On Saturday mornings’s Up with Chris Hayes, journalist and MSNBC contributor Karen Hunter challenged The New York Times‘ Jodi Kantor over her motivation for writing the buzzed-about tome The Obamas. Hunter leveled a highly-charged criticism at Kantor, mentioning her “seven figure” payday, and wondering “What was your motivation for doing it?”

Kantor’s response seemed to be leading to a crackling exchange, but host Chris Hayes swooped in and changed the subject.

There is perhaps no other subject more sensitive right now than the place of women in comedy. And it’s not like comediennes don’t have good reason to be touchy. We are, after all, only a few months past a news cycle in which people were writing serious articles asking if a new movie could finally prove that women were funny…in the year 2011! Think about that.

The plot of the bewildering, apparently one-sided dispute between Countdown host Keith Olbermann and Current TV is thinning as it thickens. A source at the network tells Mediaite that, despite the ominous Hollywood Reporter story that “lawyers” are discussing the dustup over Current’s Iowa Caucus coverage, Olbermann’s attorneys have not been in touch with the network on that matter. The source also says that the network has invited Olbermann to anchor Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary coverage, but has not gotten a response.

Jake Tapper‘s tweet of bizarre “no comment” boilerplate had all the makings of an Onion parody: “”…a spokeswoman for the Romney campaign, declined to comment on the candidate’s hairstyle, or to make Mr. Romney available to discuss it.”

It was no joke, but rather, a quote from The New York Times‘ straight-faced report on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney‘s fantastic hair.

In what reads almost like an Onion parody of the Herman Cain alleged sexual harassment story, The New York Times‘ Caucus blog reported, Sunday night, that a woman has come forward to accuse Cain rival Mitt Romney of being polite but disinterested in her health care reform suggestions during a recent Delta Airlines flight. Following a week in which disastrous PR only made his rival stronger, Mitt Romney is getting bad press for minding his own business on an airplane. I now officially feel sorry for Mitt Romney.

Guys, incredible news! Somehow, someone snuck cameras into the headquarters of a bunch of major American news outlets to see how they’re biases inform their reporting on the Occupy protests! What’s even more incredible is that the editors of these outlets all seem to look like the same three popular New York-based comedy actors! And what’s even more incredible than that is that the first site to break this story is the comedy video site Jest!

…ok, maybe this is just a comedy sketch. It’s still pretty darn hilarious.

The rebel uprising of Libya has left behind a treasure-trove of “surreal ruins”, The New York Times‘ Robert Worth reports in Sunday’s magazine cover story.

Worth details touring the war-torn remains of central Tripoli, astonished to get to go inside the belly of the beast, Muammar Gaddafi‘s Bab al Aziziya compound. He observed Libyan families were “strolling through and gazing wonderingly at the ruins.”

There has been quite a reaction to Paul Krugman’s instantly infamous 9/11 blog post entitled “The Year’s of Shame.” On The Five yesterday though, Greg Gutfeld took it upon himself to sum up what he believed was the nation’s collective response: “Go to hell, Paul Krugman, you bearded bitter buffoon.”

It doesn’t happen all too often, but, whenever news outlets accidentally use the same picture on their cover, it’s always pretty funny. Today, The New York Times and the Washington Post both decided to fill their front page with that the exact photo of a flooded New Jersey street. This kind of thing (which happens every once in a while) must suck for the papers. It really sucks for whomever owns the truck.

The only person it doesn’t suck for? The photographer. Ka-ching!

Shares of News Corp. rose Thursday–up nearly 17 percent by 1 p.m.–as traders reacted to Rupert Murdoch’s quarterly earnings conference call Wednesday afternoon. On the call, Murdoch vowed to remain in place as CEO despite the ongoing investigation into the company’s involvement in phone hacking, and reported a healthy profit. “We have the most robust balance sheet in our history,” Mr. Murdoch said, reporting 2.7 billion dollars in earnings for the fiscal year that ended June 30, up from 2.5 billion the year before.

With its influence on international events like the revolutions in the Middle East, it’s clear that social media has become much more important than as merely the 21st century way to share Charlie Sheen jokes (God, remember when we had to make fun of his legal problems through fax?). And it’s not just billionaire nerds who’ve taken notice; a fascinating article in the New York Times details the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s goal to employ what the Times dubs an “Internet meme tracker.”

New York Times correspondent Sabrina Tavernise had the assignment of covering an event Wednesday at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. She’s used to working with Times photographers, but never expected to see the face of Joao Silva, the Timesman who lost his legs and suffered massive internal injuries when a land mine exploded underneath him in Afghanistan last fall. As David Dunlap and James Estrin write in today’s Times, Tavernise “spotted a very familiar face in the crowd. Mr. Silva, wearing a T-shirt with the exclamation ‘Pow!’ written across the front, was already on the scene. He was smiling. He was walking on his prosthetic legs. And he was taking pictures.” One of those pictures is featured on the front page of today’s paper.

This morning’s Frank Bruni column on President Obama was not a fave of Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, who, holding the op-ed in her hand with visible distaste, said she was being “forced” to read it. In the op-ed, from this morning’s New York Times, Bruni describes Obama’s path from “poetry to drudgery,” saying directly to the president, “you got stuck with the mess. That’s your cinching, suffocating, unjust reality. Your campaign had all the romance of history in the making; your presidency has all the drudgery of a toxic cleanup. You orated your way into janitorial work.

According to published reports, Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman has lost his campaign manager, Susie Wiles, who resigned today. The resignation comes less than a month after the former Utah governor made his 2012 campaign official. As The New York Times‘ Michael Shear describes the announcement, “the departure of Ms. Wiles is the first serious sign of trouble since Mr. Huntsman returned from a two-year tour as President Obama’s ambassador to China to challenge his former boss.”

CNBC announced today that New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin is taking over as co-host of the program Squawk Box. An internal memo sent out to CNBC staff explained that Sorkin is replacing former co-host Carl Quintanilla, who left the program earlier this week for the network’s morning show Squawk on the Street, [...]

General Murdoch appears to have ordered his British troops to retreat. Sky News reports this morning Rupert Murdoch has abandoned his long-planned $12 billion bid to takeover British Sky Broadcasting, known in the U.K. as BSkyB. The decision comes as the British parliament was set to pass a resolution calling on Murdoch to withdraw his bid for a full takeover of the company–Murdoch’s News Corp. already owns 39 percent of BSkyB.

At this point, it’s pretty difficult to find ink drying on any nice words in regards to Rupert Murdoch. As News International’s phone hacking scandal gets bigger and bigger, the man has become an absolute pariah in England and the story is slowly making its way across the pond. However, this morning, an op-ed has appeared in one of this nation’s largest papers, titled “In Defense of Murdoch” the column attempts to show another side of the media monarch. Some might find it a bit surprising that this defense comes from none other than the New York Times. And it’s written by Roger Cohen, a Brit no less!

Small world! Turns out Fox Business Network anchor Charlie Gasparino works out six days a week in the very same city park along the East River where I (before my move to the internet and the requisite relocation across the river into Brooklyn) used to do pushups, pullups, dips and crunches. As Gasparino reveals to [...]

The New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter will write a book, tentatively titled The Top of the Morning, “about TODAY, Good Morning America and the other morning shows that collectively set the nation’s breakfast table every day,” Stelter writes this morning on his personal website.

So much for romance. A video broadcast on Canadian television Thursday shows the web-legendary “kissing couple” from the riots in Vancouver a week ago were actually knocked to the ground by riot police just before the photo was taken, thereby squeezing the last bit of mystery out of the stunning photo that seemed at first to show an oblivious man and woman in a passionate embrace as the city went to Hell all around them (and all over hockey, no less). Well, so much for that. Thanks a lot, internet.

Well, that’s odd. Last night, the AMC murder mystery, The Killing, ended its first season with an episode critics are calling an “absolute trainwreck” (and that’s much nicer than what the Internet commenters are saying). That’s not the odd thing. In fact, it would be lovely if we lived in a world where a crappy TV show was considered “odd” and not, y’know, the norm. No, what’s odd is that the New York Times wrote up a review of the season and the finale that provided spoilers for the ending…and they spoil an ending that didn’t actually happen.

During an appearance on NBC’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, Keith Olbermann casually amplified completely unsubstantiated rumors about House Speaker John Boehner, rumors which have thus far avoided repetition by most reputable news organizations. During a conference call Friday morning to discuss the unveiling of Countdown II: Electric Boogaloo, Olbermann talked about the benefits of freedom from a corporate behemoth, saying that when preparing for the new show, he had to “stop myself from stopping myself.”

The New York Times‘ Julie Bosman reports Rep. Michele Bachmann has agreed to a deal to write a memoir, set to be published by Sentinel, described by the Times as “a conservative imprint at Penguin Group,” citing people familiar with the negotiations. The book, to be co-written withJohn Fund, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, is set to hit bookstores in the fall:

CBS News wants you to know that reporters at The New York Times, Mediaite, The Huffington Post and Entertainment Weekly all got it wrong in comparing Scott Pelley‘s first week as anchor of The CBS Evening News to the final weeks of Katie Couric‘s time in the chair. As we put it yesterday, “it’s too early to fairly judge the CBS Evening News‘ transition from Katie Couric to Scott Pelley in terms of ratings, but in his first week on the job, Pelley largely held on to the viewers Couric had, but seems to have lost some of the viewers who tuned in for the post-Couric newscasts with interim anchor Harry Smith.”

I suppose Vanity Fair readers might be the sort to be interested in the family life and personal musings of Bill Keller and his wife, as well as the type of readership for whom someone like Keller is something of a celebrity, his personal life being as newsworthy as his professional choices.

I’m not a Vanity Fair reader so, while I understand, somewhat, the interest, I find Gilbey Keller’s piece indicative of something that trouble me in media, even though, by covering it, I’m a part of the problem. The angst!

The fact is that Gilbey Keller’s piece, while interesting and moving, sure, isn’t just one wife’s look at her husband’s work and its impact on their family. It’s a piece about a well-known man with a well-known job whose family is, now, also known.