Media-Whore D'Oeuvres



"Chris Matthews, the usually garrulous host of 'Hardball' on MSNBC, has quietly signed a new long-term contract to remain with the cable network through the next election, signaling that he had quit entertaining any plans to run for a Senate seat. The deal is for at least four years. Financial terms were not disclosed, and neither side would confirm whether MSNBC had won a reduction in salary for the host, as it had been reported to be seeking. Previous reports put his annual salary at about $5 million. One executive involved in the negotiations said, 'Whether he took a slight cut or got a slight raise, it’s nobody’s business' .. Mr. Matthews was in New York recently for a lunch at the Sea Grill restaurant. Before he sat down for an interview, he stopped at a table where the former first lady, Laura Bush, was sitting with a friend. She had previously greeted another NBC News star, Matt Lauer, effusively. But Mr. Matthews, who had been tough on Mrs. Bush’s husband, got a somewhat chillier reception." (NYTimes)

"Today show anchor Matt Lauer was absent from the show this morning after a bicycling run-in with a deer on Long Island over the weekend. Lauer separated his shoulder after he 'slammed on his brake and went over his handlebars,' said co-anchor Meredith Vieira." (TvNewser)

"Barely four months ago, MSNBC nearly doubled Keith Olbemann's annual salary to $7.5 million. Now the network says Chris Matthews has re-upped without much of a raise. Ouch. The NBC cable network refused to share salary details with the New York Times, save for the most humiliating one: Matthews is still making more or less $5 million per year. In October that would have been 25 percent more than Olbermann made. Now it's roughly 33 percent less." (Ryan Tate/Gawker)



"Could Peaches Geldof be ready to move on from her estranged husband Max Drummey? We hear the 20-year-old has been getting 'very close' to Lightspeed Champion star Dev Hynes since meeting the singer last month. The pair met on a video shoot and have been in constant touch ever since. Dev now lives in New York, and Peaches has just returned to the city after her recent trip to London. They met up with each other as soon as she got back, with pals saying they have been frequently hanging out together. One said: 'There is definitely a chemistry between the pair. They have very similar interests, including their taste in music and art house movies. They met while shooting a video together for Nylon, the magazine Peaches writes for, at the Comic Convention in New York in February." (Thisislondon)



(image via salon)

"ANNIE Leibovitz one of the highest-paid photographers in the world won't explain why she had to pawn all the rights to her work to borrow $15.5 million last year. But inheritance taxes had nothing to do with her financial problems .. Art Capital Group loaned $15.5 million to the photographer, who put up as collateral her three Greenwich Village townhouses, her house in upstate Rhinebeck, and the rights to all her past and even future photographs. Her Manhattan neighbors believe that Leibovitz needed to borrow because of the lengthy renovation of her two townhouses on West 11th Street and a third one next door that she was forced to buy when her construction crew undermined its foundation, forcing neighbors to move into a hotel." (PageSix)

"Rep. James E. Clyburn, who has gained a reputation for his soft touch as majority whip, will find his conciliatory style tested in coming months as Democrats consider a budget that threatens to fracture a party known for its recent unity. Clyburn — a low-key South Carolinian who rarely raises his voice or uses strong language other than when he perceives slights against minorities — might not seem the profile of a whip to those who recall the intimidating presence of past leaders such as former Republican Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas (1985-2006), known as 'The Hammer' for his ability to keep lawmakers in line. Others say Clyburn, the highest-ranking African-American in Congress, is aided by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who they contend is the one who carries the stick when it comes to maintaining party unity. But the 68-year-old son of a minister said he subscribes to the view that 'you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.' To that end, he has been meeting with senior whips to plot strategy for bridging the budget concerns of the diverse groups that make up the Democratic Party, from the liberal Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) to the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition. Clyburn conceded that it won’t be easy corralling Democratic votes for President Obama’s ambitious agenda, including a proposed $3.6 trillion budget that has already drawn howls from some in both parties. 'It’s going to be very, very challenging,' Clyburn said during an interview in his third-floor Capitol office, which is lined with photographs, including one of him seated near the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at an event in Charleston, S.C., in 1967." (CQPolitics)



"PRINCE William’s girlfriend Kate Middleton risks a royal rollicking—for raking in a fortune flogging PRINCESS party gear to kids. Kate’s well-known face is plastered on a website and glossy brochure pushing EIGHTY-FOUR princess-theme products—from tiaras and dresses to wands and fairytale stagecoaches. And it means her parents’ multi-million-pound Party Pieces company in leafy royal Berkshire is directly benefiting from her five-year courtship with the 26-year-old Prince. Last night an inside source said: “This is plainly cashing in on palace connections and the royals aren’t going to like it. Kate is a famous woman ONLY because of William and it’s clear to see that any product she endorses with a regal connection will sell. 'There’s a very real concern that what she’s doing trivialises the name of the British monarchy.'" (Newsoftheworld)

"Randy Shain said he wasn’t stunned when hedge-fund managers Paul Greenwood and Stephen Walsh were arrested last month for allegedly misappropriating $554 million in client funds. A probe three years ago by his First Advantage Investigative Services LLC found in public documents that a brokerage run by the pair had agreed to settle regulators’ claims that it improperly used customer assets as loan collateral and had been fined at least 11 times for violating rules at several U.S. exchanges. The firm neither admitted nor denied the allegations, which covered actions from August 1985 to January 1986 .. Firms like Shain’s say they are seeing an increase in requests for background checks on fund managers in the wake of high-profile fraud cases against Bernard Madoff in New York, Florida’s Arthur Nadel and R. Allen Stanford and his Antigua- based bank. In all, the men are accused of cheating clients out of as much as $73 billion. 'Investors are being more careful in checking out where they put their money,' said Pete Turecek, a senior managing director overseeing hedge funds at Kroll Inc., a risk-consulting company in New York 'As the economy continues to weaken, some people including money managers may be drawn to taking shortcuts.'" (Bloomberg)

"My friend Harry Stendhal was telling me about the new exhibition he’s organized and produced at the Maya Stendhal Gallery that is a comprehensive retrospective on Anthology Film Archives (actually it opened ten days ago). He asked me if I’d write something about it. I told him I didn’t know anything about the history of film-making other than the pop stuff. He said he thought I’d be particularly interested in a figure named Jerome Hill who was a co-founder and longtime supporter of the archive and who, according to Harry, came from a 'famous railroad family.' I hadn’t heard of Jerome Hill although I’d heard of James Jerome Hill who founded the Great Northern Railroad in the last quarter of the 19th century. Headquartered in St. Paul Minnesota, Hill was one of the great American railroad barons .. In a documentary that Hill made in 1971 of his own life, titled Film Portrait, the viewer gets a look at that kind of life of Midwestern American wealth in the early part of the century because Hill’s father Louis Hill was already a film camera buff and he was forever recording." (NYSocialDiary)

"Keith Olbermann appeared last night on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher as the second guest and later as a member of the panel. The conversation began with Cornell University (both are alumni) and the origin of their political beliefs." (TVNewser)

"I once blogged about which stars were the smartest and came up with a miraculous bunch of people who'd clawed their way to the top half naked, yet were still quite brilliant deep down inside. But who's the dumbest? Help me decide which famous people are so moronic they sit on the TV and watch the sofa. Kindly leave out my girl Rihanna, who's had enough problems, thank you. Do you hear me? If anyone even mentions her name, I'll personally come over to their house and beat them senseless. And let's not include Paris Hilton either, if you don't mind. No one who makes that much money in that many media (and outfits) can exactly be labeled dumb .." (Musto)

"The Wall Street fraud who scammed investors out of $64 billion will be sentenced in June. Bernard Madoff could receive as much as 150-years behind bars. For the 70-year-old felon, even a fraction of the maximum term will most likely mean he’ll die in prison. But where will he do the time? The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) lists five classifications of security for institutional placement: minimum, low, medium, and high. The latter, high, are also known as United States Penitentiaries .. If Madoff ends up in a medium or maximum security facility, he’ll be joining rapists, murderers and other violent offenders. 'They’ll think nothing of killing him if they don’t like him,' (Ed Bales, managing director of Federal Prison Consultants) warns. 'He may be marked.' That’s why Madoff may first be placed in a segregated unit. As much as he is despised, the BOP will be looking out for Madoff’s safety. 'They’re trying to protect him, they just don’t know how the general population will react to Bernie Madoff,' says Bales." (AC360Blogs)

"Summit Entertainment's Twilight DVD went on sale Saturday at 12:01 AM. I hear it's already debuting in at least the Top 5 of all DVD one-day sales openers of the last 2 years." (DeadlineHollywoodDaily)



"I’d always admired Stewart, but I was bugged by that 'little me' deniability, the 'just a comedian' escape hatch he’d adopted early on. Now, at last, he had claimed his own authority, without becoming any less funny. When Cramer appeared before him, trying to bond as if the two were buddies from the greenroom, Stewart didn’t knuckle: 'Roll 212!,' he cried, elevating video fact-checking into a thrilling moral vaudeville. In the end, Stewart isn’t really a skinnier Letterman or a Jewisher Conan. Throughout the Bush years, he shared a continuum with the comic 'Get Your War On' and The Onion—his genre was catharsis culture, more outraged, more earnest, than ironic/detached. For me, the discomfort of that encounter with Cramer was part of the point; queasiness, rage, aggression—these are legitimate emotions, and paired with Stewart’s firecracker weave of clips, quips, and analysis, they modeled what punditry might look like in the new era. A week after the CNBC takedown, Clay Shirky published an elegy for the news industry, a sad analysis with a Cracker Jack prize inside: 'Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.' It may sound funny, but in this era of reinvention, Stewart stands at that vanguard, with Joshua Micah Marshall, ProPublica, even Wikipedia—odd, aggressive experiments that at their best reignite old values: investigation, facts, and true debate." (NYMag)



"Sunday evenings in New York can mean a few things; the faint of heart cozy up on couches in dimly lit apartments, easing their way into the work week, while the pros go out in full force, and party like they don't have to wake up and go to work the next morning. Last night, despite the gusty winds howling outside, the throngs descended upon (le) Poisson Rouge to catch Danish six-piece The Asteroids Galaxy Tour." (Papermag)

"Comedian Rob Schneider, formally of SNL and 'Duce Bigelow' fame visited The Howard Stern Show today to plug his new direct-to-DVD movie 'Big Stan.' Schneider both directs and stars in the film. You might remember Schneider best as 'The Copy Machine Guy' on Saturday Night Live .. Howard Stern's first question for Rob Schneider, why did 'Big Stan' go directly to DVD? Schneider said the movie company that made the movie ended up going bankrupt. The movie is about a guy who gets busted for white collar crime and is sent to prison. In anticipation of what would happen to him in prison, he takes up mixed martial arts and becomes a legendary kung-fu warrior. Howard was raving about the movie, saying it's absolutely hysterical. Then Rob shared some funny stories about his favorite and least favorite guests on SNL. Schneider said Alec Baldwin is by-far the best SNL guest of all time. He said Jeremy Irons and Debra Winger were among the worst." (Gather)

"Day two of the Brussels Forum had more off-the-record events, but here are the juicy tidbits .. Note to the Obama administration: Indians across the political spectrum are thoroughly underwhelmed with your approach to South Asia to date. Also, they'd like you to cut out the complaints about offshore outsourcing. If not, Boeing is going to feel a world of hurt.
Iain Johnston has characterized China as a 'temporary status quo power.' Speaking to the Chinese attendees, there's a lot of 'after the crisis' talk - i.e., after the crisis, China is not going to be a status quo power. The big question, of course, is whether what China does during the crisis constrains its options afterwards." (ForeignPolicy)