The Media Mob

Former New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse tells Radaronline.com's Charles Kaiser that the most "gripping scene" she ever saw at the Supreme Court was when the 2003 decision of Lawrence v. Texas came down:

I think that was probably the most gripping scene I ever witnessed at the Court—when Kennedy read the majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas. Usually, when you go up to the Court, you don't know what's coming that day. But it was the last day of the term, and Lawrence was the last undecided case. So everybody knew, and the Court was filled with gay and lesbian members of the Supreme Court bar.

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According to a report from Variety's Michael Schneider, V, the 1983 alien invasion mini-series, is being redeveloped for television. (This comes via TVTattle.)

Writes Mr. Schneider:

ABC is developing a new adaptation of the franchise — which spawned a second mini and TV spinoff — written by "The 4400" co-creator/exec producer Scott Peters.

Warner Bros. TV, which was behind the original longform, is once again producing the project, which was sold as a spec script to the Alphabet net.

Mr. Peters is quoted as saying, "Whenever I mention 'V' to anybody, they still have a lot of good memories about the original movie and series. … Everybody has that imagery of their uniforms, or the visitor eating a hamster. It's a science fiction icon and too good to pass up."

"Good memories"? We just remember being completely terrified. But not as terrified as we were watching The Day After that same year.  read more »

Earlier this week, Richard Huff of the New York Daily News broke the story that conservative pundit Sean Hannity had signed a new multimillion dollar contract with Fox News, which will keep him at the cable news network through 2012.

"The new deal will keep Hannity as one-half of the nightly show Hannity & Colmes, which he does with Allan Colmes," reported Mr. Huff. "Today, the nightly show he hosts with Colmes has been No. 1 at 9 p.m. among the cable news networks for the past 58 months."

How's Mr. Colmes doing?  read more »

Jim Romenesko—and just about every media site possible—linked to a story by the Philadelphia Daily News' Dan Gross that says his paper's parent company has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Tina Brown and Barry Diller's nearly 200-hour-old Web site The Daily Beast, claiming that its logo is "potentially trademark-infringing" with that of the Daily News.

Mr. Gross quotes the letter (which an unnamed spokesperson for The Daily Beast says was not received) as saying the logo is "virtually identical in shape, color, font and style to our own Daily News logo."

Apparently there's a serious risk that "our readers could easily be duped into thinking that your Web site is somehow affiliated" with the paper.

That seems unlikely because of—to quote Ms. Brown's already famous launch-day Q&A—"Sensibility, darling."  read more »

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller defended last weekend's front-page story on radical William Ayers and his connection to Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. Mr. Keller writes an e-mail to Politico.com's Michael Calderone:

"We've reported the Ayers relationship before, and we had it on our ‘to do’ list for a while to take a more comprehensive look... When the McCain campaign began to make it a major focal point of ads and stump speeches, we decided the time was right.”

“It didn't take any prodding... When the conversation on something controversial reaches a certain level, curious readers look to The Times to help them sort the facts from the fictions and figure out what to make of it. That's what we did.”

Donald Newhouse wanted 200 Star-Ledger staffers to raise their hand and request a buyout. If a few more asked, he said he would accept up to 230.

Today, the New York Post's Keith Kelly reports that far more Ledger staffers actually want the buyout. A whopping 409 employees have requested a buyout, leaving Mr. Newhouse, publisher George Arwady and editor in chief Jim Willse in the position of buying out 230 people, and turning away 179.

The paper employs a non-union workforce of 756 people, meaning more than half of its employees have requested to jump ship.

The Wall Street Journal's Christina Binkley asked yesterday: Is Bling Over? Are the super rich—the ones who own yachts, and lots and lots of houses—about to start scaling back?

Maybe! Some are actually losing a ton of money, so it makes sense to do something like, shudder, sell the yacht. And the ones who aren't affected by the crash don't want to embarrass their friends and start buying a lot more stuff. "It's not necessarily a good thing to show up at the tennis club with a new $30,000 crocodile handbag when your friends' net worth has been halved and the Federal Reserve is spending billions to keep the banking system afloat," Ms.  read more »

According to recent articles, the Fox Business Network (FBN) still lags far, far behind its competitors at CNBC in terms of the size of its audience.

But amid the current financial panic, FBN is hoping to win over some viewers by running a political-style attack-ad knocking the record of CNBC's Jim Cramer.

"Financially, these are crazy times," warns a scary voiceover in the ads. "The last thing you need is bad advice. The last thing you need is CNBC's Jim Cramer."

Portfoilio's Mixed Media blogger Jeff Bercovici reports that Hearst's CosmoGirl has folded.

A statement from Hearst (quoted by Mr. Bercovici) reads:

Hearst Magazines has made a strategic decision to consolidate its teen publishing activities into Seventeen, the largest-selling monthly teen magazine on newsstands. Effective with the December issue, CosmoGirl will cease as a print magazine, remaining online only at cosmogirl.com. CosmoGirl's subscriber base will be folded into Seventeen.

We are proud of our leadership in the teen category and remain committed to this audience. We will continue to publish Seventeen and its annual Seventeen PROM issue as well as focus on the Hearst Teen Network of websites, which includes Cosmogirl.  read more »

Gawker's Richard Lawson points us towards a controversy brewing over this week's 12th season premiere of Comedy Central's South Park.

According to a post by Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke and one by Los Angeles Times Show Tracker blogger Todd Martens, some people—especially at Paramount—feel that South Park auteurs Matt Parker and Trey Stone went too far in calling Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull a "rape" of a beloved movie franchise. The "joke" was compounded later in the episode by depicting George Lucas and Steven Spielberg as rapists—both of the Indiana Jones movies and of Stars Wars.

What no one seems to remember is that Mr. Spielberg was once the victim of a real-life stalker who may have threatened to rape him. Literally.  read more »