On January 8th, Kris Humphries, the former husband of reality star Kim Kardashian, shared a cryptic Tweet about his ex-wife’s show, invoking the FCC. “I can’t wait for the truth to come out!” he wrote. “People will be surprised or maybe they won’t. #FCC.” Hashtag: #DRAMA!

Admit it: You’ve missed Sarah Palin. Once a seemingly ever-present fixture in politics and pop culture, Palin has all but bowed out of the spotlight in recent months. Ever since she wrapped up her “Just Because It’s Fun” whirlwind bus tour, the former governor of Alaska has only popped up on Fox News every so often to offer her take on current news items. But she hasn’t been making news, really, and we miss that.

“You take a young Bill Maher and you take a young Ann Coulter, what really happens if they live together?” Doron Ofir, the casting directory behind Jersey Shore, wants to know the answer to this question. Ofir is currently casting for a reality show tentatively titled Party Politics, the premise of which is to gather a group of attractive young people to live in a house and… talk about politics?

Whoever runs the Hollywood Walk of Fame Facebook page deserves the world’s biggest cookie. Apparently, one of their fans inquired if any of the famous Hollywood stars would be given to reality TV characters. You know, because Snooki is just as culturally important as Humphrey Bogart or Samuel L. Jackson. On Monday, the group’s Facebook page explained their position on inducting reality TV stars:

A reality series that aired in the U.K. on the BBC and in the U.S. on the Travel Channel faces charges producers faked scenes and deliberately mistranslated interviews in an attempt to portray members of an Amazonian tribe as “sex-obsessed, mean savages.” The charges, reported today in The Guardian, involve a six part series called Mark & Olly: Living with the Machigenga, which was shot in the Amazon rainforest. According to the Guardian, “the show has been called “staged, false, fabricated and distorted” by Dr Glenn Shepard, an anthropologist who has worked with the tribe for 25 years and speaks their language fluently, and Ron Snell, who grew up with the tribe as the son of US missionaries and also speaks their language.”

When the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal broke in May, many reporters tried to bring the story home for Americans by comparing it to Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s revelation that he’d fathered a love child. With DSK back in the news this week after new reports that he may be innocent after all, pundits are again drawing parallels to another case being discussed, that of Casey Anthony. “Combined with the seeming collapse of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case, the shock showed a press quick to jump to conclusions, if not about actual guilt, then at least about guilty verdicts,” TIME‘s James Poniewozik said, upon the conclusion of the Anthony trial this week. What do these two stories really have in common with each other?

The producers of Fox’s MasterChef have been forced to release an apology after an eagle-eyed Redditor caught them flagrantly faking footage. Of course, as most reality TV shows have as much in common with reality as an animated movie about a world of sentient cars, this is as necessary as forcing a professional wrestling producer to apologize for faked body slams. Still, since many Americans remain as naive to the genre’s tricks as my third grade best friend was to the WWE’s, stories like this remain hilarious and instructive.

Well, now, this is an interesting little story. ABC News legal analyst and Mediaite founder Dan Abrams appeared on Good Morning America this morning to discuss a truly bizarre would-be murder case apparently literally inspired by reality TV shows like Cheaters.

A Florida woman named Dalia Dippolito allegedly hired a hit man – who turned out to be an undercover officer – to kill her husband of six months, Mike Dippolito. Par for the course for many Florida couples, but! There’s a twist! Dippolito is saying the hit was part of a ploy to land a scripted reality TV series and that the contract out on her husband, who was in on the idea, was never intended to be real. The only problem is that Mr. Dippolito is saying he had no idea his wife had put a hit out on him.

Rush Limbaugh was certainly tickled pink by today’s developments, reveling in the fact that a “reality TV star” had “forced Obama’s hand.” “Trump has a new catch phrase!” he exclaimed. Chuckling, Limbaugh explained that Donald Trump can now add “I won” right next to “You’re fired.”

Comedian Joan Rivers is often willing to say or do anything for a laugh and last night on her reality show Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best? she allowed her grandson, Cooper, to torture her . . . literally. After Cooper and his friends laid Rivers down on the “grass of death” and put a towel over Rivers’ face, Rivers quickly yelled out “I confess” when water was poured on her.

Have you ever seen how otherwise talented chefs can cook up real crap under the pressures of a TV reality competition like Top Chef? Or the hideous designs that make it to the runway on Project Runway? At least those inedible meals and trainwreck dresses don’t stick around on somebody’s arm forever.

Until now. Oxygen Media has greenlit Best Ink, which The Hollywood Reporter describes as “a reality show that pits 12 tattoo artists against each other for ‘a cash prize and bragging rights.’”

The other day, while writing a post discussing a TV show that seeks to find a middle ground between pornography and reality television, I loudly (perhaps too loudly) announced to our obliging (perhaps too obliging) office that I would rather watch 20 minutes of the worst porn than one episode of any reality series. Instantly, people started sending me links and videos and I was forced to retract my statement after watching just seconds of one. Instead of disregarding it completely though, I downgraded it to this: I respect any porn star more than any reality TV star. I then thought it would be interesting to examine why.

TIME‘s Top 10 of Everything of 2010 issue hits newsstands today, and both Sarah Palin and dancing daughter Bristol Palin made the cut–taking Top 10 honors in the category “Best Reality TV Moments of 2010.”

Mama Grizzly Sarah takes ninth place for the highly rated premiere of Sarah Palin’s Alaska. Bristol’s best moment–dancing in a gorilla suit–got her one notch higher into eighth place. That puts both Palins ahead of “The Jersey Shore Takes Miami,” but behind such classic reality moments as The Amazing Race‘s watermelon to the face moment (5th).

David Hasselhoff once promised that he would be there for TV viewers, “forever and always.” Unfortunately, A&E saw things differently. Willa Paskin of Vulture reported last night that The Hoff’s brand new reality show—titled, of course, The Hasselhoffs—has been canceled already, even though only two episodes of the show have aired so far.

At this point, you probably know that Bristol Palin has moved to the finals on Dancing with the Stars. You also might know that some don’t believe she deserves it and aren’t happy about it. What you probably don’t know, is that one of those people got so angry he shot his TV with a shotgun and then had a 15 hour standoff with the police. If Bristol Palin doing well on dancing show can make the guy this angry, lets hope he never tries to watch the news.

MTV’s Real World season in Las Vegas back in 2002 may have been the best non-Jersey Shore season of reality television ever.

For its 25th installment, MTV is returning to Sin City.

As “The Apprentice” begins its 10th season on Thursday night, it’s embarking on new territory: the tough economy. Since the show’s past few seasons have been “celebrity” versions, the show hasn’t had the same focus on ambitious, hardworking professionals trying to push forward their careers. So Donald Trump and producer Mark Burnett are returning the show to its roots in hopes of helping one person turn his or her career around during hard times.

We see more and more reality shows now than ever, and that means more and more reality “stars.” But which reality TV stars have become actually famous? Here’s our list of the top 10.

Note: to make the list, you had to get your start on a reality show that you technically couldn’t get famous for anyway – American Idol or Project Runway contestants, for example, don’t make the cut.

The good people at NMA News, the Taiwanese news service that made a name for itself with its bizarre computer animated coverage of, among other things, the Al Gore scandal and January’s Late Night Wars, is back with a vengeance, and this time they’ve set their eyes on Sarah Palin‘s 2012 prospects.

Viacom head Sumner Redstone is furious with claims that his new pet project, a Pussycat Dolls-esque pop band/reality TV package called the Electric Barbarellas, is terrible. After Daily Beast senior correspondent Peter Lauria wrote a report that Redstone is trying to “force” MTV to promote the band in a new reality show, Redstone left an ominous voicemail on the writer’s office phone asking for the identity of the source that leaked him the story.

Parents, here’s another reason to keep your kids away from the TV this summer. A recent article in USA Today would like to add temper tantrums and a fondness for TV melodrama to the list of what happens when we watch too much television.

Welcome to the first installment of our summer series in which we head back into the Mediaite Vault (*cough* the Internet *cough*) to find some choice moments showing media personalities back when their journalism hit a little less hard. Consider it meeting the press before they were the press. First up, we watch Anderson Cooper channel his inner Derek Flint.

The news that Jersey Shore‘s breakout male stars graced the cover of yet another publication, shirtless and tan, is no news, but when Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino and company saw themselves smiling from the covers this morning, they were the Village Voice‘s “Queer Issue” cover boys. Surprise? Well, Sorrentino has officially responded to the speculation that he was unaware of his status in the gay community– and he’s totally ok with the chatter.

There was at least one important finale on TV last night – who would win season three of The Celebrity Apprentice?

Bret Michaels was in the final two (with Holly Robinson Peete), and appeared live despite finding himself back in the hospital last week due to recent complications following a massive brain hemorrhage last month. And he won it all.

This has all the makings of a great media hoax, though so far, it appears to actually be a real plan. Australian filmmaker Justin Sisley is currently producing a reality TV program that alleges to “sell off” three virgins to the highest bidder. According to a casting notice, the show calls for “our camera (to) follow the principal cast as they shed their virginity to a complete stranger in front of a worldwide audience.”