CNN's American Morning has a thing for cheesy rock-and-roll intros, and the Daily Show tonight showcased the most embarrassing among them, including Scorpion's "Rock You Like A Hurricane" for a story on Tropical Storm Bertha or "Changes" by David Bowie for everything from credit cards to reform in China. But the best part comes at the end, when host Jon Stewart reveals how American Morning host John Roberts, once considered heir apparent to Dan Rather at the CBS Evening News, learned to pair pop hits with headlines. Hint: Think Adam Curry. Click the icon for video. UPDATE:

Slightly late to the game of fond remembrances of the late William F. Buckley, Jr. is Fox News correspondent James Rosen's essay on how the founding editor of National Review was a frequent contributor to Playboy. Many of the details Rosen digs up about this sideline beat, so to speak, are fun, but the association isn't quite as counterintuitive or shocking as he'd like to think it is. "Yes, in a union difficult to imagine involving any of today's leading conservatives...the bard of East 73rd Street wrote for Hugh Hefner's oft-vilified Playboy, on and off, for almost four decades, on topics ranging from 'the Negro male' and Nikita Khrushchev to Oprah Winfrey, the Internet, and Y2K." That's a poor use of the word "bard," and also an impaired judgment. P.J. O'Rourke and Christopher Buckley have both written for Playboy and they're "leading conservatives," if not shrieking TV banshees like Ann Coulter. But even back in 1963, when Buckley the Elder made his debut in a transcribed debate he'd had with Norman Mailer, the byline and the magazine were actually rather suited to each other in a strange aesthetic way.

Political journalist Ron Fournier took his lumps recently for an ill-advisedly friendly email he sent to Bush brain Karl Rove back in 2004. Today, the Politico reveals that Fournier was this close to getting a "senior advisory role" in the McCain campaign, probably as some sort of fancy flack. He turned it down and went back to the AP instead, but now this has been reported and it's fueling the anti-AP fire. They're in bed with McCain! It's like there are these two gigantic beds in DC and everyone in the press is lying down on them with a candidate. Or it's like bullshit. This story, and the last one, are pointless except as part of some weird campaign to embarrass Ron Fournier. Fournier quit the Associated Press a couple years back to start something terrible called HotSoup.com, a sort of message board social networking political blog thing that was supposed to revolutionize everything ever. A couple weeks later (at least it felt like a couple weeks) he was back at the AP as their online political editor. (He's now the Washington bureau chief.) He's actually done a little bit of good work at the AP, stripping away some of the obtuse house style and inserting some liveliness into wire reports, but now all the liberals will decide the AP is a den of McCainiacs and boycott them or something. We ask you: why is a job offer from two years ago news? That's all this is. A declined job offer. Politico even twists the knife further:

Remember how sexist media pundits maybe helped Hillary Clinton ruin her shot at the Democratic presidential nomination? "When Hillary Clinton speaks, men hear, 'Take out the garbage,'" loutish author Marc Rudov said on Fox News in January, leading the way for other controversial statements by Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. Well now the shouting heads are doing the same thing to John McCain. And it's those bastards at MSNBC again! Just listen to Joe Scarborough make fun of McCain for getting cluster-bombed by liberal jars of apple sauce during what should have been a simple grocery store photo-op (via the Observer):

Enough said. [Washington Monthly]

John Edwards' mistress has been receiving $15,000 a month in hush money via a rich friend of Edwards, the National Enquirer is claiming. The Enquirer, of course, was the only news outlet that bothered to seriously follow up on allegations that the Democratic politician was having affair with former campaign contractor Rielle Hunter, and thus it was the only publication to catch Edwards in a hotel last week visiting Hunter and his alleged love child. There's been no confirmation of any of this yet from reputable newspapers, like the one that told us about the secret scientist who knew where Saddam Hussein hid his chemical and biological weapons, or from the one that said Puff Daddy was in on the plot to gun down Tupac Shakur. So, gosh, who knows if it can be trusted! But if you still want some salacious details on this hush money stuff — or word from Radar on how the mistress is trying to negotiate her share of this feeding frenzy — it's yours after the jump.

Poor David Granger. He wanted to bring flashing lights to the October issue of the septuagenarian Esquire, and he reaped hell for it. Fast Company accused him of an oversized carbon footprint. Media and marketing guru Rex Hammock called the idea the "worst use of technology by a magazine." Marshall McLuhan rose from the dead and declared it a hot-cold mindfuck. Others scoffed and mocked, but Granger is unbowed. He tells FOLIO:

There have been all kinds of rumors floating around about Marc Jacobs marrying Lorenzo Matrone, the upmarket Brazilian alternative to former rentboy Jason Preston. There was even a report of a very special brunch in Paris to be followed by a vacation together, which sounded suspiciously like a reception and honeymoon. To get to the bottom of the story, Fashion Week Daily went to the trouble of tracking down not one but TWO of the designer's flacks (GOD can that man NEVER commit??). Spoiler: Jacobs, officially at least, continues to enjoy the precious freedoms necessary for his admirable life as a sexual libertine. That is to say, he is not married. But just to be extra sure, Fashion Week Daily interviewed everyone who has ever worked for, talked to or looked at Marc Jacobs, ever:

Cuil (pronounced "kewl") is a brand new website that exists to give lazy tech journalists something to write about. It's also a search engine—one launched by former Google employees—though like ten seconds of playing around quickly demonstrated that it is a barely functioning search engine. Seriously, it doesn't work. Though you wouldn't know that from reading today's featured Times story on how it's a Google-killer! Sigh. [Valleywag]

The British knife crime epidemic has gone virtual! Are your kids safe when they go online-safe from knives? No! Not while Facebook was condoning the existence of a "SuperPoke" application that allowed thuggish social networkers to "Shank" their friends. Thank god the UK tabloids have hollered enough to ensure that none of our children will be virtually shanked again! The Sun is outraged. In London there have been 21 teen knife murders this year! That's the average total from a single LA house party gone wrong, but no matter. The manufacturer of SuperPoke, Slide, has pulled the application, and these digital knife-pokings have been stopped. Should everyone now go to jail?

Brooklyn Paper headline on a Brooklyn Hasidic group's upcoming endorsement of Kevin Powell for Congress: "Hasids to Powell: Jew have our support." Get it? [BP]

Score one for speaking truthiness to power. Over at the Huffington Post, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Brendan Demelle have a column entitled "Unearthed: News of the Week the Mainstream Media Forgot to Report," which relies, in almost every instance of a supposedly ignored but worthwhile story, on articles that originated in such darkened regions of underground journalism as the New York Times, CNN and the Associated Press. How dare word of John Ashcroft's endorsement of waterboarding hide in plain sight like this? And if you had trouble sleeping Saturday, it must have been because no one bothered to inform you that gray wolves had returned to the Oregon wilderness. Dan Mitchell writes to Romenesko in an act of media criticism criticism:

Republican Congressional candidate Allen West didn't know what to think. Some gal called saying she worked for an "Al Jazeera??" And she wanted him to talk on some "show" about the situation in Afghanistan, where he served as a military officer? Like he's going to tell his Army secrets to some Madrassa or whatever, in front of their martyr cameras! Then this "booker" wanted his address so she could "pick him up" — at night, the most terrifying time of day! You know what that means: A hood goes on, your hands are bound, and the next thing you know you're in Dearborn Michigan. So West reported her in to the FBI, for violating freedoms.

When the Times got a call from Steve Jobs, the hands-on CEO of personal computer maker Apple, it had already been investigating the former pancreatic cancer victim's health for several days. Following a Monday report in the Post that some Jobs associates were "troubled by his thin appearance," the Times on Wednesday revealed Jobs underwent some sort of surgical procedure earlier this year. By Thursday afternoon, Times columnist Joe Nocera was preparing to report that Jobs was losing weight due to "ongoing digestive difficulty" and, possibly, due to a recent infection. That's when Jobs phoned to give a peace of his mind. But with a liberal interpretation of the term "off the record," Nocera would go on to finagle a scoop out of the confrontational call:

Sure, you've heard about all the pole dancing in Chile, Mexico, New Jersey, and Union Square. But did you know they're also pole dancing in China? Hey, new trend! [NYT]

This video of John McCain acting like a petulant teenage girl toward a Wall Street Journal reporter is hilarious (best part: Lindsay Graham's "mee-OW" look at the end). And also telling! (TGIF, guys, we'll get through this.) John McCain's always been a favorite of the press, because of his insane availability. (Read Ana Marie Cox in Radar to learn more!) (Alex, call me!) He's affable and genuinely likes reporters. But we've reached a funny moment in their relationship. Because the media is in the tank for Obama. They love him! They cover him all day and all night and ignore McCain. But! The Obama campaign is totally, ridiculously press unfriendly. They're tight with information and generally try to control the message as much as Bush's people did. That's right, in his dealings with the press, Obama resembles President Bush! Some of the Obama faithful see this as a good thing. The media is the enemy. They distort and lie! No one trusts or likes anyone anymore, at all. So McCain is buddy-buddy with all his reporters but is now waging inept war on the media for ignoring him. Obama's beloved by the television people but is pissing off Adam Nagourney. So basically you can bitch about how the media keep painting McCain as a independent lovable American MAVERICK and they all play down his gaffes because they like him, or you can complain that the media are not even bothering to hide their gross man-crush on Barack Obama while ignoring his opponent and both are absolutely correct. So have at it, guys! R.I.P. observable reality!

Tony Pierce is in charge of all the L.A. Times blogs (there are like 30 of them or something? Crazy.) He is a good blogger and a keen editor (signing up Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to blog was weird and awesome). So he's probably regretting sending this email, which Times arch-enemy Kaus picked up as an example of MAINSTREAM MEDIA MISSING THE POINT in re: the John Edwards Love-Child and Mistress Scandal.

"It's something we're looking at and trying to determine what's there... [Edwards] remains a very newsworthy guy because of who he's been in this state and where we are." [Portfolio, Previously]

Sometimes it's the big mistakes that are the easiest to miss. Especially when half the editors are out on summer vacation and you've outsourced production to interns, who have outsourced it to drunken monkeys. The abject correction is after the jump.

John McCain made a pair of not-bad ads mocking the schoolgirlish moments of pundits talking about Barack Obama. Sure, it was hypocritical since McCain's no stranger to favorable press — he famously joked that reporters constituted his "base." Also politically dangerous for the same reason. But if he gets away with tweaking the Fourth Estate it's because he offers the kind of access other pols don't. This is why Jonathan Chait and Jacob Weisberg may not vote for him but still kind of admire the guy. Obama, however, is the anointed presidential hopeful (if he doesn't say so himself), and he clearly has more to lose if the media's infatuation with him ends. Gabriel Sherman of the New Republic has a good piece explaining how the bloom's already gone off the rose. Obama's press liaison Robert Gibbs is a dick, and his other handlers are prickly and micromanagerial. Key evidence: The Times' Adam Nagourney and Megan Thee wrote a story about how the candidate had failed to bridge the race gap. This precipitated a gentle question to Nagourney from the Obama campaign, which he answered. He then awoke the next morning to find himself attacked in an eight-point press release issued by Obama's team and leaked to Talking Points Memo and Marc Ambinder. "I've never had an experience like this with this campaign or others," Nagourney tells Sherman. "I thought they crossed the line. If you have a problem with a story I write, call me first. I'm a big boy. I can handle it. But they never called. They attacked me like I'm a political opponent." So I guess Nagourney's less of a fan. True, McCain went out of his way to antagonize Elisabeth Bumiller of the Times for probing his red-meat conservative credentials (didn't Kerry offer him the VP slot?). But again, this wasn't schema-altering. Who didn't already know McCain could go from Mogwai to Gremlin when his status as a Maverick was either questioned or affirmed by the wrong inquiring mind? With his wafer-thin lead in the polls (don't email me, Gibbs!), Obama can scarcely afford to keep a reputation like this: