The New York Observer has noticed that Bunim/Murray Productions, the company that produces The Real World for Viacom-owned MTV has posted a casting notice on Craigslist looking for an Occupy Wall Street protester to join the cast of their next season.

So, basically, a giant corporation needs a young person to exploit for money and so they’ve decided the best place to look is amongst that giant group of young people who are sick and tired of being exploited by corporations for money.

Gosh! It’s just like a wacky rom-com odd couple!

MTV told Obama‘s re-election campaign that they’re going to have to go it alone this year. According to a New York Post “exclusive,” the President’s Get Out the Vote campaign-within-a-campaign was declined service by MTV’s internal ad agency, MTV Scratch, which does not engage in political work. If they need to know what the kids want, they are going to have to figure it out themselves.

MTV co-founder Tom Freston has an unusually optimistic view of Afghanistan. “People assume that when the U.S. leaves, the Taliban will just resume control, but Afghanistan has become a different place,” he told New York Times‘ David Carr. Freston, who spent 17 years at the helm of MTV Networks, eight or so months as president at [...]

Beyoncé‘s big announcement last night — that she is, after years of wishful speculation by fans and media, in fact pregnant — set a new Twitter record for the most tweets per second, things peaking at 8,868 tweets per second. An early tweet suggesting that, “Also, B TOLD THE PAPS THAT SHE’S PREGNANT,” from MTV News correspondent [...]

Chris Brown’s performance at the VMAs had everything we’ve come to expect from him, including unapologetic lip-synching and ridiculous dancing. He took the audience on a pop culture odyssey that included a cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” ostensibly so that he would have a reason to have dudes in plaid flannel shirts jumping around on trampolines hidden beneath the stage.

Expectations could not have been higher for Lady Gaga’s opening performance. After all, this is a woman who routinely shows up to awards shows covered in meat or ensconced in an egg. Say what you will about her, but no two Gaga performances are alike, and this one promised to be a spectacle.

The network formerly known for playing “Video Music” (and inventing “reality television”) turns thirty today, and while many can complain it is showing some signs of aging (Where are the music videos?), MTV has given at least two generations lifetime memories– most Americans can’t thank Van Halen, Pat Benatar, Hall & Oates and Duran Duran enough. But some of the greatest masterpieces of the Music Video era often go unsung, so on this birthday, we bring you best music videos everyone forgot existed.

In case you aren’t hip on wacky Internet trends (Don’t feel bad if you aren’t. Seriously), the big one of this year is “planking.” Consider it the “Bros Icing Bros” of Summer ’11. What is planking? Well, it’s the fine art of lying straight down like a plank of wood to surprise and amuse people (this great Geekosystem post will help illustrate). Sounds fun/stupid, right? Well, turns out that this “new” practice was invented all the way back in 1994 by the king of fun/stupid, Tom Green!

Whatever his political status may be today, there was a time in which Jon Stewart‘s claim to being merely a court jester was indisputable, way back when he was a fixture on the half-music, half-talk, pre-reality MTV. During his tenure as host of The Jon Stewart Show, the idea of him even entering the White House was a punchline in and of itself– a punchline early and often employed in this 1994 interview with gangly underground talk show host Conan O’Brien.

This morning, MTV announced an upcoming documentary on the life of Lady Gaga and, in particular, how Stefani Germanotta, the girl from New York, became the “fame monster” we see today (who, by the way, just took on the #1 spot on Forbes’ annual “Celebrity 100″ list). A few clips from from the documentary, to be called Lady Gaga: Inside the Outside, have been released and one is particularly striking. In it, Gaga tells a story of an instance of bullying from her youth and relates how it helped make her who she is now.

Florence, Italy – very obviously a city with no sense of culture – has decided to pull filming permits for the fourth season of MTV’s Jersey Shore. The show’s castmembers – a group of self-described “guidos” of at least partial Italian descent – were informed of the decision as they were heading to the airport for their flight to Italy. They decided to remain in the States until everything is sorted out.

Now Italians get to experience the Jersey Shore phenomenon for themselves: The show premiered in Italy today and the reaction so far has been… Well, it’s enough to deflate Snooki’s signature poof.

America’s longest-running reality TV show, The Real World, returns tonight on MTV, with the latest group of seven strangers picked to live in a house, this time in Las Vegas. The selection of Sin City as home to the show’s 25th season is timed to help draw the nation’s Spring-Breaking college students to Vegas as a vacation spot. It’s left to be seen whether the MTV staple program still has much influence left on its young audience. No matter, the show has made an indelible mark on TV culture. “The Real World helped birth a genre that has eaten television whole,” says the Los Angeles Times‘ Yvonne Villarreal. But does the show still reside on the same pedestal? Critics debate:

If you haven’t yet heard of “Skins,” MTV’s latest attempt to lead American youths down a path of promiscuity and debauchery, you may be flat lining. Over the past week, media coverage has been rampant, as pundits and journalists have warned of the show’s potential federal pornography violations, as well as the danger it poses to America’s youth. If you’ve missed the hoopla, allow me to catch you up:

There are many ways you could have heard about the TV show Skins? You could be from England where the show originally became (and still is) a huge sensation. You could watch MTV where a new remake just premiered. You could be a New York subway passenger and, therefore, someone who has spent the past month getting leered at by the half-naked cast of said remake in thousands of ads. Or perhaps you read the New York Times this morning and learned that the show is SO DAMN RACY that MTV execs worried that they’d be arrested for child porn! Uh huh. Sure.

Dr. Drew Pinsky, who’s set to launch his new HLN show in March, tells the New York Post today he’s got a celebrity guest in mind: Lindsay Lohan.

“I want to talk about what’s really going on with a woman who’s suffering like that,” Dr. Drew tells the Post‘s Sean Daly.

Also among potential guests on the yet-to-be-named Dr. Drew show: cast members from MTV’s teen shows 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom:

A sad bit of news for those of who who’d hoped and dreamed of celebrating New Year’s Eve by witnessing the spectable of Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi dropping out of a ball in Times Square: the ball-drop’s been scrubbed.

The Hollywood Reporter broke the bad news to surely devastated Jersey Shore fans today, saying producers of the annual New Year’s celebration in Times Square denied MTV’s request to allow the drop–and an attempt to set a world record for mass fist-pumping–all because the Snooki request arrived, Jersey Shore style, a bit fashionably late:

Last night, MTV – the network which is doing its part to ensure that teens will view pregnancy as a damper on their social lives – aired a special on abortion. No Easy Decision, a half-hour show, followed teenager Markai Durham through the process of deciding to get, and then ultimately obtaining, an abortion. As it happens, Durham is no stranger to MTV reality shows about teen wombs – she was formerly one of the subjects of 16 and Pregnant and has a young daughter with her boyfriend.

An interesting theory this week from The Christian Science Monitor: The paper cites a recent report from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy that showed young people view parental influence as the number one factor in preventing teen pregnancy. Also a factor: MTV’s 16 and Pregnant, which chronicles the tribulations of young men and women who find themselves expecting a little bundle of… complicated feelings. One of which might, sure, be joy.

Time Magazine has released its list of the Top Ten Twitter Moments of 2010, and at least one member of the Twitterati isn’t happy. Mediaite columnist and White House reporter Tommy Christopher, who nearly gave his life in a bid for Twitter celebrity, bitterly rejected the magazine’s snub via his Twitter account. I reached out [...]

If you’re somehow still a fan of Jersey Shore, you’ll be tickled to hear that MTV is planning to have Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi climb into a ball that will then be lowered into Times Square on New Year’s Eve. If you, like most sane people, are over Jersey Shore, we’re sorry if you just felt a part of your soul die as you were reading that last sentence.

MTV sat down with the cast of the four young stars of the upcoming Harry Potter movie (and all the past Harry Potter movies) for a funny segment teaching the British actors about America.

What did they learn? Everything from “Glenn Beck” to “mozzarella sticks.”

Some Jersey Shore haters will say the show jumped the shark when it started, while others will say it should have stopped after season one.

For me, it sadly came in the middle of the final episode of season two, when Snooki appeared to inexplicably break character (we have the video evidence). It was a heart-breaking moment in a boring episode that could signal something disastrous about our favorite cast of juiced-up Jerseyans.

Yesterday, Mediaite publisher and founder Dan Abrams stopped by The Today Show to discuss an epic fight caught on tape. (No, not that one.)

The Situation was eliminated on Dancing With The Stars this week, and to make matters worse, this episode of Jersey Shore features him failing miserably with a girl from “Canadia.”

Snooki makes an incest joke, Vinny gets “pot-committed” and Pauly D comes to the realization his wingman is a total douchebag.