"A One-Eyed Invader in the Bedroom" is not about what you hope it's about. [NYT]

At this point, New York Times star television critic Alessandra Stanley has all the credibility of a Wikipedia entry. Most of the information is probably right, but you shouldn't take anything as gospel because you never know what's real and what's just been invented by a bored 13 year-old in Iowa. Alessandra Stanley Correction Watch has gone from an evergreen subject to an old joke. Geraldo had to threaten to sue the Times to get them to correct something Stanley invented out of thin air. As a service to the human resources department at the New York Times, after the jump, we present the best (worst?) Alessandra Stanley mistakes since the last time we rounded them all up.

Professionally inaccurate Times TV critic Alessandra Stanely may have topped herself this morning, when she added a year to the war in Iraq. Stanley, you see, wanted to tell everyone about how the big broadcast networks have dumbed down their programming, to the point where they ignored the Tuesday presidential primaries in Texas and instead showed cheesy reality shows like "The Biggest Loser" and "Big Brother." This was stupid, Stanley said, because election news can get big ratings, as evidenced by last week's Democratic debate, which managed to attract a bigger audience that America's invasion of Iraq, six years ago:

The Times just posted a fascinating follow-up article on the saga of fake memoirist Magaret Seltzer, the well-off white lady who pretended to be a half-Native American gangbanger raised by a foster parent in the ghetto. In it, we learn that none of the editors or publishers involved in the publication of Seltzer's book or subsequent articles about it feels particularly badly about not detecting Seltzer's lies, because the author lied like a crazy person, enlisted a couple of fake foster siblings and it's not like anyone saw this coming. "The one thing we wish," Riverhead Books publisher Geoffrey Kloske told the Times, "is that the author had told us the truth." Kloske's people, along with the Times itself, were suspicious enough that they did some fact checking, but couldn't manage more than the sad and weak sort of fact checking sadly lacking in primary sources. Here, for example, is how Penguin Group editor Sarah McGrath plumbed the depths of Seltzer's background, or, uh, didn't:

Reliably obtuse New York Times writer, Cathy Horyn, has surpassed herself this time. Here's the latest lede from the fashion critic: "If fashion strikes people as a separate language, if not a funny Xanadu, it's hardly surprising. The last days of the fall ready-to-wear season were loud and lugubrious, with designers talking in volumes." Translation, anyone?

"Power lawyer" Bob Bennett (not to be confused with his gambling-addict moralizing Conservative pundit brother Bill, as we sometimes do) uses his memoir to pretend to be a half-Indian South-Central Blood who—no, sorry, he just uses it to trash New York Times editor Arthur Sulzberger, for not helping Bennett's defense of former Times star Judith Miller when she was under indictment for refusing to name which member of the Bush administration leaked CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to the journo. You see, Pinch Sulzberger planned a big party for Judy the night she got out of jail! But Judy had to testify the next day, and attending a fancy party would perhaps be considered bad form. A short time later, Pinch and Bill Keller cut Judy loose (a couple years too late to save face for the paper). If that's the worst the anti-Pinch dirt gets, you are advised to skip the book. [NYDN]

Margaret Seltzer, the pretend gang member who wrote a fake memoir about her made-up life, is one more liar who is simultaneously ruining the memoir genre and making it more popular than ever. Sarah McGrath, daughter of New York Times writer-at-large Charles, is also taking the fall as Seltzer's bamboozled editor. While hating on nepotism is more fun than a Hot Chip dance party, easy attacks on the McGrath family are pointless. Like anyone else, Sarah McGrath's connections have no doubt helped her, but no one bases a publishing career on a name alone. This scandal could have happened to any editor responding to the memoir craze, not just one with dad Chip at the Times and brother Ben at the New Yorker. After all, the McGrath family slogan is "Salvation by Faith," not "Salvation by Networking."

With layoffs, cutbacks and buyouts everywhere else, the New Yorker is probably the only magazine around that's actually hiring. Kelefa Sanneh and Ariel Levy are joining the magazine, making them respectively the second black guy and first out lesbian on staff. The two are expected to report, presumably on cultural trends. And with these hires, the New Yorker is taking an aggressive step to up their cool quotient.

Before being exposed as a fabrication, Margaret Seltzer's memoir "Love and Consequences" received quite a bit of flattering notice in the Times. Michiko Kakutani wrote a glowing review praising, among other things, Seltzer's "amazing job" at recreating the South Central neighborhood where it turned out she had never lived. Seltzer was also the subject, improbably, of a friendly "Home & Garden" section profile, which consisted mainly of Seltzer telling fabricated stories about her life and lounging around "a four-bedroom 1940s bungalow" whose interior is described in the profile in random asides — a "soft black vinyl chair" here, a "small art table" there. All the more interesting, then, that Seltzer's book was shepherded into print over the course of three years by Penguin Group editor Sarah McGrath, whose father is an active writer for the Times and was, for eight years starting in 1995, the editor of the New York Times Book Review.

That patchouli-wearing hippie who likes to set houses on fire? He's just a misunderstood "anti-sprawl activist" to the Times. Here's how the paper started a blog post about a string of arsons near Seattle:

Does Us Weekly even have a London bureau? No matter, because even without one, the magazine had the scoop on Prince Harry's deployment to Afghanistan and acknowledged that they were part of the embargo. The New York Times, which actually has several reporters in Afghanistan, didn't even know that Prince Harry's whereabouts were clandestine. It's a shame, too. As the wiretapping story proved, the paper is so good at keeping government secrets. [Us Weekly, NYT via Doree Chronicles]

Wall Street Journal, ever the business paper, is making good on that by demanding royalties from books their reporters write based on research they originally did for the paper. The staff find the policy "ridiculous." But even if print is dying, book publishing is relatively viable. Journalists can make a lot more from a best-selling book than from reporting on metro education stories. So it's hardly ridiculous for newspaper to want a piece of it. Consider the success of New York Times trend story heartthrob Warren St. John.

The New York Times writer who blew up "rockism" from an industry term to a mainstream idea has left the paper. According to Radar, Kelefa Sanneh has already gotten a job at the New Yorker, home of the best living music journalist Sasha Frere-Jones. I can only hope Sanneh gets to write a too-witty-for-the-New-Yorker blog like Frere-Jones's. [Photo from Zoilus]

The New York Times is forever trying to identify and co-opt (bogus) cultural trends, from metrosexuals to bed bugs to Argentinian cocaine. And now, oddly and odiously placed in the Sunday Styles section, they discuss "Drunkorexia," a combination of eating disorders and problem drinking. But don't worry, they don't jump on this one too salaciously. They go to great lengths to provide context and perspective: "Drunkorexia is not an official medical term." Ohhh, thanks Times! [NYT]

No matter what borough you live in, how much you pay in rent or who your neighbors are, being a writer still sucks. Nouns and verbs are hard to come up with. Even Brooklyn, with all its just-as-good-as-Manhattan verve, can't change that for you. If anything, as Colson Whitehead, author of the revered Apex Hides the Hurt, reports in the Sunday Book Review, it's harder. All the shrinks are still in Manhattan and reading friends' unpublished books is boring. And even a dip in the Gowanus Canal can't cure writers block. Of course, Brooklyn writers hating the Brooklyn writers' scene is a trend as old as metrosexuals.

Harbinger Capital, the investment firm that is trying to BUY THE NEW YORK TIMES, has formally proposed adding four directors of their choosing to the paper's board. The Times is all "no thanks we have plenty of directors guys!" but Harbinger will probably point out to the SEC that they own 19% of the damn company, just as much as the Sulzbergers. One of Harbinger's candidates, NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway, founded online retailer RedEnvelope, shares of which recently "sank to an all-time low." [AP, Earlier]

There is a charming story that Malcolm Gladwell has told over and over again about how he used to try to sneak funny phrases into the newspaper he worked for, back when he was a journalist and not yet a personality. Turns out everyone's done it! Michael Scherer, currently with Time, explains that when he was working at an unnamed newspaper bureau in Easthampton, Mass, he and his "colleague" would try to sneak "obscure 10-dollar word[s]" into their copy. The best he ever did was "dun." But the dude who wrote noted Scrabble champion William F. Buckley's obit for the Times got his Roget's on and used "Sesquipedalian" in an A1 headline. Jesus, journalists need hobbies. What happened to drinking and fucking again? [Swampland]

The first victim, or victor, of the New York Times buyouts is Pulitzer Prize winning legal journalist Linda Greenhouse. Greenhouse, whose overhyped news stories on the Supreme Court blockbuster summer rulings made her the Michael Bay of reporting, says she would have retired in a few years anyway. And at 61, she can already qualify for some senior citizen's discounts. But the departure comes less than two months after a public editor column parsed her marriage with preeminent military lawyer, Eugene Fidell.

COMPARED with an array of beverages, sports drinks are "wildly skewed to non-bloggers," said David Lockwood, a director of research at Mintel International, a market research group. Part of the reason, he said, is that bloggers tend to avoid the lack of mind- or personality-altering affects.

Weirdish Times "families use computers now" beat reporter Michelle Slatalla tells us how to passively network online: "On the internet, no one can tell you're self-conscious." She's one of the few "relucant self-promoters" left in this world, and the internet is actually a great place to network without talking to anyone. (Good! We hates talking to people.) The key to this, apparently, is using networking site LinkedIn, updating it, and then people might email you about introducing them to your first-tier contacts and such. She had a little trouble with Google, though: "My [LinkedIn] profile still appeared lower on Google's results than an item from the gossip site Gawker, which described me as a "super creepy adult." Well, if she didn't do things like try to friend her own daughter on Facebook, we wouldn't have to! We Googled her and LOL'd. Click for the screenshot.