• Welcome back to CBS Radio, CEO Dan Mason. There are a couple of items in your inbox. Start with that Imus folder. [NYP]
  

• In his memoir, former Time Inc. EIC Norman Pearlstine paints NYT honcho Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., as a lightweight for that whole "not caving to federal prosecutors like Time did" thing. [NYP]
  

• Rick Kaplan brought in to save ratings-challenged Katie Couric. [NYP]
  

• Who will succeed Bill Keller as Times executive editor: Jill Abramson or Dean Baquet? Get set for the inevitable Hillary-Obama comparisons. Either way, oddly, the real job worth having seven years from now will be digital fella Jon Landman's. [WWD]
  

• Fox to do for business what it's done for the Republican party: Convince gullible yahoos that it isn't a soulless machine out to exploit the most vulnerable members of our society for the benefit of those who were born with all of life's advantages in the first place. [NYT]
  

• Jeff Zucker to be named CEO of NBC Universal, because he's done so well so far and everyone loves him. [NYP]
  

• CNBC is backing Maria Bartiromo because, really, what else do you know about CNBC apart from Maria Bartiromo? [NYT]
  

• Maria Bartiromo: too palsy with her subjects. [NYT]
  

• "Time Inc. has selected Stockholm's Bonnier Group as the winner of the auction for the right to buy 18 of Time Inc.'s magazines. There was no immediate word on the price that Bonnier will pay, but the terms are in place and a deal should close within a month." That's what AdAge said, but then they pulled it. So who knows? [AdAge]
  

• Remeber The Politico, that Allbritton politics website thing that hired away pretty much every decent political print reporter? It's live. [The Politico]
  

• Apparently, there were some layoffs at Time Inc. yesterday. [NYP]
  

I am convinced there's something tragic happening in the news media. It goes beyond legitimate differences of taste and form. At an unprecedented rate, hard news, good news, and non-sexualized news are disappearing. ... If Walter Cronkite had witnessed Katie Couric's debut as anchor of the CBS evening news (maybe he did), I am confident he would have been traumatized to see precious news time wasted on "exclusive" photographs of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' newborn baby.

In an unscripted moment that will come as a shock to absolutely no one, Secretary of State revealed her affinity for Fox News.

• Nobody watched "I'm From Rolling Stone." [WWD]
  

Geraldo Rivera's Fox-syndicated show Geraldo at Large has been cancelled, though it will be reincarnated on weekends for the Fox News Channel and retitled At Large with Geraldo Rivera (thus admitting that Mr. Rivera has forever lost first-name recognition status). Sadly this might mean the reconfiguration of the At Large website to lose "The G Spot," supposedly Geraldo's blog but really just a collection of show summaries cobbled together by an unfortunate PA. Appropriately enough, Rivera himself is nowhere near this G-spot nor, one imagines, any other.

We asked who would distribute the inevitable Saddam Hussein execution video, and the answer was the same as for every other question in 2006: You. We won't bother posting the clip here, but your friendly neighborhood YouTube has dozens of duplicates available for your Faces of Death viewing pleasure. So presented with this huge gift of a news story during the holiday dead zone, how did media outlets finesse the grisly, standards-and-practices-breaking problem of airing an execution?

• Ad Age's Media Mavens: A remarkably diverse group. [copyranter]
  

• 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]
  

• Jeff Zucker may take over for Bob Wright as head of NBC by the end of the year. Honestly, you get the feeling that Zucker could rip the head off a transgendered prostitute and skullfuck it in the middle of a board meeting and he'd still get promoted. [NYP]
  

In the spirit of journalists getting hurt for your amusement, we'd be remiss not to mention the above clip of Fox News's Steve Harrigan getting waterboarded last Friday for Greta Van Susteren. Harrigan's not here to debate the politics of torture, you see: