting, downs three valiums, one upper, one and a half drinks, two joints and a dash of cocaine. The book is a sprayfire indictment of practically everyone Phillips ever met in Hollywood, and it got her banned from Morton's.

The Pull-Quote: "They were really a rogues' gallery of nerds. Marty [Scorsese] was tiny and asthmatic, Steven [Spielberg] had the soft, flabby look of a typical Twinkies kid, and Brian [De Palma] never took his safari jacket off."

The Takeaway: Sour grapes ferment the best, although it's not as if anyone still believes in some West Coast Arcadia where dazzling moving pictures are made. Still, you'll hardly do better for the brutally honest story of a show biz prodigy that had to burn everything before she flamed out.

9. Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures With the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media, by Michael Wolff

The Gist: Following up on Burn-Rate (1998), which was about Wolff’s bust foray into the world of online startups, this is the nasty-minded sequel by the former New York media writer who wants badly to be the next Murdoch but can’t and decides to just insult everybody he ever envied instead—especially Fox News President Roger Ailes. Most of the stuff in here consists of Wolff's recycled columns, but it's all in one place and no true mogul ever wasted his time searching through web archives. Harvey Weinstein is obese and grotesque. The media business is "collapsing” like communism. Some of Wolff's axioms should be true even if they aren’t: “The larger and higher-profile the company, the bigger the nutcase who runs it.”

The Pull-Quote: “This was the meta thing. Meta gave both irony and gravitas to what we did. The delicious incongruity between our superficiality and our importance. The joie de vivre of self-referentialism. The stupendous, intoxicating power of being able to create the world we lived in."

Bonus Pull-Quote: “So, as I arrived for my speech, I was thinking of my relationship to the absent but always present [Fox News head Roger] Ailes. He was the greatest, but the Antichrist too.”

The Takeaway: Still fun. Like Young’s book, AOTM is a serviceable monument to failure dressed up as critical thinking. Though most of the wisdom you could just as easily cull by lunching at Michael's. Wolff went on to try and match-make the sale of his old haunt New York (he's now at Vanity Fair) to Mort Zuckerman, who in the event lost out to hedge fund wizard Bruce Wasserstein. That means more meanness is forthcoming in what promises to be the Dance to the Music of Time of inferiority complexes.

The cable and satellite companies that would have to carry the new channel aren't convinced the world needs another movie service, according to executives at several companies. Even Comcast Corp., which owns 20% of MGM, has little interest in carrying a new movie channel, according to a person close to that company.

"Movies are not as much a part of the mix" with the growth of video-on-demand, says Michael Willner, chief executive of Insight Communications, a cable operator primarily in the Midwest. "If they are just another outlet for movies they will have a tough go."

Of course, it's impossible for any human to win Cranky Redstone's enduring love. As the old expression goes, the only way to win is not to play the game.

The new venture could create some awkward moments around Hollywood. Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, is close friends with Harry E. Sloan, the chief executive of MGM, and Jon Feltheimer, the chief executive of Lionsgate. A spokesman for CBS declined to comment.

I think this just means Les Moonves has to dance around certain topics during lunch meetings or dinner parties. That's not so awkward. You know what's awkward? Having lunch with a crazy Scientologist who is about to mock you in a movie, per Redstone's recent rendezvous with Tom Cruise at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Oh, and Redstone, being a cantankerous old bastard, is totally supportive of this CBS-Viacom infighting:

Last month Mr. Redstone, who is the controlling shareholder in both Viacom and CBS, was asked at an investor conference about the two companies entering each other’s business. “They were always intended to be independent companies, free to compete with each other,” he said.

[Deadline Hollywood, Times]

Their sparring has been uncomfortable for Mr. Redstone’s friends and executives, and he frequently, at dinners and business meetings, has used abusive language toward his daughter, said one person who has been present during such incidents.

And yet you're not really trying to oust the belligerent daughter — odd. Senile old man odd.

Meanwhile, the value of Viacom, where you are chairman, has fallen by about one-fifth, to $41 billion. Your plan to split the company in two does not seem to be paying any dividends. Viacom's CBS is about to fall behind Fox as the top U.S. TV network.

Everyone keeps asking you, in a roundabout way, who will succeed you. And you keep talking about how hard you work out and how well you eat.

Way to keep everyone tortured. You must enjoy it, crazy old bag.

[Times]

(Cruise photo via Film School Rejects)

• Game over, Scientology wins, they have Pete Doherty and Sumner Redstone. Viacom chairman Redstone hasn't actually converted but did have lunch with Scientology bigshot Tom Cruise, probably canceling in his area a personal and business rift with the actor and paving the way for more sweet Mission Impossible money. Doherty has been reading up on the religion and shacking up with a Scientologist DJ who probably hasn't yet mentioned the religion's stance on psychoactive drugs.
• Accidental gay porno fan (and singer) John Mayer posted a long rambly blog "about a young guy who maintains a celebrity blog... who has wrestled with a lifelong battle for acceptance as a gay man." Then, mercifully, "I'm going quiet now." [JohnMayer.com]
• Star overlord Bonnie Fuller said singer Britney Spears' parents are "pimps" who treat their daughters like "cash registers" and "bank machines." To back this up, the American Media editorial director has both an anonymous quote and a book-plugging psychiatrist. Air. Tight. [HuffPo]
• There's talk of a Hills movie. Well, of course there is. The question is, have they stockpiled enough stares. [MTV]
• Hills stars Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt "work on their relationship" by going to Vegas and staying in different rooms, in different hotels and barely talking. Actually, that is seriously a dream vacation for some couples. [People]
• Atress Lindsay Lohan will play a member of the Manson family. [E! Online]
• She's supposedly jetting off to rehab soon, but singer Amy Winehouse still can't manage to get to the jail on time to visit her husband. [Sun]

Media conglomerates such as Time Warner, which went through its own disastrous mega-merger with AOL in 2000, seemed finally to be recognizing that size wasn't everything. “Whether [Time Warner] is the biggest is not the main thing," said Jeffrey Bewkes, Time Warner's incoming chief executive. "It needs to be the most profitable." Sumner Redstone last year spun out Viacom's traditional media businesses such as TV network, CBS. And Barry Diller's IAC is, even if only after pressure from disgruntled shareholders, being broken up.

Now one can be sure every media company chief executive is running around like a headless chicken. They know that their future depends on internet advertising. For the moment, the bulk of the growth appears to be going to those properties with the biggest audience reach, which scares smaller media companies. Add in a mega-merger they don't understand: it's the perfect environment for media bankers to present consolidation as inevitable and their hair-brained schemes as urgent.

Most of these ideas will come to nothing. But someone who understands the web just enough to be dangerous, will be panicked into a moronic deal. (Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times, maybe, though he's hampered by the family legacy). Microsoft will survive the hugely expensive and wearying combination it is now proposing. Traditional media companies which follow its example don't have the luxury of making the same mistakes.

First, Hirschorn's career is an object lesson in the financial rewards of going downmarket. Hired as an editor to Kurt Andersen's dream team at New York Magazine, Hirschorn followed his mentor to the excellent Inside.com, a media news site that was too early for its time.

You might think Hirschorn would have professional qualms about bringing to the air shows like "A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila" — a dating show in which the prize is a bisexual internet phenomenon. But he's an inspiring manager, say former colleagues, and he's melded highbrow and lowbrow in a way that's common in the UK, but till now rare in US television. The offers he's weighing now will be something of a consolation for any mockery at Manhattan dinner parties with former colleagues at more refined institutions.

Pure speculation, this, but there's a grief-premium Sumner Redstone's media conglomerate may have to pay to compensate Hirschorn for his new Viacom boss. The VH1 programming chief was a protege of Tom Freston, the laid-back executive fired by the capricious 84-year-old Viacom owner after Freston failed to acquire MySpace. Redstone's new placeman, Philippe Dauman, is a lawyer.

"Hirschorn will be successful anywhere he goes," says a Viacom informant. "No use having to fight with an uncreative douche who doesn't get it." So, Hirschorn, just go! (Even if the Viacom offer is enticing.)

• Right off the bat, fun little non sequitur! Sumner Redstone shaves nude in his hot tube. What?
• Burrough's piece is based largely on interviews with two advisors, one from the Dreamworks camp and one from Redstone's circle, identified as a dude. It's hard to imagine there's anyone close to the situation who doesn't know who the Redstone source was&mdash nearly a third of the direct quotes come directly from his mouth. Also, we gotta say, given Burrough's avoidance throughout the piece of the whole pronoun thing when referring to the Dreamworks source, we're going to take a guess that it was a lady.
• The Island, that mystifying Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGregor action flick, cost Geffen his deal to sell to Universal, an arrangement he'd promised Spielberg he'd take care of. The G.E.-owned company took one look at that bomb and cut their offer by $100 million. Yes, Scarlett, you were $100 million kinds of terrible! Spielberg didn't talk to Geffen for weeks afterward.
• Not surprisingly, Spielberg is protected and appeased as Dreamwork's sacred muse by everyone at Dreamworks, including Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg. That said, the Dreamworks source says "Let's be clear. Steven needs David. David is richer than Steven." Aww, ain't it grand having partners you can trust?
• When Geffen finally brokered a bargain-basement $600-million deal to sell Dreamworks to Sumner, a decision he now says was "poor," Spielberg refused to move his offices to the Paramount lot like the rest of the company. He's still holed up at the Universal complex, all Ruby Ridge-style.
• "Suits Do Not Publicly Criticize The Talent." An unspoken Hollywood rule, which both Paramount's Rob Moore and Redstone seriously flouted when Moore criticized Clint Eastwood for the lackluster performance of Flags Of Our Fathers and Redstone booted Tom Cruise out Paramount's door, publicly blaming the star's unhinged behavior. Dreamworks execs, especially Spielberg, were not amused, and really lost it when Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman said in September that losing Spielberg would be "completely immaterial" to the company.
• Still, the director thought Cruise's bizarre crackheadedness hurt 2005's War of the Worlds. Dakota Fanning can also do no wrong, it seems. "Far worse, though, had been an episode when Spielberg told Cruise the name of a doctor who had prescribed medication to a relative and the doctor's office was subsequently picketed by Scientologists." Subtle, OT-VII, subtle.
• Hollywood publicists are all kinds of terrifying.
• A $1 million donation to the Shoah Foundation will not earn you Steven Spielberg's forgiveness.
• Nikki Finke, dare we mention her name here, is allegedly part of David Geffen's "covert press campaign" to kick Redstone's ass. (Don't hurt us, Nikki!)
• But wait a minute—so is Bryan Burrough maybe! As the VF piece was going to press, filled with lots of chest-thumping Geffen quotes like, "Redstone, he is accustomed to bullying people. And I will not be bullied. There is no fight I will run from," Geffen calls Burrough up to thank him. "Somehow you've so provoked Redstone he has come over to see me and we've cleared up a lot of these issues. This article, you, you did this. A lot of this was bullshit. This was about our personal relationship. And we've cleared up a lot of this. And a lot of this I feel like I owe to you," he tells him.
• 
  No better feeling in the world as a journalist than to know you played your role as press pawn to your subject's satisfaction.

  Showdown at Fort Sumner [Vanity Fair]

• Cash for Kaus! [ETP]
  
• Bill Keller is getting on top of his crippling blog addiction. [Marketwatch]
  
• Will Bauer's Cocktail Weekly work? Given how even the smartest women we know think nothing of buying dumbass lady magazines that make them feel like there's something wrong with them, we're guessing yes. [AdAge]
  
• Human embodiment of evil likes Internet. [Forbes]
  
• Someone at Time Inc. leaves the building without a security escort. [WWD]
  
• Sumner Redstone on Spielberg, Katzenberg, and Geffen: "We do not treat them as employees, we treat them as co-workers." Guess that means they better buy something like MySpace soon. [LAT]
  

As someone still at MTVN. I read your post this AM...
Not totally correct, but on its way...

1. Your former Viacom staffer, seems to have a 1500 mile away view of everything.. Shitting on nits like Wolf and Browning is easy. 2. Where is McGrath in all this? Why is she blameless? She brought in Wolf? She was behind letting good people like Scannell, Frank, Hirschhorn and Dunn walk out the door. 3. You have it wrong on Hirschhorn. Everyone here knows he's the one that told them to buy MySpace and IGN and no one listened. True he got golden parachuted, but only after he couldn't take the company missing out one more time. More power to him for getting paid, had we listened to him we wouldn't be in this shape.

Earlier: Inside Baseball: MTV Networks

• Time layoffs: Here's who's already gone. [Mediaweek]
  
• David Carr has a blog. [NYT]
  
• Scripps backpedals. [Romenesko]
  
• Sumner Redstone's daughter makes society debut. Yay, meritocracy! [NYP]
  
• If you haven't been following the whole McCaw/Santa Barbara News-Press story, this is a pretty good summary. [NYT]
  
• Larry King: Nancy Grace is "harpoonish." Oddly, this is not a reference to her physical appearance. [Miami Herald]
  
• The Times won't tell you exactly where to go to find Eli Lilly documents under injunction, but it will give you the exact words you need to type into a search engine that will direct you to them. [NYT]
  
• Lloyd Grove: Likes "Judge Judy," gin. [WaPo]
  

A reliable inside source just confirmed that [MTV President & COO] Michael Wolf was fired this morning.

Update: Here's what passes for confirmation at Gawker.

It is true that Michael Wolf was fired from MTV today. My friend works with him (but not at MTV), and wants to e-mail Gawker himself, but said he didn't want his e-mail traced, and so he told me to e-mail you guys, but said if I mentioned his company's name, he would "kick me so hard in the vagina that I wouldn't be able to have babies". Whatever. My friend did not know why Wolf had been fired, beyond his explanation that "You know, Sumner Redstone's going crazy."

• How long will Sumner Redstone hold on to Midway games? Hopefully, long enough to give us a few more Photoshopped pieces like the one above. [NYT]
  
• Lou Dobbs is sort of a dick. Also, there's an article about him in the New Yorker. [NYer]
  
• Not that you care, but the government is pretty much at war with the idea of an independent press, and the government is winning. Oh, look, Britney's hanging out with Paris Hilton! Sorry, what were we saying? [NYT]
  
• Rupert Murdoch v. Silvio Berlusconi: whose ticker will give out first? [NYT]
  
• James Murdoch: Just as canny as his dad? [Economist]
  
• Observer to go tabloid in attempt to appeal to women and their diminutive limbs. [NYM]
  
• Slate's Jacob Weisberg would rather be online than anywhere else. So, you know, don't try and tempt him away with a real job, print people. [Guardian]
  
• Don't be alarmed, but some people think Fox News may be biased. Just gays and Democrats, though, so no worries. [NYS]
  
• Of interest only to British media junkies: Publisher Kimberly Quinn to leave the Spectator. Guess she ran through the roster of contributors. [Guardian]
  
• Tyler Br l has hired an editor for Monocle. Nothing earth-shattering, really... it's just the Tyler Br l thing. [WWD]
  

• News headline disappointingly misleading. [NYDN]
  
• Sumner Redstone's heirs coming out of woodwork to sue him. [NYP]
  
• Washington Post loses a couple of politics reporters to a website. [NYT]
  
• New York's two tabs use the word "perv" a lot. Also "sexy". [Slate]
  
• Almost a third of British journalists report being bullied. Insert your own Richard Desmond joke here. [Guardian]
  
• Hachette has cancelled publication of Nikki Finke's biography of Michael Ovitz for mysterious reasons. Ovtiz was a powerful Hollywood agent late in the twentieth century. [FBLA]
  

[Image: WireImage]

Update: We are terrible, terrible people and deeply apologetic. Also ignorant! Sorry about that.

75-year-old Murdoch's wife Wendy Deng is 37; 83-year-old Redstone's wife, Paula Fortunato, is 44. Both women also exert considerable influence over their husbands' business dealings: Fortunato reportedly prompted Redstone's decision to sever ties between Tom Cruise and Paramount, while Deng allegedy brought in a Feng Shui expert to completely upend office assignments at DirecTV. But though these little exercises in power may provide momentary thrills, they hardly seem worth the price of being legally obligated to handle shriveled Viagara-cock.

Younger Wife, Exotic Fish: The Mogul's Secret to Vitality [LAT]
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