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Let’s be clear — we’re big fans of America’s Newsroom and its hosts, Martha MacCallum and Bill Hemmer. And we know in the frantic world of news some stupid, silly things get lost along the way. But a short, sweet, minor gaffe on the show this morning was just too good to pass up.

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He’s the guy rumored to have been at Rupert Murdoch‘s side for so long he used to get the boss’ sandwiches–rising to become trusted deputy to Murdoch and chief at News Corp.-owned Dow Jones. Now Les Hinton‘s reportedly on his way out, another domino to fall as the phone hacking scandal that has engulfed Murdoch and his empire continues to spread. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Hinton is stepping down

Yesterday, Poynter Online’s Jim Romensko posted a memo that Wall Street Journal managing editor Robert Thomson sent to that paper’s entire staff. In the message, Thomson announces that two News Corp. employees—Journal Deputy Managing Editor Jim Pensiero and Gabriella Stern, Newswires‘ Senior Editor for global news—will be leading a new “Special Project” at the company. Pernsiero is to be the project’s Editor-in-Chief, while Stern will be his Managing Editor.

In a blistering speech at the World Newspaper Conference, Hinton echoed his boss Rupert Murdoch‘s suspicions about the Internet. Along with the pugnacious quote above (though who actually says “the news is viral?”), he compared old media entering the web to “an over-eager middle-aged dad,” criticized aggregators and “thieves” for the newspaper industry’s nosedive, and called out Jeff Jarvis as a moony-eyed leader of “the information-must-be-free imperative:”