So what about the Masturbating Bear?

So NBC is finally wrapping up the Conan O'Brien debacle and, after a break for the Olympics, will head into another three months of critical headlines about the mediocrity of Jay Leno when he gets the timeslot back. Conan and his people played it well-- a lot better than he played as host of The Tonight Show, which we all stopped watching after the first week (he never should have brought back Andy Richter-- it was a retreat to the infantile comedy he did in the early days of The Late Show, not even Letterman does the hip "irony" thing anymore, and Conan didn't click as a full-fledged talent until after he dumped the playacting sidekick and went solo). The only question that matters is whether NBC gets to keep the "intellectual property rights" to his sketches which would mean it's the last anyone will ever see of The Masturbating Bear.

One thing the saga did demonstrate was how the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com is consistently wrong in its reporting and how dangerous it is for lazy paid mainstream journos to use it as a source. From its ever-shifting details of the contents and timing of the settlement, the site and its shaved bronzed midget frontman made it clear that, as when they rolled the dice in reporting the death of Michael Jackson prematurely, they make shit up, and as long as they have supporters like Brian Stelter at the New York Times to give them attribution and feature stories whenever they happen to be correct, they're golden.

TMZ & Jacko: Who you gonna believe? The New York Times or Hollywood's Rumor Rat? Think twice before you answer.

In the world of journalism, reporters and columnists look to the rung above them-- or even beneath them-- for what's already been published or posted, and accept the word as fact. So it goes with the spreading story that the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com scooped the world on the death of Michael Jackson because of its superior sources and technology. Though we proved on Friday that TMZ's early word of Jackson's untimely yet not entirely unsurprising bucket kick was based on a gamble-- shaved bronzed midget frontman Harvey Levin and his boy squad took the information everyone else had and ran with it before it was confirmed (an old, dangerous tabloid trick-- see the Bible, Tabloid Baby), the awestruck praise of the despised Hollywood sewer site is comin from "the top"-- in the form of a New York Times article that's been copied and commented upon by print columnists around the nation and world.


We should mention that the Times story is written by Brian Stelter, a boy blogger turned news man who, coming from the Internet and helping his musty print bosses understand its importance, has made a cottage industry of elevating TMZ.com in the eyes of the mainstream media.

Back in March, Stelter pushed the story that during the brouhaha over givernment bailouts, TMZ "drove mainstream coverage and Congressional outrage."

Our own criticism of Stelter's fawning TMZ coverage under the authority of the New York Times goes back to 2007, when he wrote more than one fawning article about the successful debut of TMZ's whitewashed syndicated television sister, which had actually opened to middling ratings, especially in comparison to entrenched infotainment shows.

It's an interesting situation we have here: The established, "mainstream" media doesn't trust Harvey Levin and TMZ enough to use it as a source on a major story like the death of Michael Jackson, yet it sources TMZ on other gossip items on a daily basis, praising the gutter operation and laying out the foundation for using it as a valid source in the future. Of course, the fact that TMZ is a division of Time Warner has little to do with that.


Meanwhile, we find that the unfiltered truth is coming from the independent sites run by real journalists, not TV lawywers like Levin. For example, Rumor Rat, the mysterious celebrity news site whose Big Cheese is obviously a veteran with perscpective and experience and whose team has swarmed across Hollywood and nibbled away at TMZ and Perez Hilton, recognizes who the real rats are.

New York Times' acclaimed investigative business journalist crawls back to familiar turf, dishing with fellow gay about their dead icon Anna Nicole

Harvey Levin (right), shaved bronzed midget frontman of the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com and its inconsequential whitewashed syndicated television sister, was comfortably back in clone Polo and his familiar checkbook coverage of dead sex symbol Anna Nicole Smith, today, while today's New York Times gives credibility to his sleazy operation in a controversial front-page story by a website blogging fanboy turned Times reporter.

Sinking New York Times elevates stinking TMZ

Recent viewers of the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com and its whitewashed syndicated television sister know the AOL and Time Warner-backed operation for its ugly misogynistic harassment of the troubled woman who gave birth to octuplets, and know its shaved bronzed midget frontman as the giddy giggling amalgamation of Sidney Falco and Roy Cohn who's shown up joyfully on local news and morning shows to wallow in the pugwash of the latest conscienceless backdoor gangbang perpetrated by his jealous Hollywood-hating attack squad.

But to readers of The New York Times, TMZ.com is a shining light of investigative muckraking journalism, not only challenging but leading the mainstream in the coverage of "billion-dollar business scandals and the economic collapse."

In a story that's hit the Times website tonight, reporter Brian Stelter states that TMZ actually "drove mainstream coverage and Congressional outrage with a blog post late last month that exclaimed, 'Bailout Bank Blows Millions Partying in L.A.' The site reported that Northern Trust, a bank that received $1.6 billion in taxpayer money, had hosted hundreds of clients and employees at a golf tournament and a series of parties in Southern California. 'Your tax dollars, hard at work,' the site wrote.

"Northern Trust never sought the bailout funds, but agreed to take them last fall at the behest of the government. Regardless, the photos of Tiffany gift bags and the grainy video clips of Chicago and Sheryl Crow performing for the group angered readers —as well as Congressional Democrats, who demanded in a letter that Northern Trust repay what the company 'frittered away on these lavish events.' The bank said it would do so 'as quickly as prudently possible,' news that earned four exclamation points from TMZ.

"Harvey Levin, the editor of TMZ, who called the story 'the most important thing we’ve ever done,' knows his readers don’t come to the site for a dissertation on mortgage-backed securities. 'It’s hard for people to wrap their heads around $800 billion in bailout money. It’s too big a thing,' he said. 'It’s much easier to understand paying for a Sheryl Crow concert.'"

At a time when established, major newspapers are folding left and right in the face of economic woes and Internet competition, such praise and validation in the pages of the financially-troubled New York Times seem outlandish and hard to even fathom-- unless you read TabloidBaby.com and remember our criticism of the boy blogger-turned-Times reporter.

After Stelter wrote his second gushing Times story about the TMZ TV show in December 2007, we wrote that "youthful TV blogger-turned-New York Times special reporter Brian Stelter continues to drag the former 'newspaper of record' down the slippery slope of hype and spin with his breathless adulation of the syndicated television series based on the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com."

While TMZ's most notable "contribution" to the coverage of the economic crisis has been its scapegoating and mocking of the so-called "Octomom," tabloid television shows have been, as Stelter praised TMZ and other infotainment shows, "expanding their coverage" since the Eighties, when A Current Affair covered the San Francisco earthquake and fall of the Berlin Wall. The acquisition of the Northern Trust celebrity party photos was the center of TMZ's jaded and cynical spin, but it was a very brief diversion from its usual corrupt fare. Stelter's use of the Times platform to give credibility to the site only gives Levin and his patrons more authority to state with a straight face that the work they do is of value and deserving of corporate and network support in expanding.

And all this comes on an evening when TMZ's gallery of online headlines is highlighted by

Reality Doc Sued Over Alleged Botched Vagina

and

Neverland Was Filled with Sculpted Boys

(Of special to irony to those who recall Harvey Levin's initial brush with the spotlight, TabloidBaby.com "drove mainstream coverage and Congressional outrage" in 2005 with its exclusive photos of Mitzvahpalooza, the $10 million bat mitzvah tossed by a Long Island defense contractor accused of supplying faulty body armour to US soldiers in Iraq, and featuring pop and rock stars like Don Henley, Tom Petty, 50 Cent and Aerosmith's Steven Tyler and Joe Perry. Mainstream organizations from Rolling Stone to Time magazine used our photos.)