These last few months, Fox News anchor Shep Smith has been acting weird. Liberal weird. Now we're sure something's wrong, because good ol' Shep is talking up Hussein Obama, and talking down god:

It's only been one day, and already Muntader al-Zaidi, the Iraqi reporter who terrorized George W. Bush with high speed shoe projectiles, is already a full scale national hero. Viva los zapatos (in Arabic)!

Muntader al-Zaidi will probably never again do something as awesome as hurling his shoes at the US President during a press conference. But was it worth it, considering what came next?

Chicago Tribune editors sat on the Rod Blagojevich story starting in October. Publishing Dec. 5th seems to have only pissed off the Justice Department and wrecked what might have been a much bigger scoop.

Yes, People is a softball celebrity magazine. But editor Larry Hackett has been defending his publication as a deeply ethical, serious crown jewel in the Time Inc. empire, despite its obvious kowtowing to powerful subjects like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Who the hell is he kidding?

Here's one of the LA Times' suggestions for "D.I.Y. Gifts" this holiday season. Uh...crack? [LAT]

I'm not sure I understand what the fuss is in this wire story about gays protesting same-sex marriage bans. Doesn't this happen every day?

The Atlantic Monthly's re-branding evidently includes intern/slaves for, as our tipster fumes, "their [internship] position. AT LEAST 40 hrs a week unpaid!?? really? what kind of fucking student can do this?"

A critical Stalker sent us a secretly-snapped pic of Washington Post Watergate-breaking journalist Carl Bernstein, reading one of "his own damn books on a plane." It's A Woman in Charge: the Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The rumors appear to be true: Newsweek will amputate up to one million copies from its 2.6 million circulation, according to Wall Street Journal sources, and no fewer than 500,000. There will be an unknown number of layoffs, announced Thursday, to be achieved through voluntary buyouts like the 111 from last spring. But the biggest change at the 73-year-old magazine: It's going to become a whole lot more like Washington Post Co. sibling Slate, with contrarian, gimmicky or otherwise grabby headlines that wouldn't be out of place on Digg.

Open bars are de riguer at media parties, and they're just about the only fringe benefit of working in this godforsaken industry. But what happens when the parties themselves start to disappear, like what's happening this holiday season? NO MORE FREE BOOZE! Portfolio's Mixed Media reports that there is a new group called "ASSME: the American Society of Shitcanned Media Elites"—which I guess I should probably join—that will carry on the noble tradition of an open bar in season where everyone else is a god-damned Scrooge. If you're laid-off and broke, you can still keep on drinking—at least for one magical night.

Wiretap transcripts yesterday indicated that Tribune Company honcho Sam Zell might have subtly conveyed (wink-wink) that he might just have to restructure (wink wink) one or more bothersome Chicago Trib editorial writers out of their jobs in response to demands from Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who was delaying a deal to buy the Chicago Cubs from cash-strapped Zell. Insanely, it has emerged that the whole thing was Blago's evil wife's idea ("hold up that fucking Cubs shit. . . fuck them"), but also that it seems to have gone nowhere.

The Wall Street Journal's Thomas Frank, he of the book "What's the Matter with Kansas?," eviscerates in tomorrow's paper that infamous Times rich-people reporter Alex Kuczynski. Kuczynski, herself quite wealthy, published a mostly shameless account of renting a poorer woman's uterus in the Nov. 30 Times Magazine. Frank is unsparing:

From page 8 of this week's New Yorker: "EDITOR'S NOTE: On the Contributors page of the December 1st issue, the book "In Sickness and in Power," attributed to the New Yorker writer David Owen, was in fact written by a different David Owen." Even funnier? The "other David Owen" is, in fact, the former British Foreign Secretary one of the founders of their Social Democratic Party. And it's Lord Owen to you.

An alderman in Milwaukee, a town not famous for sobriety, compared the local Chuck E. Cheese to "something out of a Quentin Tarantino film... there is alcohol and pistols being brandished." In Brookfield, Wisconsin, the children's pizzeria-plus-creepy-robot-theater gets far more police activity than a nearby biker bar, including a 40-person riot earlier this year. One participant in a 10-person brawl in Toledo's Chuck E. Cheese actually detached a velvet rope and started swinging the brass end at people. Intrigued? Good, because the Wall Street Journal is dying to tell you why you should watch your back inside the animatronic dystopia.

A little late, no? The Pulitzer Prize, conventional journalism's most sought-after award, is opening its doors to Web publications, eleven years after Internet reporters first tried to submit their work.

A laid-off journalist has proposed a fancy idea that would have the twin benefits of re-employing a lot of unemployed journalists, and producing a quality historical record of our time that could reside in the halls of our nation's finest libraries forever. So needless to say it will never happen, because the public hates journalists, and is functionally illiterate. But that doesn't make it a bad idea, now that the liberal elite is in control of the public purse strings! So is it time to bring back the Federal Writers Project?

Just because we're in the midst of an apocalypse, people these days like to say, "Oh, the media is so negative. What about the good news?" Here's some good news: shut up. Times are bad, and if there's one thing the media loves, it's bad times, because bad times= lots of NEWS. Though the media does prefer bad times that don't involve media layoffs. Regardless, the important thing here is that bad news is not what you have to fear. Be scared when you start to see the good news. That's when you know the end is nigh.

We gratuitously mocked Times columnist Nick Kristof's Twitter feed last week. But the truth is that he's in good company. Lots of big-shot media people—including many Gawker "favorites"!—have Twitters, despite the fact that Twitter is proven to destroy journalism. We haven't been paying enough attention to their various tweets about this and that. After the jump, we condense the offering of five famous media twits into bite-sized packages:

Hey, one more ominous day in the increasingly ominous life of the New York Times Co. The fact that the Times Co. announced plans to mortgage or sell its fancy headquarters building on the same day that the Tribune Co. took a step towards bankruptcy is really bad karma. Check this out, people: The New York Times Co. will eventually go bankrupt if it does not make a drastic change. No amount of fanboy love for Frank Rich or outcry from the journalism establishment will change this fact. Who will step in with a plan to save the paper of record? We will, improbably!