In your finally Friday media column: Malcolm X's newest media controversy, Vegan mag in meaty photo flap, Anderson Cooper has a nice room, tabloid phone-hacking scandal updates, Graydon Carter's in the movies, and Bob Woodward creeps towards old codger territory.

  • The Root killed a negative review of Manning Marable's new book about Malcolm X, and the action carries a whiff of controversy because the head of The Root is Henry Louis Gates, one of Marable's pals. But then again: " ‘Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention' is an abomination," wrote reviewer Karl Evanzz. "It is a cavalcade of innuendo and logical fallacy, and is largely reinvented from previous works on the subject." It sounds like a kind of shitty, thesaurus-y review.
  • Scandal! Vegan news magazine VegNews used stock photos showing actual meat products! And then said those delicious-looking photos were of vegan products (which is the real crime here, journalistically)! Hey ho! Hey ho! Stock photography has got to go! Hey, hey, VegNews, hey, how many animals did your stock photo agency kill today?
  • Oh wow, Anderson Cooper's new talk show "Anderson" will be taping in The Allen Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center, which looks over Columbus Circle and Central Park in an appropriately dramatic and sweeping way. You'll look great in there Anderson, we just know it.
  • Further British tabloid phone-hacking scandal updates! Today, police entered the News of the World offices to gather items in their ongoing investigation. And a judge said that he'll use four of the cases against the paper as "test cases" to see how the following bazillion lawsuits should go. And, it emerged that News International tried to offer Sienna Miller 100,000 pounds to make her complaint go away. You can do better, Sienna.
  • Vanity Fair editor and George Washington hair model Graydon Carter will be playing an investment banker in an upcoming Richard Gere thriller called "Arbitrage." Then he'll return to his posh Vanity Fair office, where he plays an outraged populist.
  • Bob Woodward says that Google CEO Eric Schmidt's tombstone will read, "I killed newspapers." Whereas Bob Woodward's tombstone will read "I was born several decades too early to ever really understand the internet."

[Photo of Marable via Wikipedia]