By Hype Stalker

In what might be a roundabout response to their recent drubbing in Vanity Fair (“Panic on 43rd Street,” by Michael Wolff), The New York Times recently engaged in an odd bit of “inside baseball.” Just days after the glossy drive-by, The Times struck back with a piece by Katherine Q. Seelye that exposed the juicy bits behind the recent firing of Vanity Fair publisher Alan Katz. The article quips, “People at the magazine said that he and [Vanity Fair Editor-in-Chief] Graydon Carter had been unable to overcome personality differences and never established a working relationship.” Wait, is that The Times being snippy? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet! Seelye then reports Carter’s thoughts on the publisher switch, “I feel a great comfort level with [new publisher Edward Menicheschi]. He has great presence and élan, and he is the sort of person you could imagine as the publisher of Vanity Fair.’’ Okay, Carter basically just called Katz a slob—not nice. But just as we got ready to call Seelye the new queen of the media gossip world, she followed up with “What-Ifs of a Media Eclipse” (August 27), a well done feature that details the rise and fall of newspaper giant Knight Ridder. The writer goes to great lengths to point out all the mistakes and “could-have-been” scenarios surrounding the newspaper chain’s history. Hopefully, Times boss Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is taking his writer’s notes to heart…

We generally like to keep this space about hardcore media matters, but someone must cry out and acknowledge the horror that was this week’s Emmy Awards show. Why, oh why, would the producers of the show subject us to: Bob Newhart under glass, a nonsensical take-down of the entire Fox News anchor team, roughly ten embarrassing “wrap it up” musical interruptions during acceptance speeches, Barry Manilow actually winning something, an awkward Dick Clark tribute and yet another award to Tony Shalhoub, star of “Monk,” a show you nor any of your neighbors has ever seen? Maybe reality TV isn’t so bad after all…

We’re just saying…What possessed Vanity Fair to get into soft porn and feature a nude spread (boobage and all) of 26-year-old Johnson & Johnson heiress and P. Hilton wanna-be Casey Johnson. More importantly, what possessed the usually on-the-mark photographer, Jonathan Becker, to shoot Johnson without her diapers on? Why isn’t anyone talking about New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin outing the 60 Minutes producers by telling Tim Russert on this Sunday’s “Meet The Press” that the CBS bigshots begged him not to speak with other media outlets about the “hole in the ground” comment in hopes of preserving the network’s exclusive? Why won’t any of the television networks admit that, now that Karr has been cleared of “the kidnapping case of the century,” shifting focus from the Middle East, North Korea, Iran nukes, etc., just may have been an ambulance chasing mistake? Will Charlie Rose make good on his recent promise to showcase a standoff between Oscar The Grouch and Lord Of The Ring’s Gollum aka filmmaker Spike Lee and Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff?