Whether you ever noticed or not, the fact is that MTV has never accepted political ads. Sure, it's always been rife with promo spots of musicians screaming at you to Rock The Vote, but actual candidate ads were never allowed (although they were allowed at fellow MTV Networks stations Spike, Comedy Central, and VH1). But now it's time to put on your listening hats, young voters, because that's all changed! MTV has announced that it will accept political ads, which of course is part of their commitment to engage the youth in the democratic process, and not just a greedy attempt to get their claws on lots of Barack Obama's sweet, sweet money:

Sources are telling us this afternoon that the executives at MTV have decided against returning to Las Vegas, the scene of the 2007 Video Music Awards, for the 2008 incarnation of the show. Instead, this year's VMAs will be broadcast live on September 7 from the Paramount Pictures Studio in Los Angeles. While one source told Defamer that it was a case of "been there, done that", a separate source told us that the "very chaotic" proceedings last year had something to do with the decision not to return to The Palms Hotel in Vegas (where, you'll recall, a clearly out-of-shape Britney Spears nearly killed her career with a zombified rendition of "Gimme More").

That was fast: In March a casting call went out for socialite Tinsley Mortimer's reality show, and apparently MTV has already shot — and rejected as too boring — Mortimer's show. According to Page Six, the cable network's producers, who by this point are surely experts in whipping up drama from the barest of reality TV ingredients, couldn't make anything of the footage: "She looked good but she just got dressed and went to parties every day and didn't have anything interesting to say," a tipster told the Post. Uh, right, because reality television is all about stimulating conversation, and Mortimer was hired for her intellect. Translation: She didn't get into any brawls, do enough drugs, say anything racist or have a sufficiently interesting sex life. The show getting cancelled is a no-lose situation for Mortimer. She either takes it happily in stride or has gigantic breakdown that brings back the reality TV crews and launches her into broader starletdom. [Post]

MTV has decided to try the novel strategy of actually running some music videos on their network, something that hasn't been seen there since the inception of The Real World. But they've added an annoying, faux-modern twist in their new show FNMTV (ha): not only will they show music videos, they'll provide a place for homemade insta-response videos made by you, the viewer. Sound asinine? Oh, it is. But everybody has something to say and deserves to say it momentarily on MTV. And it has great interactive appeal, especially if you're interested in talking burritos, dimly lit karaoke clips, and an earnest analysis of the Pussycat Dolls by some dude with a beard:

Watching Dave Letterman sucker-punch Hills axis of vapidity Spencer Pratt on The Late Show Friday night brought up one major question for us: why has it taken this long for a talking head to publicly shame the guylighted villain? Shilling, we presume, merely for the gruesome brand that is Spencer and Heidi, the numb and pathological Pratt answered a few very pointed questions regarding the MTV show's obvious scripted nature and what exactly Bromance nobody Brody Jenner does for a living. At that point, Letterman finally pulled out the big guns after Spencer boastfully claimed he "won't go to a club for less than $100,000." Dave's shock, insulting-yet-gentle series of guffaws and his no-beat-missed announcement that he wants Spencer off his set immediately sum up an interview too good to be true. See for yourself after the jump.

Eater LA stumbled upon something as rare and precious as an Italian Deericorn recently, when a crew from MTV's The Hills wandered into a local restaurant they happened to be patronizing, followed moments later by that show's stars, Audrina Patridge and Justin Bobby. Turns out they were there to shoot a crucial dinner sequence between the two in which the topic of Korean BBQ was merely the pretext for a much deeper conversation regarding the speed that they, like, wanted to take their relationship. Plenty of photos were snapped revealing all the behind-the-scenes activity that goes into capturing just one moment of enhanced reality—more so than you ever might have realized, for moments after the crew zipped off to the next location, a dozen teamsters arrived to dismantle the entire restaurant and pack it into a truck idling outside.

Ad money is flying onto the Web. While it hasn't hurt cable TV yet — that business is still seeing a migration of ad dollars from the broadcast networks — Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Cablevison, Charter and Brighthouse Networks are worried it could. So together, they've created Canoe Ventures, and hired ad-agency veteran David Verklin as CEO. His mission: Convince cable programmers like Walt Disney's ESPN or Viacom's MTV to adopt advertising technology that will automatically place cable commercials, like Internet ads are targeted today.

There's no use denying that we have had more than a passing interest in reality dating shows for just about as long as we can remember. From watching to Roger Lodge wink his way through Blind Date to finding ourselves hooked into all of the Flavor of Love franchises to our guiltiest moment where we watched a marathon of Shipmates, we had thought we'd seen it all from the genre. But today’s news that King of Television Ryan Seacrest has enlisted Hills boy toy/master nobody Brody Jenner to star in Bromance has officially ruined our ever-weakening belief in these shows doing anything other than harm to our souls. The premise, the challenges, and the overall stench of this upcoming MTV series sounds like, quite possibly, the worst idea in the history of ideas:

Of all the Hills characters deserving a spin-off series, MTV is allegedly going with the single most boring, vapid, expressionless cast member whom we suspect is the sole character not popping Adderall offered up by producers between takes. Just think what a Methanie Does Manhattan show might bring, with her Tatum O’Neal-esque late-night trips to Harlem. Or Spencer Does Santa Cruz, where MTV could allow viewers to watch his eyes quite literally pop out of his enormous head upon entering the glorious land of non-working, tree-gazing beach hippies.

We've already admitted that the Real World series lost us more than a few years ago. We grew especially despondent after that Las Vegas: Reunion idea, and hardly noticed when the current Hollywood-set season began. Then one recent Lazy Sunday, we found ourselves flipping through the channels and spotting a young man named Greg. You see, Greg is Puck, Irene, Trisha and Coral all meshed into one handsome package. He steals panties. He cries in the confessional. He's violent. He doesn't clean up. His heart breaks. He punches walls. And last night, the producers decided to eject Greg from the current pack, claiming he hadn't been putting enough effort into his "job." But after taking a look back at the long list of past Real World ejections, we're dumbfounded as to why MTV has made a habit of kicking off some of the most charismatic, entertaining and (warning: cliché lies ahead) "real" people on the show. A clip of the brutal send-off from last night, plus a recap of the top three most erroneous ejections pre-Greg after the jump.

The question that has kept an anxious nation on tenterhooks for the last two days—"Did stoner movie star Seth Rogen light up a real spliff on stage at the MTV Movie Awards last weekend?"—has finally been resolved. According to the AP, the stunt was a big fake; but they also say that Rogen and Pineapple Express costar James Franco weren't supposed to do it at all! Is anyone here telling the truth? Such a web of deception!

What would happen if Hollywood’s most boy-crazy, sex-obsessed serial dater hooked up with Hollywood’s most lady-loving, satin-sheet-sex-obsessed player of all players? Well, for one thing we’d write about it. For another thing, the couple in question would most likely spend a sample evening locked in a private New York bar’s room, lorded over by a bodyguard just because they were so frisky they needed 20 minutes to themselves...that very second. Something else they might do? At a private concert thrown by Prince at his infamous party palace, they might escape immediately after feeding each other that always seductive aphrodisiac, bread pudding, into the “labyrinthe corridors leading to [Prince’s] basement” and do, well, what these two stars in question apparently do best: the dirty. Join us after the jump to put some faces to these places:

MTV announced Wednesday that this weekend's Movie Awards show would recognize Adam Sandler as its Generation Award winner, apparently the highest accolade an actor can receive at the annual festivities. Don't call it synergy, though; such shameless dovetailing is the last thing on the network's mind, with Sandler's market-cornering man-child apparently towering over the imminent opening of You Don't Mess With the Zohan five days later:

The Times deployed its investigative resources to dig into the very important rumors that Real World: Brooklyn would be shot downtown rather than in, say, Williamsburg or Park Slope, and nudged the story a bit closer to confirmation. The owner of the downtown BellTel lofts seconded show producer MTV's earlier confirmation of negotiations, and this time there was no mention of other, white borough neighborhoods as alternatives to downtown. PR genius Ronn [sic] Torossian, who represents the developer of BellTel, tried to spin MTV's interest as a big validation for the neighborhood. But then the Times went talking to some of the locals, and they started asking why the cable network wants its fresh young stars getting mugged and so forth:

Apparently it's 1987, because MTV feels it is very important to educate everyone about how you can't tell from looking at someone whether he or she has HIV. Oh, but it can't be 1987, because only in the 20 years since then have we developed the technology necessary for the Viacom music channel to create a cringey viral (literally!) website designed to communicate this message. Guess whether people have HIV, find out how they got infected, and when they found out! Decide everyone in the world looks HIV positive! Feel guilty if you notice something funny! Hours of awkward edutainment await. [Times, PosOrNot.com]

We thought we knew just how low The Hills' reigning king and queen of mean Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag would go just to garner the slightest bit of attention from the press. Given their history of stunt proposals, staged “paparazzi” shoots, and plastic surgery adventures, the evil duo has proven their weight in gold-digging PR wizardry. But their latest alleged stunt planned for the “reality show”’s upcoming season is creepy enough to inspire the next Law & Order: SVU plotline: "Rumor has it that Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt have decided to fake a pregnancy for the 4th season." Sadder still? It sounds like they’ve convinced MTV producers — and the wardrobe department — to play along with the lie as old as time...

Last night, we tearfully watched as the third season of that Adderall-fueled pity party known as The Hills came to a wisdom-filled conclusion. So what did we learn last night? Aside from newly cropped and suddenly hot Justin Bobby teaching Audrina (and us) that living alone means you can “come home and cook something,” and shockingly, “have people over,” Methanie Pratt managed to summarize the entire season’s course on Lives Of The Blonde And Vapid by telling villainous Spencer that one should always “think really hard before you do anything.” Below we bring you three tidbits to carry with you forever, involving drinking on the job, dieting leessons, and when the appropriate time to “shush” someone is:

Oh good Christ. The next season of The Real World, MTV's drunken, disease-riddled dinosaur of a reality series, (the 21st!) will be set in Brooklyn. The current season, which threw a bunch of damaged wannabe stars into a "green" sound studio in Hollywood, is getting annoyingly high ratings. So, the network has decided to sally forth with yet another installment, apparently continuing the smaller-part of an already done city trend, and will dump a bunch of yokels and rubes in our trendiest and irritatingest borough. Now, we don't know for sure which little enclave of Brooklyn the producers are thinking about, but we assume it's somewhere real and gritty, like off the Bedford L! Yes, it seems fairly inevitable that our broken Zelda Fitzgeralds will be plopped into some gorgeous crash pad in hipster Disneyland Williamsburg, but we have a better idea! Why, not the notorious Bushwick McKibbin dorms??

OMG! The final episode-for now!-of MTV's semi-reality trainwreck The Hills is almost here and who can wait? I have no idea what's going on, but Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt sure do look shouty and angry! Watch it here. [via OhNoTheyDidn't]

MTV Networks is having its upfronts today, where it pitches its new season to advertisers. The network is also trying to sell sponsors on its "podbusting" techniques—i.e., making commercials that are like mini-shows in themselves. The theory, of course, is that making ads more like regular programs will defeat the almighty Tivo, with content so compelling that you cannot help but watch, slack-jawed, as the hypnotic 60-second Mountain Dew Bourne Ultimatum spinoff flickers before your eyes. They're so entertaining! Way better than boring old regular commercials. In one sense, this is corporate America trying to give us what we want. But do we really want better ads?