Hooray for Judith Miller! After years in the wilderness, she's finally come home. The former star New York Times national security correspondent is heading to Fox News as an on-air analyst and general sad embarrassment. Miller became famous when she went to jail in a grandstanding stunt because she refused to admit that her secret source was Scooter Libby even though Libby had signed a waiver authorizing her to testify about their conversations and then there was some poetry exchanged and eventually she quit the Times in disgrace and they wrote a caged Editors Note about how she lied, incessantly, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, which was sold to Americans using bullshit planted in her articles by people from the office of the Vice President and then cited by Vice President Cheney. In other words, no one likes her. So now she's going to be on Fox in their new glorious Democrats-are-in-charge-again rebirth as the loyal opposition to the terrorists who will run the country in 2009. They are sooo lucky to have her! Since she left the Times she's been with the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think thank, because she's given up entirely on getting anyone to like her or take her seriously anymore. Also she endorsed Barack Obama because why not? She probably believes in abortion and socialism and progressive taxation just as much as she believed that Iraq was a dangerous threat based on the most specious and misleading of evidence. For a while all the "serious" media liberals had to acknowledge that Bush was more "serious" about National Security than those peacenik hippie Nation-reading commies, remember? No, no one remembers, or cares, whatever. Miller is of course either delusional or just doesn't give a shit:

The New York Times had its resident medical doctor reporter examine all the available medical records of all the candidates for president and vice president. The only problem is that none of the campaigns would turn over any records! But, you know, Barack Obama seems healthy enough, besides the smoking. And Sarah Palin didn't release any records at all, not even about her crazy "giving birth en route from Texas to Alaska" thing, but they only devote like one paragraph to that. Because the point of the story is to let you know that John McCain is an old, sick man. He has all the cancers, everywhere, all over his face. Breaking! Ok, sure, McCain's doctors say he's pretty much recovered from his skin cancer, and the chance of it recurring during his first term, say, is like 10%. But they are maybe not letting us know how serious the last bout of melanoma was!

"Blame Duncan Riley," opens a Fortune report on this week's awesome saga in which an ex-TechCrunch employee unwittingly manipulated Apple's stock price. But it's not over until we bury the bodies. Here's the 100-word recap:Duncan Riley, former TechCrunch blogger, claimed last week to have insider info from a tipster who had seen new Apple price sheets. Laptops started at $800 instead of $1,099, said the tipster. Analysts - if you believe them - think a sub-$1,000 MacBook would be a big change for Apple. Riley's rumor bubbled up from his own site to VentureBeat to the New York Times' new online Technology page, where news from VentureBeat and other tech sites is merged onscreen with the Times' original reporting. Some readers who didn't bother to unpack their trust issues took the headline (note the grammar error: "a $800 MacBook") as Times-grade truth. I don't blame them. The NYT accurately broke the story on Apple's $499 Mac a day before Steve Jobs unveiled it. The only thing I remember from newswriting class is that journalists are telling stories, even when they think they're reporting the truth. Riley told a good story, peppered with enough details to make it plausible. Web surfers crazy for stock market guidance swallowed the tale without stopping to chew. Now that we all know there's no $800 laptop, journalists will pat themselves on the back about some important lesson they've learned. I'll do it myself, right after I stop by Daring Fireball to watch Duncan Riley's ritual spanking.

The veteran New York Times TV-industry reporter has to contend with the newspaper's boy wonder, Brian Stelter. Anecdotes?

The New York Times today runs five—five!—pieces on how many voters have somehow deduced that presidential candidate Barack Obama is a black man. Adam Nagourney reports that Hillary Clinton advisor Harold Ickes (he's also, it should be noted, a former Jesse Jackson aide) "routinely shaved off a point or two" from Obama's poll numbers to account for secret racistness. You can tell he was doing this during the primaries, right? Harold, people who won't vote for Obama because he's black aren't lying to pollsters. Because they sure as hell weren't lying to the Times reporters who went into the field to report on race.

The Observer assembled a story headlined "Twilight Of The Media Idols," keyed to a woe-is-big-media panel discussion at the Time Warner Center. Trouble is, many "media idols" seemed to be basking in a sunny glow: Time Warner Chairman Dick Parsons and Comedy Central host Lewis Black were bounding around with their entourages, Richard Stengel of Time proclaimed a "golden age" for "quality content" and the likes of Candy Crowley (CNN) and even Hillary Clinton strategist Mark Penn were inundated with j-school groupies. But the Observer's men did find the perfect foil amid the moguls: Sad former Times editor Howell Raines, who couldn't even get anyone to look at him. Apparently his Portfolio column hasn't given him any media cred. The scene:

Marc Santora, the New York Times reporter who appears in ads for Dell's DigitalNomads site, says he received no compensation for the ad, which came from an interview Santora did for Big Think, a website backed by Facebook investor Peter Thiel. What appears to have happened: Dell or its ad agency, Federated Media, created the ad for Dell's DigitalNomads, using a clip from Santora's Big Think video. In a comment, Big Think cofounder Peter Hopkins says that Dell is a sponsor of his site, but the ad does not mention Big Think. (The Big Think interview was also published to YouTube, and DigitalNomads' producers embedded the clip in a blog post.) From what Santora's saying, no one asked him or the Times for permission to run the endorsement. If so, Dell could be in rather big trouble — and not just with the Times.FTC rules forbid deceptive advertising — such as an ad from Dell which suggests a New York Times reporter has endorsed its vision of mobile technology, when he hasn't. The agency also has strict rules governing endorsements, not all of which seem to have been followed here. Bottom line: Santora seems to be the victim of a sleazy new Internet-enabled advertising tactic. He does offer this amusing side note: The one time he wrote about Dell was when the computer maker's "Dude, You're Getting a Dell" spokesman was arrested on pot charges. Here's his note to us:

Why is Marc Santora, a respected war correspondent for the New York Times, appearing in ads chattering about mobile technology? Click on the ad, running on sites like VentureBeat, and you're taken to a site, DigitalNomads, which appears to be a collection of blog-filler pablum about the wonders of the wireless Internet. Buried at the bottom is a tiny disclaimer: "Powered by Dell." Dig under the ad-placement code, and you'll see that the ad is sold by Federated Media, John Battelle's online-ad network. Battelle's outfit grew infamous last summer for getting some of the bloggers for whom he sells ads to recite a sponsor's slogan. That last time, it was Microsoft.At no point does Santora mention Dell's name. But his underlying message, that new technological gear helps us all do our jobs better, certainly serves Dell's purposes. I would have thought that the strict Times ethics code would forbid such an endorsement, paid or otherwise. Why bloody the reputation of someone who's taking a bullet to get stories for the newspaper? I've asked the Times what's going on, but haven't heard back yet. Update: Marc Santora has written in to let us know he had no involvement, financial or otherwise, with the ad — which just adds to the headscratching.

It should not be such a surprise that the New York Times is planning unprecedentedly brutal cuts to its editorial staff for 2009. After all, the newspaper has the most heavily-staffed newsroom in the country, with some 1,200 employees. Advertising revenues have declined at double-digit rates. And—after the recent economic swoon—the business won't be rebounding any time soon. But here's the funny thing about the rumor we're hearing:

Newspapers have always been selfish when it comes to giving credit to anybody else for anything. Good reporters are always conscientious about noting when someone else broke a story, but as a rule of thumb, the more self-important a news outlet is, the less likely they are to credit a competitor (or anyone else) for a scoop. But everything has changed now! Thanks to the internet and how it is beating the shit out of newspapers. Are you ready for a revolution in how you consume your news? Click through for a glimpse of the future of information! Newspapers—the forward-thinking beacons of journalism—have invented something totally new. Imagine this: you read the New York Times' website, and, abracadabra, you see a "link." This "link" sends you to a site that is not owned by the New York Times, where you can read information on a certain topic. NBC and the Washington Post are about to start doing it too! This could be big!

Congratulations to Paul Krugman, Princeton Economist, for his Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences! The international trade expert learned he'd been honored this morning, greeting the news with only mild surprise. "To be absolutely, totally honest I thought this day might come someday, but I was absolutely convinced it wasn't going to be this day," Krugman told the New York Times, where he's been an Op-Ed columnist for years. And the prize committee claims they honored Krugman for "having shown the effects of economies of scale on trade patterns and on the location of economic activity," but we layman can all assume that Krugman won the prize for his column's years of Bush-bashing. Just like when Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace prize in 2002! Carter won supposedly for working "to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development" but everyone knew it was just because the international community hates George W. Bush and former president Carter can't stop complaining about Bush. Of course, Krugman still thinks he won this prize for his "economics," but he knows full well that the recognition won't silence the people who read his writings just to call him a communist or whatever:

"American economist Paul Krugman won the 2008 Nobel prize for economics for bringing together analysis of trade patterns and where economic activity takes place, the prize committee said on Monday." [Reuters via Fishbowl]

Andy Martin is the habitual politician and "researcher" who created the original smear of Barack Obama as a secret Muslim in a 2004 press release, begetting a mutating series of email forwards still coursing through the internet. Last week, he was featured in a Fox News special that, in the words of the Times, "allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government." But, hey, Martin isn't just worried about Obama and Islam, he's also deathly afraid of the Jews! The Times' Jim Ruttenberg dug into Martin's anti-Semitisim in this morning's paper after Martin tried to deny and brush off the issue last week:

So the New York Times has a great story on Barack Obama's shady illegal fundraising. Because the system is utterly broken and Obama is taking advantage of that fact to win this election. His unprecedented fundraising is democracy at its worst! Of course millions in donations from thousands of random people is not so bad, and McCain's taking advantage of the GOP bundling system that Bush developed which is really just a laundering service. Still, hey, lots of people are donating way more than is legal to Obama's campaign and that campaign is maybe not being as vigilant about checking up on this as they should be. Though honestly this story is primarily an excuse to print the funny fake names and occupations of these mysterious illegal donors:

♦ Sean Hannity has signed a new "multi-year" deal with Fox News. [THR]
♦ Cutbacks at the Wall Street Journal: Reporters will only get one laptop now, not two. [Gawker]
♦ Ratings for Meet the Press have dropped since Tim Russert's passing. [NYP]
♦ The New York Times is shutting down the website for the International Herald Tribune. [E&P]
♦ People is rushing to market a 96-page, soft-cover book commemorating Paul Newman. [Folio]
♦ Dan Rather is seeking to expand his suit against CBS. And he's "only" making $1.5 million a year at HDNet, in case you were wondering. [Bloomberg]
♦ Dreamworks is downsizing. [Nikki Finke]
♦ The Natalee Holloway made-for-TV movie is on the way. To Lifetime, naturally. [NYP]
♦ Ryan Seacrest's radio show is coming to New York. And some people wonder why radio is dying. [NYP]

You have to give credit to the people who have the unenviable job of selling enough online ads to keep the New York Times afloat. At least they're brainstorming! Already this year they've experimented with creative strategies like selling the entire top of the homepage to Apple. And today, we see, they've come up with yet another space that can be "sponsored": The archives! The CBS show Eleventh Hour has a "sponsored archive" of free NYT stories about cloning humans and stuff, which presumably is a topic related to Eleventh Hour. It might grate on traditionalists, but we can't hate on things like this too much. Better to sell new online ads than, say, start plastering the front page of the print edition with ads. Besides, Thomas Friedman's mustache wax ain't free.

♦ David Letterman is in talks with John McCain about rescheduling his appearance on the late night show. [NYP]
♦ Sarah Palin will make two appearances on Fox News this week. [Politico]
♦ If your copy of the Times looks a little bit different today, that's because the paper has been busy shuffling around its various sections. [E&P]
♦ The LA Times may lay off as many as 75 staffers this week. [Variety]
♦ How big banks are handing their ad campaigns during this turbulent time. [NYT]
♦ CBS has had a solid start to the fall season. NBC has not. [AdAge, THR]
♦ Anne Hathaway has signed on to appear in Alice in Wonderland, which Tim Burton is directing. [THR]
♦ Why is Jim Cramer employed? That's what we'd like to know. [Romenesko]

So. The McCain campaign oddly decided to run against the media this year. It's not that odd, because Republicans have been doing it quite successfully since 1968, but this is the first year they've had a candidate who started off beloved by the media. And they just sorta pissed that away. Then in running against the media, they pissed off the media, and suddenly John McCain can't get any favorable coverage anywhere, and then they push back againt the media even more, and then Times executive editor Bill Keller says: “My first tendency when they do that is to find the toughest McCain story we’ve got and put it on the front page, just to show them that they can’t get away with it.” Sorta giving the game away! So that explains the gambling story. But those terrible old standards of make-believe "fairness" are what then led the Times to enable the insane and vicious tone the campaign suddenly took this week. The Times put that gambling story on the front page even though there didn't seem to be that much to it. Now Keller admits, basically, that they did it because the McCain campaign was bothering them. So, obviously, then they had to be fair and put some sort of theoretically damaging Obama story on the front page a week later! And they did, with Obama and ’60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths, the story of how goofy '60s Weatherman Bill Ayers cleaned up and went legit and eventually served on a non-profit board with Barack Obama, which means Obama is a terrorist. Like, seriously, this is what they concluded:

The company that funded Netscape, Google and Genentech is now focusing on electric cars, solar power and biofuels. New York Times contributor Jon Gertner has been meeting with Kleiner partners since last year. His 8,000-word feature in Sunday's paper goes deep on details of a few KPCB investments such as Ausra. But it spends a lot of time framing the story for non-techies outside the Valley. Here's the Sand Hill Road edit:

"Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times, had two breakfasts with the mayor, and although no specific commitments were made [about endorsing Bloomberg's third term], an understanding was reached." [Times]