Times editors can't stop lavishing praise on books linked to their corporate overlords — and one corporate overlord can't seem to keep her family members from enjoying the fruits of this self-dealing. Times board member Lynn Dolnick yet again has an immediate family member whose book is featured in her newspaper, and yet again there is no disclosure of the connection to the board or to publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who is Dolnick's cousin. And this time, the newspaper really went to town. A book by Dolnick's husband Edward about Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren got an early review ("engaging"), an "editor's choice" recommendation, a special plug on page A4, and a friendly write up on the Paper Cuts blog ("delightful book"). And the Times is not likely to be making any apologies for the situation, judging from its handling of Lynn Dolnick's last nepotism controversy.

Did you hear? The Reverend Jesse Jackson made reference recently to the testicles of Barack Obama. Only he called them "nuts." Nuts! A funny, elementary school word, isn't it? Totally harmless. But of course you'd have no idea what the hell Jackson said if you only read the Times piece on the story. Because the New York Times apparently won't print the word "nuts." Which is ridiculous. We understand that the Times, like most major publications, has a self-censorship policy that almost always forbids it from using genuine expletives (unless the president says them!), but to elide the harmless word "nuts" actually misleads the reader into thinking Jesse Jackson said something far filthier and more obscene. This is not the first example of the Times censoring such harmless bullshit, either. The most egregious examples, after the jump.

Left: The head-turning photo that appeared all over the world yesterday. Right, the original photo. The New York Times, which ran the altered version, explains how the photo spread "from the Web site of Sepah News, the media arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards," to "the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites." We lucked out by running other photos for variety. (Photo by Sepah News via AP)

Since the start of this decade, stock of the company that holds the New York Times has fallen by 72%. The latest tumble came yesterday, when an analyst for Lehman Brothers said the newspaper group was still more expensive than its peers and advised it to stop paying out so much to shareholders. Well that might at last shake up the stoic Sulzberger family, which controls the Times and depends on those dividend payouts. Times watchers have long speculated on the rivalry between hapless publisher Arthur 'Pinch' Sulzberger and his cousin, this man. If now's not the time for Michael Golden to make his bid to restore the family's fortunes, then when?

Though they clearly aren't experts at building security, executives at New York Times Corp. read their own paper often enough to understand that three examples of something marks a trend. So, after the third stunt scaling of the building since May, the company is having many of the climber-friendly ceramic tubes removed from the building's facade. How many? Even the Times' own reporters don't seem to know, though they're guessing maybe 8-10 feet worth, measuring from a canopy used by all three climbers.

Yet another climber has ascended the front of the Times building, and this one brought a banner. It's not clear what it's supposed to say — the Times' City Room blog appears to have the story to itself at this early hour and is saying only that the banner "referenced bin Laden," is white "with red fliers stuck to it" and was hung above the "T" of the "The" in the Times logo etched into Renzo Piano's ceramic tubes. Also, the guy is using his cell phone a lot and appears to be a professional, though he's only reached the 11th of 52 floors before holding between the ninth and tenth. The prior two climbers, you'll recall, made it all the way to the top on June 5 before being arrested. Cops are the scene with climbing cables and hard hats. (Photo by Hioko Masuike via Times) UPDATE:

Look, it's easy to make fun of Maureen Dowd. We do it all the time! Talk about nothing of substance, psychoanalyze pols, imply that male Democrats are effete and female politicians of all stripes are raging harridans, bash the Clintons, toss in some increasingly out of date pop cultural references, and stir with occasional tired Bush-mocking. What you shouldn't do is pretend Maureen wrote a column exposing the secret fact that all of Obama's donors are Muslims and Communists, or something. Which is what one enterprising Obama critic has done!

Attention wannabe celebrities of the blogosphere: Take a lesson from Violet Blue. Should you finally achieve your goal of getting your picture in the New York Times, be quick to dismiss the Gray Lady's staffers as annoying retards who Don't Get It and you just wish they'd leave you alone. Do this before the story runs. An amazing thing will happen: Those moronic hacks at the Times, with their newsroom ethics and their rhino-thick skins, will print and distribute your photo even after they've seen your putdowns. They don't do "unpublishing." Be sure to make them sorry for it.

Quick: Which one of these two boxes is an ad, and which is official Times Web content? Both ran in a column down the right side of an nytimes.com business news article, both have headlines in sans-serif font, both use the exact same link colors. It turns out the one with the big corporate logo (on the right) is actually the editorial content, while the one designed to look like a trustworthy Times table of contents is actually an ad, taking the reader to awful, faux-objective content like this. Congratulations, Times. I read a lot of fairly scuzzy media websites in the course of a day, and I've never been tricked quite this completely. Or as Ashton Kutcher likes to call it, "Link'd."

In response to a Times column about Fox News uglifying a picture of reporter Jacques Steinberg and viciously smearing Tim Arango and other journalists, the cable network's chief rageaholic, Bill O'Reilly, is pretending to be pissed at the Times for caricaturing him in the illustration for a 2007 book review. The caricature, he said during his Fox show last night, even included some kind of devil horn (clip after the jump). But O'Reilly's screaming on-air hatefest is the worst sort of act, because if you actually examine the illustration, reproduced after the jump, you notice two things.

From the Times today: "An article today in Sunday Business about missed opportunities to reduce America's dependence on imported oil refers to a 1990 effort by Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, to block higher mileage requirements for vehicles and notes that Mr. Helms did not return calls seeking comment. The section went to press on Thursday, before Mr. Helms’s death Friday morning."

Last week, Fox News aired nasty Photoshopped pictures of two Times journalists responsible for a story about Fox losing ground among younger viewers. But it sounds like the cable network may have done much worse to another Times reporter, Tim Arango, who wrote a similar article in March. In his column for tomorrow's paper, Times media columnist David Carr recounts tales of Fox's dirty-politics-style PR tactics against journalists from his paper, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press and others. One story, in particular, stands out:

A photo editor at the New York Times-forced to work on a public holiday-has decided to make mischief. From a gallery of pictures of the day on the newspaper's website, here's a revealing shot of dancers preparing for the start of the Independence Day parade in Washington, DC.

I've long wondered why the New York Times, perhaps the world's most sophisticated news-gathering operation, writes articles about fitness that would be an embarrassment to a fifth-grade PE class. Really now. Times readers were certainly grateful that the paper of record brought its unparalleled resources to bear to answer imponderables like "Does Weight Lifting Make A Better Athlete?", or "Should we stretch?" But perhaps such questions would better be left to, you know, the sense god gave a rock. I know the media wants us all fat and broke so we consume more media, but come on. Well, fuck it. I give up. Today they reveal that sweat cools you off:

Look what happens when journalists report about a ratings dip at Fox News: their photos become ghoulishly caricatured on Fox & Friends. According to the show's co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade, New York Times television editor Steven Reddicliffe, who just so happens to be a fired and disgruntled Fox employee, assigned reporter Jacques Steinberg to write a "hit piece" on how fewer viewers were tuning in to the fair and balanced news network. It was a form of aggression that would not stand, and so the nasty liberal "attack dogs" got their comeuppance by having their facial features distorted and exaggerated with the magic of Photoshop. As you can see above, Steinberg became a chain-smoking Dick Tracy villain, and Reddicliffe became Lionel Trilling.

Google will partner with "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane to create a new Google-distributed Web video series, the New York Times reports today. The Times story, already on the top of Techmeme, hails the deal as "innovative" and "a bold step into the distribution business," which is true — or at least was, when Valleywag and the rest of the Google-watching press reported the same news on August 17, 2007.

We were sent this tear-jerking tale of the going-away party for a New York Times employee who got the best gift ever. "The story: Merrill Perlman, the director of copy desks at The Times, who has 'chosen' to leave the paper (read: got pushed out) received a send-off today in the same spot where the Pulitzers were given out earlier this year. (This, after the farewell had originally been scheduled for the Page One conference room - never mind that the copy editors constitute the biggest staff in the New York office.)" Read on!

Oh, hey, people of The South! The New York Times might like to hire you as a stringer/researcher/ admin/journalistic sharecropper! But please remember: This is an elite newspaper for the elitist elites in fancy New York, so please no redneck type people. To help ensure you are not a hick, the Times has asked you to pre-pitch five stories NOT involving anything the Times has ever covered before (you do take the Times right? It's only $665 per year in trashy zip codes!), and also NOT about cliché things only of interest to the poors: "Please do not submit ideas concerning dog fights, cock fights, or the Confederate flag." Anyway, if you do get the job, you'll be rewarded with good pay and creative freedom. Ha ha, just kidding, you'll tackle "light administrative duties" and also "the pay is very modest," but at least you'll learn how to talk right, and the money will probably go a long way in your shantytown or whatever. Full job listing after the jump!

Times tv critic Alessandra Stanley gets a lot of shit around here for making mistakes. It's not just that she makes a lot of them (though she does, or did), it's that she makes obvious, egregious ones that seem to suggest that she doesn't actually watch tv. But she's gotten better about it! She says. She told Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici that she's "trying to avoid" corrections, which is apparently a change of pace for her. How's she doing? Pretty well! She hasn't had a correction since she got the date of the Iraq war wrong 103 days ago. Her longest streak since 2002! BUT!

Neatly encapsulating the prevailing foodie conventional wisdom, science-fearing New York Times contributor Michael Pollan has famously advised America to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." He also believes we should eat like our ignorant, backward ancestors ("Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food") instead of like modern human beings. But as regular Gawker readers know, heavily-processed, contemporary American fast food has preserved an inordinate number of its inventors and purveyors well past any reasonable life expectancy. This morning's Times brings word of the death of hamburger chain founder Wilber Hardee at the ripe old age of 89. Granted, he was felled by a heart attack. But he joins no fewer than four other fast food pioneers who have kicked the bucket over the past six months at extraordinarily advanced ages: