When Dave Logan agreed to appear on Fox Business to promote a book on corporate culture, he probably had some faint hope the six-month-old cable channel was less of a viper pit than its News Corp. sister network, Fox News. Any such delusions were quickly dissolved when host Stuart Varney tore into Logan for being an academic egghead and asked, "This is the United States of America, it is a highly competitive economy, you claw your way up on the backs of others - didn't you know that?" After Logan stood his ground and recounted the lessons of 11 years inside American corporations, Varney scampered a retreat and tried, unconvincingly, to end on a friendly note. Presumably, Varney will now be forced to spend the next few months in ambush interview boot camp with Roger Ailes and Bill O'Reilly. Clip after the jump.

This thing the Daily Show did last night was pretty great, everyone! Though it kinda suffers from the same obvious "make your opponent look ridiculous through selective, out-of-context quotes" thing Fox does all the time but it's a comedy show so whatever. Our favorite bit was the shaky camera PR film! Lol @ Rupert Murdoch! [HuffPo]

Husband-of-Touby Jon Fine, who writes for Business Week when he's not being lassoed by his millionairess wife's trademark boa, sneaked a look at Rupert Murdoch's speed dial. The Australian media mogul's old cellphone is on display at the Newseum, that mausoleum of 20th-century media bric-a-brac, which Fine checked out this week. Murdoch's key phone numbers include those of his children, various executives at News Corporation-and, slightly less predictably, a Tunisian movie producer called Tarak Ben Ammar.

Check out Natali Del Conte on Fox News. Del Conte not only makes her geeky solution to finding a hard-to-find Wii seem simple — "just Google Wii Tracker" — she also advises viewers to buy Wiis bundled with games and then just return the games. Sneaky sneak.

It's no surprise that MSNBC is tilting to the political left; the cable news network admitted as much to the Times in the fall. But MSNBC is still figuring out how far to push its political bent into viewers' faces. If the network's coverage of a recent speech by Republican presidential candidate John McCain is anything to go by, it is edging toward becoming the Fox News of the left, as Fox itself feared. Saying he believes Iraq is a key Al Qaeda battleground, where of course America should fight an endless war forever, McCain told an MSNBC reporter, "General Petraeus and I and Osama bin Laden are in agreement," and the news network dug into the quote like the journalistic red meat that it was. See the headline at left for a flavor of how MSNBC covered the story. Video of McCain's treasonous comments is after the jump.

Remember how CNN and AP were running around trying to figure out where Barack Obama was having his secret Islamic Vacation Of Change/Terror? And then a six year old found him in the Virgin Islands while looking for Easter eggs and sent a picture to Fox News? Well it turns out the whole experience wasn't just a cute story but also a lifeline for mostly false idea of "Citizen Journalism," in which furries leave their basement to cover the war in Iraq or city council meetings or whatever, for no pay. Because, see, the little girl's family submitted their Barack scoop to Fox through a website called uReport. Also, they approached Obama in a pretty straightforward manner, instead of melodramatically spying on him from a distance and probably giggling like a bunch of teenaged girls, like CNN did. Maybe this really does change everything. After the jump, video of the girl's mom recounting the family's heart-pounding investigative Obama interview.

Fleishman-Hillard, one of the world's largest PR firms, seems pretty worried about that recent bedbug infestation at Fox News! Fleishman is sending out press releases for its client, Hot Shot insecticides, offering a free Hot Shot to anybody who's been a guest on Fox lately. So they don't bring the nasty Fox bugs back home! Funny thing is, most PR firms are painstakingly careful not to offend any media outlets, but here's a brave one that's willing to stand up and call Fox News—I'm really paraphrasing here—a den of dirty bloodsucking insects that has tainted anyone who set foot on its premises. Lots of people have said that before, but never a PR agency. Good show, Fleishman! Hope Fox doesn't get offended next time you're pitching them clients (such as Target, Motorola, Dow Chemical—email me for a longer list)! It's a good thing Fox News doesn't hold grudges, ha ha. Full pesticidal press release after the jump.

Fox News felt, perhaps, a bit upstaged by ABC News' sensationalized report on how Hillary Clinton slept in her own home 11 years ago, so the cable news network decided to flood the zone with even more of its own tabloid hype than usual. FoxNews.com started with "Woman Gets New Anus Instead of Leg Operation" then moved on to "Is Your Vagina Depressed?" (Sex site Nerve.com spotted the racy headlines quickly.) Fox's report on vagina pain, aka Vulvodynia, was noteworthy not just for the headline, but also because a paid Vagisil consultant and advisory board member, Dr. Adelaide Nardone, touted a Vagisil product for the disorder, and neither she nor Fox disclosed to viewers her relationship to the feminine hygiene brand. Perhaps these sorts of stories are inevitable when you give your medical correspondent his own blog called "Dr. Manny After Hours." After the jump, video of the Vagisil plug, plus Dr. Manny encouraging a woman — her vagina, really — to buck up and look at the bright side of life.

A tipster tells us that the Fox News employee who caused the bedbug infestation has been fired; he's described as "a satellite desk guy who was greasy and gross." Sounds like a likely suspect! Any further information, email us. [Earlier]

The Democratic primaries and debates have lifted CNN's ratings to new heights, but the numbers may fall back below cable news competitor Fox after the election, when everyone realizes CNN's leading personalities are 74-year-old Larry King and vein-popping demagogue Lou Dobbs. CNN president Jim Walton: "Journalism is key to what we do... Fox is doing something different." [NYT]

How to describe His Holiness Jimbo Wales? The pugnacious entrepreneur Jason Calacanis can't stand dealing with Wales, because the Wikipedia founder is so humble, so calm, so staid that, unlike Calacanis's other would-be competitors, he takes no bait and is above reproach. So Jason must be pleased to see Wales revealed as human, and in fact as a dude who picks up chicks using his own online encyclopedia. The nerds have already heard this story in, like, fifty volumes on Valleywag, but here's a quicker version. The point: Jimmy Wales is an Internet Christ figure, this was his Last Temptation, and even though he failed he's still the Son of God.

"For ten years I didn't even have a TV," the pornish-turned-serious-ish actress tells Spin in its March issue. "But sometimes when I'm really depraved, I watch Fox News. I know it's completely manipulative, but at least I get to know what Britney is doing every day. It's not even about the news. It's like a complete lobotomy." Truer words have never been spoken.

By now, we've all seen the video of Gary Busey's vampire-like neck-raping of Jennifer Garner on the red carpet the other evening. But you might not have seen (or heard) that Busey managed to pry himself from his coffin early on Monday morning and delivered a heartfelt (yet borderline creepy) apology to Garner on Ryan Seacrest's radio show. During this interview, we learn that The Buse also managed to spring another surprise attack on the carpet on Sunday (specifically, he interrupted a Fox News interview with George Clooney). However, as disturbing as all of Busey's confused red-carpet lunging on The Most Important Night In Showbiz was, we found ourselves even more disturbed after learning about his "interesting odor."

Fox News talking head Courtney Friel sure has plenty of enemies who can't forgive her unprecedented crime of being a hot-but-vapid TV news personality (see prior coverage last night). Or maybe they just hate her for taking that cliche to an extreme: One dogged detractor, the fourth we've come across and second to email in the space of three hours, sent links to more people hating on poor Courtney, more racy magazine shots allegedly pulled from her website and the following video, in which Courtney pulls what we are told is a chicken cutlet from her top:

Fox News correspondent and alleged harasser Rachel Marsden was escorted from the News Corp. building last year after parting ways with late-night show Red Eye. But now she has been allowed back on the premises to distract terrified American homeowners into staring at her outfit instead of thinking about what she's actually saying, which is that the free market is about to foreclose on their homes. Marsden wrote in to say she did a Fox Business News segment Friday on subprime mortgages, and that it was in the building from which she had once been banned. Also? She loves everyone at Fox and they love her back. From the email:

Fox News correspondent Courtney Friel is not keeping her enemies at bay, despite fighting them with a terrifying blog where she ponders whether to get "contrast or Fox blonde" hair treatments. First Marty Davis, a conservative former TV anchor, smacked Friel yet again, calling her a "blank canvas constitutionally incapable" of becoming a real journalist. Then another less-than-friendly observer of Friel emailed Gawker some photos apparently removed from the talking head's website after she was hired at Fox. It would seem Friel has decided that a little sexy is professional, but too much sexy — Maxim sexy — is just embarrassing. Whatever happened to "any publicity is good publicity," as she wrote on her blog? Let's test that theory, and enjoy a video courtesy commenter "The One" involving Friel and a horse dick:

Fox News talking head Coutrney Friel was recently called a "bikini bonehead" and a walking non-sequitur, but Friel tried to juice the hate for all it was worth on her blog, writing, "any publicity is good publicity." In that spirit, she horrifically packed 58 photographs of herself onto the single, short page that constitutes her blog, virtually all of them headshots with an identical, robotic TV smile. While her pictures disorient and stun you, Friel's undated blog posts depress you, delivering kind-of-sad news about her career in a relentlessly upbeat style:

Tax-evading wiretapper Jeanine Pirro, who might have knowingly tried to put an innocent man in jail this one time, lost a tooth on Geraldo last night when God became tired of her relentless lies and decided to punish her live on Fox News. The tooth, or maybe it was some sort of cosmetic cap designed to fraudulently misrepresent her evil-infested mouth, fell off right when she was saying something about how Democrats aren't really democratic because they have superdelegates. Geraldo just laughed at her and pretended to listen as she kept talking, but then later he said she had "consulted her dentist and is now back from the break ." You'll probably laugh too, at her and not with her:

The press has been barred from covering Karl Rove's speech today at Choate, the chichi Connecticut prep school. Sort of like Rove was barred a few weeks ago from delivering the school's spring graduation address. "This is a special program, a school event, and we typically don't invite the media to a school event," a spokeswoman said. "It's our standard way of doing things." Well then!

Harris Poll asked TV viewers, both Democrat and Republican, to name their favorite and least liked news personalities. The results of the survey, crunched and displayed on our chart, are fascinating.