Last week we wondered loudly if this season of America's Next Top Model had been fixed. A plus-sized model won and all and yeah, yeah isn't that great. Some people, though, smelled a rat. Did she really deserve to win? Was this just producer plotting to make the show seem more fair? In much the same way that rumors have been circulating that, per producer decree, a woman has to win this (the fourth) season of Top Chef, critics have suggested that the show, after umpteen "cycles" featuring plus-sized girls, predetermined that a "larger" model would win this season. A token, if you will. Adding to the fervor is the Seventeen magazine cover shoot that the winner, Whitney Thompson, received as a prize. Does she really look like a size 14, as she claims she is? Did she just pack on pounds to be The Plus-Sized and then drop weight again after the victory, as some have suggested? Having little to no knowledge of sizes and whatnot (boys!), tell me: does she look like a size 14 in these photos? I'm sure some airbrushing occurred, but does she look anything close to her purported size? It would be something of a scandal if the whole thing was, you know, staged. Click to enlarge (heh) the photo. (More at Mollygood.)

The Dove "Campaign for Real Beauty" photo retouching controversy was left as an unresolved disagreement between truth-in-advertising purists and photo professionals who say retouching is a necessity. Television and movies may be moving in the opposite direction; a lighter touch with makeup is needed in the face of exacting HD cameras. But for print ads of all kinds, the wonders of Photoshop manipulation will prevail. James Danziger, the photo gallerist who represents celebrity image producer Annie Leibovitz, weighs in with a cogent postscript to the Dove controversy and its legacy: "We are living in both the digital age and the age of hypocrisy.":

The aftermath of last week's Dove "Campaign for Real Beauty" photo retouching scandal remains unclear. It all started with retoucher Pascal Dangin telling the New Yorker that he had cleaned up photos for the campaign featuring ostensibly "Real" women, which would be a hugely hypocritical move. Dove, their ad agency, and celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz all denied it, saying they did nothing to the pictures except "to remove dust and do color correction." Today, Ad Age tries to decide whether or not the fiasco will hurt Dove—and the company is still stonewalling, while the New Yorker is standing by (most of) its story.

The Parents Television Council—the shrill right-wing arbiter of entertainment morality last seen reprimanding companies for associating with rappers—is now busy condemning the brilliant, violent, and controversial new video game Grand Theft Auto IV. Unfortunately for the forces of purity, the Council decided to do its condemning primarily by making things up:

Flemming Rose, the Danish newspaper editor responsible for publishing the controversial Muhammad cartoons that caused a global Muslim fundamentalist uproar in 2006—and which still threaten the life of one of the artists, who has been condemned by Osama Bin Laden— has a message for all the American papers that refused to publish pictures of the cartoons even as they were writing news stories about them: thanks a lot, pussies.

Singer Beyoncé's fashion collection, House of Deréon, is pushing a new kids line, for which it created the ad pictured at left. The reviews are rolling in, and they go a little something like this: "I don't know about you, but the words 'fuck me pumps' and 'pre-schoolers' do not need to go together in the same sentence." Taking racy pictures of underaged girls seems to be the fashion of the moment. Beyoncé is just staying on the cutting edge! But at least Miley Cyrus had a track record of sexual photos before her controversial Vanity Fair shoot; these girls are, what, five or six? And, more importantly, however will Annie Leibovitz take edgy pictures of them when they reach the next break in the celebrity pipeline if they've already been dressing like this for ten years? Larger photo of the ad after the jump.

Soldiers are fighting back against a government attempt to take their men's magazines away! Stars and Stripes talked to a bunch of our military men at a base in Germany, and they voiced universal opposition to a proposed bill to ban "sexually explicit" magazines—including Playboy, Penthouse, Maxim, FHM, and the like—from Army bases. They're good for morale, the soldiers say. And besides (everybody together now), they read them for the articles!

Hannah Montana, the kids' show starring exploited teenager (or, alternately, picture-posing strumpet) Miley Cyrus, ran its first new episode in two months last Sunday. And the ratings were down 24%! Could this be the end for our hero—done in by Annie Leibovitz, Vanity Fair, and a child-unfriendly wave of bad publicity?

Graydon Carter, the rotund Vanity Fair editor and undersecretary of the celebrity-industrial complex, weighs in on the magazine's controversial Miley Cyrus photos in a video message: "She seems like a girl with a head on her shoulders," he says. Right-o! "But parents, rest easy. We think Cyrus is going to make it through adolescence. And this issue." [VF]

Buzz Bissinger, the excellent sportswriter and blog hater who made himself a very unpopular man very quickly by becoming unhinged and cussing out nice-guy Deadspin editor Will Leitch on TV last week, has had some time to think about what he did. And he's sorry now. First his wife told him he looked bad. Then everybody else did. "I started reading emails sent to me. The majority were predictably vindictive — dickhead, horsefucker, douchebag, windbag, ugly, stupid, etc. But what struck me far more is that many of the emails were smart, not laced with personal invective, and made cogent points about sports blogs and the Internet." He has perhaps now learned a valuable lesson, or three!

Michael Roberts, the Vanity Fair fashion and style director who attributed the uproar over the sexy Miley Cyrus photos to unsophisticated Americans who don't handle "chic pictures" as well as his fellow Europeans, is not just dispensing cultural criticism through the media: he has a book coming out! And in a fun coincidence, the 112-page tome is going to be called Fashion Victims: The Catty Catalogue of Stylish Casualties, from A to Z. Perhaps he'll add a section addressing the fact that "The whole kiddie porn prurient angle seems to be worryingly sour grapes from other magazines that didn't get a picture like this." After all, at Vanity Fair "We don't do cheesy teen pictures. We do chic pictures and pictures that are beautiful portraits." Alrighty then. Just for kicks, another now-ironic quote from last October's Telegraph profile of Roberts:

Bonnie Fuller, who oversees Star magazine and is therefore the arbiter of American media standards, has a question about this whole Miley Cyrus thing, and its connection to the current Texas polygamy scandal: "Is it OK to sexualize a fifteen-year-old if it is in the pages of a high falutin' magazine and her parents seem OK with it? Or is this really not much different from parents in a cult acquiescing to having their teen daughters wedded and bedded?" Ummm... can we say 'No' to all of the above?

Amnesty International, well known whiners for freedom, released a new anti-torture ad last week. And it's really good! The ad, not torture. At the very least, it's the most stylish portrayal of waterboarding America has seen since it became the hot new YouTube trend. There's also a nice, subtle nod in here to overblown bottled water ads; both are bad things that will kill you. Through economic paralysis and environmental degradation. Oh, the waterboarding will also kill you by drowning. The ad, which Dick Cheney doesn't even realize is supposed to be disturbing, is after the jump.

Annie Leibovitz: come off it. Really now. As dirty as the media business is—and particularly the celebrity media business, which Vanity Fair revels in under a sheen of high class pretension—there are some bare, bottom-level standards to which we all must adhere. One of those is, "Do not sexually exploit minors." You want to economically exploit a minor? Fine. That's a grand American tradition. But trotting out 15 year-old Miley Cyrus with pouty lips, tousled hair, and only a bedsheet is just bad. Bad! Of course Vanity Fair bears the responsibility for publishing it. But the idea for the shoot can be traced to the tired celeb photographer Leibovitz (who is sorry it's been "misinterpreted"). And her narrow, robotically transgressive act has now played itself out. This incident, and Leibovitz's entire style, is less shocking than it is boring—but with a 15-year-old involved, it's boring and creepy.

Well that was quick. It looks like you can no longer access Vanity Fair's behind-the-scenes slideshow of Miley Cyrus pictures. We have a selection of the vaguely creepy shots in our earlier post. Now the link on the magazine's website goes to a landing page for the feature story on the young star, but when you attempt to click through to the slideshow, an error message appears. A tacit admission of guilt, or just, ahem, a technical issue? We've emailed VF for comment, and we'll let you know what we hear. [UPDATE: The slideshow is back!]

There's a technique called "grooming" that pedophiles use on their victims (yes, we just learned about it today, thank you). One definition says "Grooming behavior is intended to make the victim or potential victim or victim's guardians feel comfortable with the molester and even interested in interacting with him." And here's a characteristic of a regressed child molester: "They place pseudo-adult status on their victims and then view them as they would their peers." Now take a look at the following behind-the-scenes pictures from Vanity Fair's controversial new Miley Cyrus photo shoot by 58-year-old lesbian photographer Annie Leibovitz and ask yourself if any of that rings a bell. We're not accusing these stylists of being pedophiles, we're just saying... ugh:

Yesterday Page Six published a terrible rumor that there's a sex tape floating around featuring Jackass star Bam Margera and the fiancee of the radio personality "Opie," of "Opie and Anthony." Calling into question the sanctity of a radio shock jock's relationship, can you imagine? Now Opie has struck back at the "scumbags of the media" (that's you, Page Six!), offering $100,000 to anybody who can produce the alleged tape. You know what that means: Bam Margera is tearing his apartment upside down right this minute. Kidding! He sounds pretty sure he's on safe ground. After the jump, listen to Opie and Anthony excoriate those with even lower journalistic standards than themselves:

The Washington Post has fired a young reporter named Michael Tunison after he disclosed that he wrote for a sports blog on the side, and, additionally, may have been drunk at some point in his life. This is obviously behavior incompatible with his key newsroom position, "which included some reporting and writing and some clerical work in the Montgomery County bureau." You can just imagine the vast logistical difficulties that his newly revealed identity as a football fan would pose in his suburban newsgathering duties. Our jock-following colleague at Deadspin gently mocks the WP for being hypocritical and, frankly, stupid about the internet, but we say: kudos, Post. Your actions help give all bloggers something to make fun of. After the jump, a screengrab of the blog post (and drunky pic) with which Tunison "brought discredit to the paper":

Not being well tuned in to the Catholic outrage circuit, we missed the big controversy this week over Bill Maher calling the Pope the head of a "child-abusing religious cult," and saying "he used to be a Nazi and he wears funny hats." That sounds fairly accurate, no? Not to Catholic League president and perpetually outraged man Bill Donohue, who demanded an apology on behalf of all Catholics worldwide who care about trivial things. And now Donohue says that he's been assured that Maher plans to apologize tonight for "falsely accusing the pope of once being a Nazi." Because in fact the Pope was just "conscripted into a German Youth organization (from which he fled as soon as he could)." Is Bill Maher now expected to be nuanced when it comes to the objects of his hate? Doesn't really sound like him. If you're reading this, Mr. Maher, and I know you are: just shout "Jesus loved whores!" at the end of your apology, to maintain your cred. The clip of his original Pope rant, after the jump.

When a Chicago subway train got stopped for an hour in a tunnel yesterday morning, riders there did what many of us have thought of doing many times, but have not for fear of our lives: they got out and walked. That is just awesome. Less awesome: when officials heard people were walking along the tracks, they shut down power to the entire line as a safety precaution (for third rail zapping possibilities), which automatically stranded thousands more riders. It's a grassroots revolt ethical quandary!