On Thursday, HLN host Nancy Grace joined ABC legal analyst and Mediaite founder Dan Abrams on Good Morning America to discuss — and disagree on — the pregnancy rumors floated by Casey Anthony‘s defense. Namely, the idea that her own dad, George Anthony, had fathered Caylee Anthony.

In a contentious interview, HLN’s Nancy Grace cut off the mic of Joran van der Sloot friend John Ludwick after he blamed Sloot’s victim for her murder. “You are saying that the murder victim who endured a brutal beating a super human strangulation where her neck bone was crushed, the room covered in blood, her clothes ripped off of her post mortem and left that way to be found, it’s her fault?!” Grace exclaimed incredulously.

Nancy Grace was in a particularly spirited Casey Anthony tizzy during her show last night on HLN, after passionately disputing that new “Tot Mom” videos were leaked to the internet as a result of hacking. “Whoa stop, Trisha! You just hurt my ear! That’s what her lawyer said!?” Grace exclaimed. “Her lawyers also said George Anthony molested her and Lee Anthony molested her. Remember that!? They also said the baby died in the swimming pool and that george anthony, a former cop, went and threw the body in a pet cemetery out in the woods to decompose. Yeah, they said that too. So what do I care what they said? Why are you telling me that?”

A day after the Casey Anthony video diary clip leaked on YouTube, featuring a blonde, glasses-wearing Anthony talking about her new adopted dog, among other things, there is still a question about whether the video was actually “leaked,” or if Anthony and her team strategically released it in a cleverly orchestrated move to get some attention.

Tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of the first New Year’s Eve in which Anderson Cooper courageously accepted co-hosting CNN’s last broadcast of the year with unpredictable comedienne Kathy Griffin, and she has yet to disappoint in the ways she inspires, as Cooper put it, “dread” in her co-host. Tonight she appeared on Anderson Cooper 360º to discuss tomorrow’s ceremonies, and promised various stages of undress– and possibly a drive-by disturbance of Paul Begala.

Back when Mediaite was still in its infancy, when all the writers you know and love were adorable baby versions of themselves being cared for by a mysterious, sock-wearing woman named Nanny, a tradition was formed. Whenever the holidays would roll around, the Mediaite brain trust would choose the big pop cultural event of the year and find all the media counterparts for the various characters. At the time, back in the sepia-toned days of 2009, that cultural event was Harry Potter. Well, now it’s 2011…

The title question makes for a bad Paula Cole record, but a good basis for discussion on this morning’s Morning Joe. Co-host Mika Brzezinski led a discussion of the current GOP presidential field’s frequent brain power outages, such as Herman Cain’s Libya whiff and Rick Perry’s debate mega-stumble, pegged to op-eds by The Washington Post‘s Kathleen Parker and Newsweek‘s Paul Begala.

Early Thursday morning, Mediaite founder Dan Abrams appeared on Good Morning America, alongside Nancy Grace, to discuss the Conrad Murray verdict. At the very end of their segment, Abrams went off-topic and congratulated Grace on her Dancing With The Stars success, mentioning her now-famous cartwheel. As the show went to break, Grace told Abrams to unbutton his shirt, because he was going to do one.

“What is the best thing in the world?” you are likely asking, chin resting on hand. Cake? Puppies? A cake in the shape of a puppy? A puppy in the shape of a cake? The answer is “No, wrong, none of those things!” Because the best thing in the world is Nancy Grace doing a cartwheel in a swishy gold dress. I mean. Right? Obvious answer.

Closing arguments began this week in the Conrad Murray case, and Good Morning America brought in their “legal dream team” to assess the situation. Mediaite founder Dan Abrams and HLN’s Nancy Grace butted heads in their analysis of the case. “Nobody’s on trial because it’s not a crime to be awake. It’s a crime to be dead by having propofol shot into your dead body until all of your organs are saturated with a powerful, surgical anesthetic that is not to be used outside the operating room. Those guys didn’t know what they were talking about!” exclaimed Grace. “It’s actually not a crime to be putting drugs into a dead body,” Abrams snarkily rebutted. “But if you put it in a live body, that is a crime.”

Friday nights are always a little weird — MSNBC shows prison documentaries, and plenty of 25-54 year-olds are out from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m., doing 25 to 54 year-old things. But Friday night had a few other elements in the mix — Monica Crowley was guest-hosting for Sean Hannity at 9:00, while On The Record ran a special on the economy at 10:00. The result? An unorthodox night of numbers, with FOX taking the first four time slots and MSNBC taking the final three (FOX, it must be noted, ruled primetime overall, continuing its dominance).

When MSNBC decided to move Lawrence O’Donnell to 10 p.m. and put Ed Schultz in his time slot, they had to be hoping for better results than a third-place finish at 8 p.m., especially on his debut night. But Schultz’s first appearance at 8:00 was merely the side story to Nancy Grace‘s second-place finish in [...]

While FOX continued to pounce all comers in the ratings, it was MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell who made for the most intriguing storyline: Friday marked his last show at 8 p.m. (he’s being swapped with Ed Schultz and starts broadcasting at 10 p.m. tonight), and he went out with a bang, finishing in second place behind [...]

Live TV is always kind of a gamble, particularly because it offers people a platform to promote their intense feelings for Dancing with the Stars and/or David Arquette. Seriously, you simply never know when someone is going to interrupt a live broadcast to sing the praises of America’s favorite Arquette, not including Patricia, Rosanna or Alexis.

And that’s exactly what happened Monday afternoon when CNN sent Maggie Lake out to the streets of Manhattan to report on the release of a new biography on Apple’s Steve Jobs.

You can say this about Nancy Grace: she seems to be really enjoying her time on Dancing With The Stars. And she’s using her official YouTube channel to show what ABC’s cameras aren’t capturing — progress reports on that week’s dances and impromptu moments with her makeup team. This week, DWTS had an 80′s theme, and Grace, going down Memory Lane, revealed that she was a high school cheerleader back in Georgia. She even whipped out a cheer to prove it. After surviving the cut and back at work, someone pressed Grace for an encore. And she obliged. right there in the CNN lobby:

A day after having a Republican debate thrown into the mix, normalcy returned, somewhat, to the cable news ratings, with CNN falling back on its pre-debate numbers and FOX regaining a stranglehold on the top spot. There was, however, some notable movement buried in the ratings.

Nancy Grace and her partner, Tristan MacManus, advanced to the next round of Dancing With The Stars on Tuesday, sealing their spot in the Final Eight and avoiding elimination. After the voting was announced, Nancy and Tristan took to Nancy’s personal YouTube account to thank fans for their support

Remember Court TV and the national obsession with high profile trials? For about a decade from O.J. Simpson to Scott Peterson and Natalee Holloway the country seemed to have an insatiable appetite for soap opera like details that slowly and painstakingly emerged day in and day out in courtrooms and from investigations around the country. Courthouses regularly became tent cities with media encampments at high profile trials. Some judges and lawyers (and witnesses ie. Kato Kaelin) became more recognizable than most movie stars. Sometimes, the cases addressed important issues like in the trial of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy Mcveigh or assisted suicide doctor Jack Kevorkian or most obviously, Bush v. Gore. Others were far more frivolous like Anna Nicole Smith‘s lawsuit or a random celebrity drunk driving or drug case. Multiple daily cable news shows hosted by the likes of Geraldo Rivera, Greta Van Susteren, Nancy Grace (and me) covered the minutiae with analysis and debate from lawyers and participants.

On her HLN show, host Joy Behar commented on colleague and Dancing With The Stars contestant Nancy Grace‘s recent “nipplegate.” To some, it appeared that Grace’s areola unleashed itself on an unsuspecting public while she danced, although Grace insists she was wearing pasties at the time. “To me, it looked like a Frisbee,” confided Behar.

On Monday night, the world was shocked, shocked when, after all the hand-wringing over Chaz Bono’s fiendish insistence on existing, it actually seemed that HLN’s Nancy Grace was the one to plunge our nation’s children into depravity. The worst depravity of all in fact, the depravity of a briefly viewed human female breast! However, Grace has spoken out, denying that that slightly different shade of pink that we saw for a second was actually her nipple.

Thank God. I guess my children won’t be going to Hell after all.

On last night’s Dancing with the Stars, legal analyst Nancy Grace shocked America with half a second of breast exposure. Given the precarious moral nature of this season of DWTS to some conservatives given the presence of Chaz Bono there, Jon Stewart posited tonight that the biggest story of the day would get major coverage on Fox News, where the transgendered contestant was called dangerous to children by resident Dr. Keith Ablow.

Since its premiere last week, opponents of this season’s Dancing with the Stars have claimed that the images broadcast therein could corrupt and severely traumatize children. All the griping around Chaz Bono seemed to leave the Dancing with the Stars unprepared for the real threat: Nancy Grace‘s breasts, escaping the shackles of her dress after a fairly energetic performance.

Tonight’s premiere of Dancing with the Stars brought with it several surprising names, perhaps none moreso (in a confusing way) than HLN legal maven Nancy Grace. Grace kicked off her run on the program with a cha-cha that began with Grace sliding out of a desk in a glittery white gown and making plenty of conservative, albeit difficult to follow, steps around her partner.

Mediaite founder and ABC News legal analysts Dan Abrams and HLN’s Nancy Grace went head-to-head this morning on Good Morning America, debating the Bob Ward murder trial taking place in Orlando. In a 911 call, Ward admitted to shooting his wife, but later backtracked, saying she killed herself while he tried to take the gun [...]

This is obviously not your typical media post. While I personally don’t care for TV shows about dancing, the idea of cable news hosts, known best for their political coverage, participating on such a show is an interesting spectacle to behold. It falls in that pantheon of “wait, what?” TV moments like Larry King rolling with Snoop Dogg or Glenn Beck engaging in some awkward sexual banter with Rick Santorum. It is a class of television all its own.