Columbia School of Journalism fetes Harvey Levin amid his latest TMZ scandal

So who else noticed that the week the Los Angeles Police Department placed two cops on leave in its probe of how its evidence photo of the beaten pop star Rihanna wound up on the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com, TMZ's shaved bronzed midget frontman Harvey Levin was in New York cruising for recruits and being feted at the Columbia School of f'ing Journalism?

While two women are left hanging and facing the loss of their jobs because the Time Warner-AOL operation (and CNN cousin) once again perverted the justice system (tainting the jury pool and all that) when it allegedly paid $62,500 for the celeb S&M porn, little Levin was lecturing a room of privileged J-school students the way he charms his boy team on TV, dressed WeHo Polo shirt clone and seducing resumes from the elite with his tales of big money and Hollywood glamour amid lowbrow taunts that the newspaper and magazine industry are dead. This is the same Columbia School of Journalism whose Sig Gissler rejected Tabloid Baby's Pulitzer Prize nominations before the Pulitzer board could decide for themselves.

TMZ survives and thrives because the clueless old school mainstream operations suppport and use it as a source. We don't think TMZ would fare quite so well in the rough and tumble journo world without the hundreds of thousands of dollars his corporate overlords give the staff to throw around to corrupt public officials and ruin it for the rest of us by making real whistleblowers gunshy,

A tip of the Tabloid Baby hat, meanwhile, to The Enterprise Report, which does it on a shoestring and has been in front of the pack and on top of the latest TMZ/Levin scandal from the start...

Jacko opens for the Buckshot Bandits

Hey, if we were going to set off on a bank robbery spree in Los Angeles this week it probably would have been on Tuesday, when thousands of police were hanging around downtown at the Staples Center, but maybe the crooks who robbed two banks in the Valley today knew better. We ran into the aftermath near the intersection of Topanga Canyon and Ventura Boulevards in Woodland Hills this afternoon, as police had the whole area evacuated and cordoned off because the robbers had left behind a package they'd claimed was a bomb. Turns out it was our encounter with the Buckshot Bandits, named for the long-barreled rifles and sawed-off shotguns they tote. Cops like to give bank robbers nicknames. It supposedly helps get them caught. Maybe they should call these guys the Buckshot Bombers, seeing they also left fake devices after two bank jobs in May. At today's second heist in Encino, not far from the Jackson family compound, one of them also put a gun to a customer's head.