♦ Election returns may set TV viewing records tonight, assuming there's some "suspense." [AP]
♦ What's been on cable news channels all day? Mindless talk and speculation, for the most part. [TV Decoder]
♦ It's possible the networks will call the election before the polls close. [THR]
♦ Some of the high-tech wizardry in store tonight: CNN plans to feature 3D "holographic images" of the network's remote correspondents in its New York studio. [WSJ]
♦ More trouble for tabloid kingpin David Pecker: John Miller, AMI's chief operating officer, has resigned. [NYP]

The most important election in a generation is just four days away. Every day brings fresh news about the crumbling American economy. So how are good 'ol Americans coping with these turbulent times? They're buying guns in record numbers, of course! That's what Fox News is reporting, at least, which says FBI background checks are up nine percent from last year. And just in case you weren't aware of it, this increase is all Barack Obama's fault. Decent Americans are just buying up lots of guns now so they have them in case Obama wins the election and he changes gun control laws, in which case you'll have to pry their semi-automatics from their cold, dead hands.

Nine days ago, Bill O'Reilly landed himself a big raise when he signed a new four-year contract with Fox News worth an estimated $10-12 million a year. So how did he repay this act of generosity on Fox News' part? He devoted a segment of his show to saluting his boss, Fox News chief Roger Ailes, for his charity work. Last night, the "Patriot" part of O'Reilly's "Pinheads & Patriots" segment plugged Ailes' work supporting wounded Navy SEALS. "He's been a quiet, longtime supporter of this very fine charity," O'Reilly says. "And for that he is a patriot." Such a kiss-ass, no? But we're guessing this is what you have to do to when you're making all that money and your ratings are on the decline.

What exactly is happening over at Fox and Friends, America's drunkest morning show? As far as we can tell, this clip shows Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy playing the "Who Can Stare At Each Other Longest Without Laughing?" game while reporting on a killer earthquake in Pakistan. Then they just start showing murder scene video for no reason, which really causes extensive sputtering. Why is the Fox and Friends control room making Brian Kilmeade appear to support death? Click to watch.

♦ Details on the layoffs and management changes at Time Inc. [NYP]
♦ More on the demise of Maer Roshan's Radar and its God-awful TMZ-like reincarnation. [NYO, HuffPo]
♦ Fox News has apologized for putting a racist and anti-Semite on the air. [MM]
♦ Noted media expert (and former basketball player) Charles Barkley thinks Fox News is "corrupt." [B&C]
♦ Barack Obama's 30-minute infomercial airs tonight. [AdAge, Politico]

This is a really subtle joke, right, Fox production team? Or is it just our birthday? [CityFile, Related]

Oh Fox News PR machine, how we've missed your vicious personal attacks on anyone speaking ill of the Mothership! It's been literally months since one of Roger Ailes' specially trained attack flacks unloaded against a reporter or a PR person or anybody else for the crime of calling Fox News a den of writhing right-wing pus-sucking leeches, or words to that effect. Well now they're up against 6'6, 250-pound man who specializes in snatching balls. Finally, a fair fight: NBA Hall-of-Famer, erstwhile (former) Alabama Republican and free-speaking man Charles Barkley pointed out the obvious:

See also: The Worst Fact-Checking Team In Newspapers [Gawker]

♦ The New York Times has endorsed Barack Obama, not surprisingly. [NYT]
♦ If Bravo loses Project Runway, there's always the copycat show Fashion House to fill the void. [NYP]
♦ Maer Roshan's Radar magazine has folded. [Gawker]
♦ OK! has a brand new editor, publisher and executive creative director. [NYP]

Greg Gutfeld, host of Red Eye, the 3 a.m. Fox News show you have never seen, wore out his faux-meathead wingnut schtick around the same time he stopped regularly doing crunches. He purposely poses as a wiseass ignorant bastard (which is fine!), so we're not upset that his latest column explores how Obama is like "a really hot chick." We just chalk it up to homoeroticism. But we have to object to his opening line, "So yesterday, during an ideas meeting..."; Greg, you know don't have "ideas" meetings.

Allow me to construct a sports metaphor (UPDATE: Which I see the NYT also used in its lead sentence, DAMMIT. Oh well, forge ahead) that would sound stale to serious sports fans, but which I believe will sound fresh and insightful here, where we have only seven (7) total sports fan readers: Fox News is the New York Yankees. MSNBC is the Tampa Bay Rays. The Yankees throw huge contracts at aging veteran superstars, trading away their young players for big-name talent that tends to quickly prove to be over-the-hill. Tampa Bay had a string of bad years but stuck to its strategy of focusing on affordable young talent, nurturing them, and building from within. Now, Tampa Bay is in the World Series. The Yankees are sitting at home. My, this metaphor just gets more and more awesome: Fox just signed Bill O'Reilly, the most predictable shouting head on television, to a new four-year, $40 million contract. They just "lured" Glenn Beck from CNN (if you consider him a man who needs "luring") with a multimillion-dollar contract. Other Fox News names like Shep Smith and Sean Hannity get paid huge salaries to stay on. Meanwhile, MSNBC's new star Rachel Maddow came out of nowhere, in cable news terms. She was with Air America not too long ago, for fuck's sake, which is definitely the minor leagues. MSNBC took a chance on her, got her on air, saw how well she did, and then took the leap to giving her her own show. Which has paid off. The best part? They are probably paying her—in cable news terms, again—peanuts. Where are Fox News' Maddows? Where is the young talent that they nurture and build into a star while still paying them the wages of a rookie? These things are important. The economy is shit, advertising revenue is dicey, and homegrown stars are the wave of the future. I'm taking bets on Tampa Bay. Get at me, O'Reilly.

♦ Bill O'Reilly has signed a new four-year contract with Fox News worth $10-12 million a year. There is good news, though: His radio show may be coming to an end. [NYDN]
♦ More bad news for Harvey Weinstein: A handful of senior execs at The Weinstein Co. have announced their departures. [THR]
♦ How are monthly business magazines keeping up with the financial crisis? They're not, really. [NYO]
♦ The offices of the New York Times received an envelope this morning containing a "white granular substance." [Radar]

♦ The Rachel Maddow publicity machine rolls on (not that we mind, of course): According to today's Times, she's a "fresh face," MSNBC execs adore her, and her show's ratings have defied all expectations. [NYT]
♦ For reasons we will never understand, Fox & Friends is now more popular than CNN's American Morning and MSNBC's Morning Joe combined. [LAT]
♦ Sarah Palin will sit down with Brian Williams tomorrow. [TVNewser]

Hooray for Judith Miller! After years in the wilderness, she's finally come home. The former star New York Times national security correspondent is heading to Fox News as an on-air analyst and general sad embarrassment. Miller became famous when she went to jail in a grandstanding stunt because she refused to admit that her secret source was Scooter Libby even though Libby had signed a waiver authorizing her to testify about their conversations and then there was some poetry exchanged and eventually she quit the Times in disgrace and they wrote a caged Editors Note about how she lied, incessantly, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, which was sold to Americans using bullshit planted in her articles by people from the office of the Vice President and then cited by Vice President Cheney. In other words, no one likes her. So now she's going to be on Fox in their new glorious Democrats-are-in-charge-again rebirth as the loyal opposition to the terrorists who will run the country in 2009. They are sooo lucky to have her! Since she left the Times she's been with the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think thank, because she's given up entirely on getting anyone to like her or take her seriously anymore. Also she endorsed Barack Obama because why not? She probably believes in abortion and socialism and progressive taxation just as much as she believed that Iraq was a dangerous threat based on the most specious and misleading of evidence. For a while all the "serious" media liberals had to acknowledge that Bush was more "serious" about National Security than those peacenik hippie Nation-reading commies, remember? No, no one remembers, or cares, whatever. Miller is of course either delusional or just doesn't give a shit:

God, John McCain is just sick of running for president. Even in the cozy environs of Fox News Sunday, questioned by the friendly Chris Wallace, he's absolutely unable to justify to himself the various hideous missteps of his miserable campaign. That Sarah Palin pick? Well, he half-heartedly argues, it'll piss off the feminists. What a great reason to make her your successor, John. And then he offers, on the subject of Governor Palin's selection, the type of "joke" that is utterly serious: "as a cold political calculation, I could not be more pleased." Ugh.

♦ It's confirmed: Sarah Palin will appear on Saturday Night Live tomorrow. [NYDN]
♦ Yet another tragic consequence of the economic meltdown: Suze Orman is making money off the crisis with big-money endorsement deals. [WSJ]
♦ Playboy is cutting costs. How? With energy-efficient lightbulbs, naturally. [WWD]
♦ The Grammy nominations—not the actual awards, mind you—will be a TV special. [NYT]
♦ A hiring freeze is now in place at Condé Nast. [NYP]

Kudos to Fox News PR chief Brian Lewis for being the only media company flack to make the PRWeek "PR Power List" this year. He "has assembled arguably the most aggressive PR team that has ever existed," PRW writes. "In spite of criticism, Lewis and his team keep the message consistent." That message: Fall in line or be destroyed. [PRW (my former employer) via TVNewser]

"Overreaching copyright claims have resulted in the removal of noninfringing campaign videos from YouTube." That's the gist of a complaint from the McCain-Palin campaign's general counsel to YouTube management. The letter says YouTube's 10-day review policy hurts America, because "10 days can be a lifetime in a political campaign." It's never been proven that anyone at McCain/Palin headquarters used the DMCA to take down Sarah's swimsuit video. But no doubt being DMCA'd by Fox News for using a news clip in a campaign video has given John McCain a more personal view of how copyright laws can backfire.

Don't be a sucker. Those complicated, long-winded explanations of the worldwide financial crisis are just a lot of big city hokum. Fortunately, your good buddies Mike Huckabee and Chuck Norris are here to set the record straight: It's a dark, shadowy conspiracy between the fat cats on Wall Street, the elitists in Washington, and the nefarious Red Chinese who are secretly stealing our oil off the Florida coast! Huffpo's Rachel Sklar learned the awful truth from Huckabee's new talk show on Fox last night. Huckabee's got a "friend" who tells him this whole mess is the result of "financial terrorism": "Just today, a friend of mine in the financial markets indicated that he's been doing a careful analysis of the last 12 days, and there seems to be a manipulation of the marketplace - at the last half-hour of each day, there is an extraordinary rush of computerized trading going on. He believes that there may, in fact, be evidence of economic terrorism that is fueling a lot of what's going on. Now it's a fascinating idea, that if somebody could break down the world economy, it would have a greater impact that any bomb ever set off. It seems to be there is plausible argument for it." But, Norris sagely points out, don't forget the Chinese! "Oh yeah, I think - oh definitely, Mike. The thing is, China has one and a half trillion dollars* of our debt. Now, what did we give China for collateral for that one and a half trillion dollars? So the thing is, you know, with our government - what did - what secret deal did they get, give China, said, 'Well, you know, ah, we won't tell the people but you can drill 50 miles off the Florida shore, and do a slant drilling into our oil in Florida,' you know - so a lot of things are going on underhandedly that we the people don't know, and that's why it's so important, Mike, that we the people get the power back. We need a voter revolution in our country." (audience applause) Also? When Congress took off for the Jewish Holidays, they were really Christmas shopping, and Barack Obama is big on infanticide. Read it here.

♦ Sumner Redstone is being forced to sell about one-fifth of his stake in CBS and Viacom to meet the terms of various loan agreements. Also: Shares in Viacom plunged after the company announced third-quarter earnings fell short of estimates. [Bloomberg]
♦ It's official: Hearst's Cathie Black announced CosmoGirl will fold. [Portfolio]
♦ A little perspective: Time Warner is now less than one-quarter of what AOL alone was worth before the merger. [SAI]
♦ After much drama (and a few leaked emails), Scott Rudin has decided to talk away from The Reader. [THR]