In your confuseday Tuesday Wednesday media column: Newspapers crumble, Clear Channel layoffs, total confusion in Wisconsin, and the NY Sun is just messing around:

Former New Yorker editor and Princess Di grave-dancer Tina Brown has been working on a big new internet venture over at Barry Diller's IAC building for a few months now. So how's it coming along on the recruitment front? Well, she'll have the cruise ship beat covered, at least. We hear that Nicholas Wapshott, currently a columnist with the NY Sun, has been telling people at parties that he's going to join Brown's startup. Wapshott's claim to fame: when he came to America in September of 2001, he decided to sail over in style on the gaudy QE2-causing him to completely miss the 9/11 disaster, which had to be handled by a junior reporter he was supposed to be managing. Heh.

New York Sun columnist and bizarre racial thinker John McWhorter takes a wistful look back today at God and Man at Yale, crypto-fascist William F. Buckley's seminal work on how to be an uptight Ivy League conservative. Why today? Well, there's never a bad time to speak out against the outrageous marginalization of capitalism and Christianity on college campuses, in McWhorter's view, and besides, he had a column due. He thoughtfully and eloquently fellates Buckley's 1951 plea for sticks (of morality) to be inserted in asses (of Christianity) throughout our nation's top schools. And you know—not to be immodest—McWhorter can't help but see a little bit of Buckley's controversial genius in himself:

The New York Sun, the little neocon paper we glance at so you don't have to, has a provocative question: what if Absolut, instead of making ads about Mexico taking over America, made an ad about TIBET? It's as if Matt Sanchez has surreptitiously landed a job on the Sun's editorial board, a scenario which is quite possible. The paper's reasoning, as it were, goes something like this: Tibet is tiny. But the IDEA of Tibet, under the "ice of Communism," is "a vast land extending deep into what is claimed by the Chinese communist party." Also, Tibet has been in the news lately with the Olympic torch protests, and so has Absolut. Makes perfect sense!

From an editorial in today's New York Sun:

We're always amused when news stories are entirely self-contradictory. Take, for example, this lead from the Sun:

For the record, NYU's Water Street Residence is at 200 Water Street, off Fulton Street, immediately adjacent to the South Street Seaport.

City Hall announced yesterday that Mike Bloomberg donated a total of $140 million to 843 groups last year, the Sun reports today. It's the most money he's ever given in one year — up from his previous record of $135.3 million, in 2003 — and by far the largest number of groups he's given to, up from his 2002 record of 655.

Speaking of The New York Sun, that preferred small-circulation newspaper of New York's wealthy right-wing Zionists has recently (and somewhat unofficially) joined our little bloggy corner of the world. We present: It Shines For All, the Sun's new blog, which isn't actually linked from any obvious spot on the Sun's homepage.

We don't know which is more curious: The Press having something good to announce, or the Sun breaking media news. Either way, it's interesting: The Press has hired a new editor to replace the recently departed Alexander Zaitchik, who replaced the only slightly less recently departed Jeff Koyen. The new guy is 27-year-old Harry Siegel, son of Giuliani biographer Fred Siegel and a former Sun editorial writer.

In a rare move certain to assert its relevancy amongst the under-25 crowd, the NY Sun dips into MTV's Sunday Stew and comes out with a mouthful of the Andy Milonakis Show: