Aaron Brown was the serious, soft-spoken voice of CNN. Americans all remember his calm, powerful, and moving presence on CNN covering the attacks on the World Trade Center, as they happened, all day long. His first day at CNN! Then a couple years later CNN ditched him and gave his time-slot to Anderson Cooper, who is much prettier. But he's back! On, uh, PBS, where he'll look comparatively "young" and "cool." Anyway, Brown weighed in, for some reason, on the battle between Fox hothead Bill O'Reilly and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. "Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly 'are both larger-than-life figures,' he says, but Olbermann is 'smarter, funnier, better read and eminently more talented.'" Well. Is someone angling for David Gregory's spot once Gregory takes over for Chris Matthews? He's got all the time in the world, NBC. He'll wait out this rumored move that may never happen. [TVNewser]

"IAC/InterActiveCorp boss Barry Diller is pushing ahead with plans to break up his company into five separate businesses, and downplaying talk about a possible asset swap with Liberty Media...Diller said he hopes to complete the spin-offs by August." [Post]

eBay's lawsuit against Craigslist, alleging that founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster conspired to squeeze eBay out of the company, is fascinating for many reasons. It reveals Buckmaster and Newmark's naked greed: They issued shares of the company to themselves to increase their stakes and decrease eBay's.But it also shows how tight the two have been with Craigslist's workers. eBay owns, or owned 28.4 percent of the company, a stake acquired from early Craigslist employee Philip Knowlton. Knowlton sold his shares in part because Buckmaster and Newmark were trying to squeeze him out, too. (Are you beginning to see a pattern?) The two, acting as Craigslist's board of directors, issued themselves one new share for every five they already owned, a move which pushed eBay's ownership stake down to 24.85 percent — a level which, among other things, eliminated eBay's ability to elect a director for the company. Do the math, and it becomes clear that Craigslist's other shareholders — presumably its employees — own about 3.3 percent of the company. That's a miserably small portion of equity to give employees of a tech startup; normally, about 20 percent of a company's equity is reserved for employees.

The text of eBay's complaint filed in a Delaware court [PDF] has made its way online, and in it, eBay "seeks equitable and legal relief" from Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster and founder Craig Newmark for:

The migration of Project Runway from Bravo to Lifetime is getting ugly, and not Harvey Weinstein ugly — partition of India ugly. The fashion show won't actually move until November, but things are already bad, so bad, between the trendsetting supergays who TiVO Bravo and the spinster homebodies who drink white zinfandel until they pass out on their cats in front of Lifetime. Wrote a commenter on Dlisted: "Being on Lifetime ... automatically makes [Runway] not cool, trendy, or creative. Bravo is funny and gay. Lifetime is timid and stodgy." Doree Shafrir's mom at the Observer rounded up other examples of anti-Lifetime fearmongering by Runway fans, then quoted a Lifetime VP saying, "We care about women — we put them first." PUT WOMEN AHEAD OF GAY MEN, HUH?? Oh, it's on, and even the inevitable Chistian Siriano-mediated peace talks may not be able to turn it off. A bullet-point summary of each side's strategic strengths, distilled from the Observer piece by a party not directly involved in the dispute, after the jump.

"Fresh off his legal victory over Liberty Media, IAC/InterActiveCorp boss Barry Diller is expected to meet with his board this week to restart the process of breaking up his company into five separate pieces, The Post has learned. At the same time, sources said Diller and Liberty Media Chairman John Malone are continuing to talk about a deal that would trade one or more of IAC's assets for Liberty's ownership stake in IAC." [Post]

There are dueling views on who is winning the battle for supremacy in the eyes of the notoriously combative media mogul Sumner Redstone. On one side is Philippe Dauman, head of Viacom, who recently decided to form a new movie channel to distribute films from Viacom's Paramount. On the other side is Les Moonves at CBS, who was allegedly "royally screwed" by Dauman's new channel since it ended the hope that his Showtime network would screen Paramount films. Daubman hopes the incident will help him get CBS and Viacom merged back together and put under his control, the Post reported this morning. Not so fast, said the Wall Street Journal: Dauman's movie channel is a supremely bad idea.

Julia Allison is sick and tired of the anonymous online critic who maintains a blog devoted entirely to criticizing her. "This woman checks my tumblr, my flickr, my vimeo, my twitter... as well as all of the things my girl friends post, and spends a good portion of her time (time which could otherwise be spent engaged in fun and useful activities, such as tennis, horseback riding or archery!) penning long, bitchy, link-ridden items 'analyzing' my life." Which sounds a lot like a the job description of a Gawker blogger, except the woman in question is anonymous and probably doesn't get paid. Which is outrageous! Star editor-at-large Allison said she knows the identity of her critic and is wondering what to do with it:

CBS honcho Les Moonves had a week from hell. It started with a Times highlighting how his salary keeps going up while revenues at his beleaguered company keep going down. Then he had to answer to news department staff about leaks that made Katie Couric look like a lame duck in the anchor chair at CBS Evening News. Now he's said by Nikki Finke's sources to be "royally screwed" after fumbling negotiations with Viacom, a sibling company in the Sumner Redstone media empire. Moonves had been trying to cut the amount CBS' Showtime was paying for Paramount movies, but Paramount said "screw this" and decided to form its own cable channel along with studios MGM and Lionsgate. Here's why the whole situation is especially awkward, according to the Times:

Among the names floated by Radar yesterday as possibly taking a Times buyout was Craig Whitney, the assistant managing editor overseeing journalistic standards. Whitney sided with public editor Clark Hoyt in a recent internal Times feud over semi-nude photos in T Magazine of a 17-year-old girl (pictured) whose blurred breast was exposed. Hoyt and Whitney argued the photo did not belong in the paper, T and the main Times Magazine basically called Hoyt and Whitney Philistines. The folks at T would be happy to see "prudish" Whitney go, claims one observer, if only because they see his very job as unnecessary. Of course, it was barely a month ago that Whitney was reminding everyone to attempt to interview multiple people when writing profiles. Sometimes a prude is just what you need.

The Wall Street Journal's scoop about Katie Couric's CBS Evening News exit has a deliciously bitchy media backstory: The Journal reporter who broke the news, Rebecca Dana, last year lost a plum staff position at the Times for bragging to her friends that she would "kick [Times TV reporter] Bill Carter's ass" once she started. After she was ratted out by her buddies, the Times rescinded her job offer, supposedly over concerns about the young reporter's maturity. The paper did offer Dana a lesser position with three-year probationary status, but she opted to bide her time, take a media reporting job at the Journal and then, uh, kick Bill Carter's ass. (Photo via Jossip)

Harvey Weinstein is moving Project Runway from Bravo to Lifetime because his company will now be making $1 million per episode rather than around $600,000 per episode, the Post reported. Understandable, even if some fans of the reality show may have to emigrate from their homelands to watch it. But what's kind of gross is how the media mogul exploited (and probably undermined) the show when it was at Bravo in order to earn more money for Wesintein Co.:

Fellow MSNBC host Keith Olbermann is on Chris Matthews' shit list, as you knew, while Race For The White House host David Gregory makes him nervous, because Gregory is an obvious possible replacement for Matthews, according to a leaked copy of a forthcoming Times magazine profile obtained by FishbowlDC. More embarrassing: fellow network personality Tim Russert, who Matthews kind of idolizes, supposedly can't stand the high-volume Hardball host. Profiler Mark Leibovich was of course sure to include a fresh batch of Matthews' leering comments toward women:

Erica Jong's sister has resented her for 35 years, since the publication of Jong's famous novel Fear of Flying. She unleashed her anger recently, and unexpectedly, at a laudatory academic conference on the book at Columbia, telling the New Yorker afterward, "I gave myself permission to be a bitch." She is angry because, she said, her husband was slandered in Fear of Flying, depicted as demanding a blowjob from Jong. But Jong has always branded the book a work of fiction and is shooting insults back at her sister. So begins a feud that is so much more delicious than a trillionth rehashing of Jong's feminist classic.

Suspicious: During a pro-Hillary speech by Bill Clinton at Indiana University, the Barack Obama campaign started giving away concert tickets to Dave Matthews Band. The giveaway was the first opportunity to grab the tickets, and a line formed, partly made up of people who left the Clinton event, according to the Indianapolis Star. One student waited for more than three hours.

A studio lot full of Hollywood "agents, managers, publicists and reporters" found Scientology messiah Tom Cruise hilarious Tuesday night, the Times reported, not because the actor is certifiably insane but because he did a mean impression of Sumner Redstone, the Viacom and Paramount boss who cut ties with Cruise two years ago. The crowd was watching a screening of Paramount comedy Tropic Thunder, which includes a performance by Cruise as a redheaded, pudgy studio executive with lots of chest hair and a penchant for cussing and dirty dancing - a ringer for Redstone. Cruise's performance killed among insiders primed for Hollywood in-jokes and long accustomed to Cruise's unbalanced personality, but it's unlikely the rest of the moviegoing public will be as tickled, and weird that the chummy screening got any notice at all in the Times, even if the paper was trying to make up for missing the story of Cruise's make-up lunch with Redstone last week. After the jump, a side-by-side comparison of Cruise, made up for his character, and Redstone.

Sure, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post slammed Hillary Clinton in a front-page endorsement of her rival Barack Obama two months ago, but what has the News Corp. overlord done to obliterate the Democratic presidential candidate lately? He's rolled out daughter Elisabeth, for starters. The TV executive will host a fundraiser at her London home for Obama later this month. It's become quite the hot ticket: actress Gwyneth Paltrow will be there, along with former VP Al Gore's financier buddy. But Rupe is firing even more powerful guns at Hillary: Post headlines. Here's the one atop a Monday story about Hillary's false claim to have taken sniper fire during a 1996 trip to Bosnia:

From lovable Brooklynite novelist Jonathan "Safran" Foer (the hip one!) to New Republic editor Franklin Foer (he's the serious one!) to stunt-rememberer and baby brother Joshua Foer (he will come up with some way to bother us later!), everyone loves the Foer Brothers. Everyone except, apparently, playwright Itamar Moses, who has written a play about how much he hates his successful old band camp buddy Jonathan Safran Foer. Vanity Fair noticed that the two main characters in Moses's The Four of Us are quite a bit like Moses and Foer, as one is a mostly unknown playwright and the other is a ridiculously successful young novelist. There is some jealousy. Then Moses makes fun of Liev Schreiber!

Last week, British the Office star Ricky Gervais posted a video to his personal blog that both mocked his Office character and had fun at the expense of an entertainment column in the Lowell, Massachusetts Sun, paper for a town where Gervais was scouting locations for his new movie. Since then, the Sun columnist in question has replied to Gervais' video, seemingly in soft, celebrity-friendly tones, but also with some sentences that could be read as vaguely threatening: