Your usual host Hamilton Nolan is off for the rest of the day, so you're stuck with me. Rest assured, I'm as sorry about all this as you are.

A fellow calling himself Bob Anderson is going around pretending to be a writer for W magazine. He even registered an entire fakey domain name, fairchildgrp.com, to make his emails look more legit, according to an email exchange we've reviewed between him and a media event organizer. But the scammer was nevertheless excluded from a recent event after he was busted trying to pass off another writer's online column as his own. The writer is a lady of the female persuasion, and her byline is on the online column submitted by "Bob Anderson" as credentials. So, be on guard against this guy, if you are very very easily fooled.

Forbes' executive editor for technology, Betsy Corcoran, is leaving the magazine after ten years. The Silicon Valley journalism fixture is launching a startup to bring more technology into America's classrooms (Lucere.org, not yet live). She tells us her departure is "really and truly about my passion for education and technology" — and not the relentless rounds of layoffs at her magazine.

Eighteen years worth of National Lampoon covers, starting at the magazine's 1970 inception, have been posted online. (Via Robert Newman). A perfect way to burn through the rest of your last day of "work" this week, no? (For the youths: The Lampoon was like The Onion of the 1970s and 1980s, but with a little bit more actual news, and a lot more questionable taste.)

Why is conservative, gay-marriage-hating Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz pouring money into right-wing DC media sinkholes like the Examiner newspaper and the Weekly Standard magazine? Because he can, is about the best answer anyone can come up with, according to a profile in Politico. Just your basic propaganda play, but with dying media. That should end as well as Anschutz's dabbling in movies, probably (i.e. poorly).

Kristol writes:

David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel aren't stupid: Expect to see Barack Obama get on the plane after his session with the International Olympics Committee at mid-day Friday Copenhagen time, and be in Afghanistan with our troops five hours later, in time for the evening news Friday here in the U.S.

Speculation on flight path and landing sites to come. Do your worst, jihadis!

Ha, this is Dan Wasserman's editorial cartoon in the Boston Globe today. Luckily Pinch Sulzberger is enough of a mensch to think this is funny. Until he sees tomorrow's cartoon, which portrays him as Satan, fucking Boston with a pitchfork.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Today is the tenth anniversary of Jonnie Friedman's media column! Yes, we've made fun of Jon on this blog—a fact which takes up the majority of his anniversary column. But here is another totally true fact: you will not find a nicer media reporter in New York than Jon Friedman. Seriously, we are all jerks relative to him!

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.News Corp is reportedly close to selling the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol's pet conservative magazine that in some quarters has a reputation for being "smart" (although not in smart quarters). Rupert Murdoch will sell the little mag to billionaire wingnut Phillip Anschultz because, hey, Murdoch already has the WSJ, and Bill Kristol sucks, so why not?

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Peter Doocy, the son of smarmy Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy, has been hired as a reporter by Fox News. Don't get it twisted: Peter Doocy was objectively the most qualified applicant named 'Doocy.'

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Mark and Gary Stern, brothers and veteran newspaper publishers, are planning to launch a new daily print newspaper. In Detroit. "'We aren't going to get into a situation that will put us in the red,' Mark Stern said." Does not compute.

The announcement of the game caused a stir on the web yesterday, with the Weekly Standard launching a protest campaign encouraging readers to e-mail Microsoft and T-Enterprise, the out-of-its-depth company that had hired actual Gitmo detainee Moazzam Begg as a consultant on the game. Today, T-Enterprise released a statement explaining that the fact that they'd hired an alleged former Al Qaeda operative to consult for a game in which a terror detainee at Guantanamo Bay escapes and fights back against his captors was in no way intended to be a commentary on "the British and American troops that fight the war against terrorism to make the world a safer place." Sadly, though, they've pulled out of the project, which was obviously never a real project to begin with because there's no way in hell Microsoft would have gone along with it.

Official Statement Regarding Rendition: Guantanamo – 3 June, 2009

In recent days, much has been made of the involvement of T-Enterprise in relation to an X-Box 360 game entitled Rendition: Guantanamo. As a reputable and highly regarded firm amongst professionals and clients alike, we would like to take this opportunity to clarify a few issues that have emerged in the wake of press coverage in the United States.

Unfortunately, much of the speculation regarding the game itself made by various publications and websites has been inaccurate and ill informed. Based on a simple teaser trailer that actually revealed little of the game, many conclusions were reached that have absolutely no foundation whatsoever. It was never designed to be "propaganda" or "a recruiting tool for terrorism". Neither was it designed to glamorise terrorism as has been reported.

First and foremost, the main character was NOT Moazzam Begg. Instead, his name was Adam. He happened to be involved in a case of mistaken identity and so was never a terrorist. T-Enterprise is against all forms of terrorism and would never seek to advocate otherwise. Furthermore, Guantanamo was to be a mercenary run institution and so there would have been NO American military personnel killed within the game. Again, we support the British and American troops that fight the war against terrorism to make the world a safer place and would not make a game that said otherwise.

Having clarified our position on terrorism, I would now like to refute all suggestions that the game was in any way linked to Al Qaeda. T-Enterprise has never had and would never have a link to Al Qaeda in any way, shape or form. Furthermore, we would certainly not facilitate a means of funding for any group that undertook terrorist activities. The game was simply designed to be an action video game that adults could enjoy.

However, as a direct result of the extreme reaction that the game and its popular misconceptions have provoked, T-Enterprise has decided to pull out of the project and will not be completing Rendition: Guantanamo.

Should you have any questions regarding this statement then please contact our press office for clarification.

Zarrar Chishti

Director, T-Enterprise

As Media Matters points out, O'Reilly and Bernard Goldberg had a good laugh last night about Zeleny's silly question:

O'Reilly: Did he actually say that word, enchanted?

Goldberg: I cannot picture any journalist asking Franklin Roosevelt if he was enchanted.... Because they were men of a different era, they were men of a John Wayne era. Today's men...especially men in journalism, they're softer.... They want to know about your feelings.

O'Reilly: I don't know what that means. I know what the enchanted forest is...

Goldberg: It's the kind of question that fits our metrosexual times, if you know what I mean.

We know exactly what you mean, Bernie. You mean "homosexual times." Now it's possible that O'Reilly and Goldberg were not aware that Zeleny is in fact a gay man—something Media Matters, for some reason, didn't point out—which would render their jocular insinuations that the Times pansy asked a pansy question something just short of bigotry. But the high-school locker-room banter, with all the subtlety of a Sean Delonas cartoon, tells a different story.

The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb also got in on the act, writing that "Jeff Zeleny embarrassed himself and his paper when he asked Obama what was the most 'enchanted' moment of his first 100 days. I was unable to see whether the question was read out of a My Little Unicorn notepad."

Because gays love unicorns and rainbows. They use them to do sex things to each other in Michael Goldfarb's dreams.

True, there is a clique of professors in Hyde Park who are "alien" to working-class interests, as I know from having lived there for 15 years. Those professors are conservatives, however: members of the University of Chicago's law and economics departments who have given that institution much of its world-wide fame.

It's a crying shame Saul Bellow isn't still around to set us right on this question. Look at what he did for the North Side of Chicago in The Dean's December (he's describing the terrifically named Dewey Spangler, a famous newspaper columnist):

Would he ever have risen so high without the cultural capital had accumulated in Lincoln Park; would he even have gotten out of Chicago? Dewey had never wasted anything in his life; he always got his money's worth. He had made the Shakespeare pay, just as he turned his years of psychoanalysis to use. His bookish adolescence had given him an edge over the guys at the City News Bureau and his competitors in Washington, so that now could frame his columns in high-grade intellectual plush, passing easily from the President's budget message to John Stuart Mill, transmuting the rattle of the Chicago streetcars into the dark rich tones of political philosophy. Even the idea of filling the shoes of Walter Lippmann (a hell of a nasty ambition to suffer from, Corde thought) went back to the scrolled green benches of Lincoln Park. Corde didn't mean to put Dewey down. But origins were origins. You did the best you could with them. You couldn't turn them in for a better set.

[Weekly Standard]
[Wall Street Journal]

National Review says on its blog The Corner:

The similarities are striking, the most egregious of which is a device Labash uses throughout his piece. He repeatedly breaks up anecdotes with "Stone's Rules" — things like "Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack," as well as "White shirt + tan face = confidence."

Toobin does the exact same thing throughout his profile, even including the same mathematical equation and, like Labash, basing his conclusion on yet another rule. The cover art on The Weekly Standard is a photo of Roger Stone with his shirt off, showing his Nixon back tattoo. Whaddayaknow? In The New Yorker's print edition (not online), they run a photo of Stone with his shirt off, flashing his back tattoo.

We can't quite agree with this. Stone's tattoo is probably the most obvious photo of him for any profile. And as for "Stone's Rules"—they're really quotable slogans that the man has honed to a fine point over decades of working with the media. To expect any profiler not to quote them is ludicrous. But judge for yourself: Toobin's profile is here. The Weekly Standard's Matt Labash profile is here.

(Further story-stealing sensitivity: a tipster accuses the New York Times of ripping off a year-old Washington Post story today. The Post's piece was on shrinking portion sizes at restaurants; the Times today talks about portion sizes as well as rising prices as a byproduct of increasing food costs. Again, we have to say this one is clean. The Times' story was broader, and has a solid current news peg. Disagreements in the comments, please.)

[pic via NYer]

It's good to finally know the author's name, but there is nothing here to confirm the events as described by Beauchamp. Right now, we have no reason to believe that his stories are anything other than what we first suspected them to be: a "pastiche of the 'This is no bullshit . . . stories soldiers like to tell."... That Beauchamp chose to reveal himself at this point also seems a bit disingenuous, since the military has already launched an investigation and, courtesy of JD Johannes, we'd already identified his unit four days ago. If we'd gotten that much information, it was only a matter of time before somebody besides his editors started asking him "hard questions."

A STATEMENT FROM SCOTT THOMAS BEAUCHAMP [TNR]
"Scott Thomas" Revealed [Weekly Standard]

Doubts Raised on Magazine's 'Baghdad Diarist' [NYT]

Help the Warmongers Help Themselves [Vanity Fair]