Oh sure, Eliza Dushku will turn up in something else relatively soon, but her men-in-prison fan base will be hard-pressed to find another series that goes so out of its way to accentuate her physical assets as "Dollhouse" conspicuously did.

If only the show was as consistently good as the pictures.

OK, so I was nakedly trying to boost my monthly traffic totals. Sue me.

Besides, Joss Whedon fans are still pissed off about this column -- I'm not sure why, frankly, except that I joked that they don't have much to do on Friday nights -- so what do I have to lose?

At first I was slightly taken aback by Fox's announcement that "Glee" would be out on DVD with its first 13 episodes in December. But the more I think about it, the more it seems that this is a series bending TV's financial model -- placing an extreme emphasis on cashing in right now, whether that be on the downloaded music or selling the episodes halfway through season one.

Given the flimsiness of the construct and the expense of the show, it's a good idea.

"Glee" has won its share of fans -- especially within the media -- mostly by being different. After a steady diet of crime procedurals, a musical soap -- featuring an immensely talented cast with Broadway credentials -- certainly qualifies as a breath of fresh air.

The series itself, however, remains a bit of a conundrum -- easy to watch, perhaps, but difficult to always like. The comedic tone is wildly uneven. The characters consistently behave stupidly, so much so that it's tough to consistently care about them. And even the musical numbers -- at their best buoyant and exuberant -- exhibit wide swings.

An episode a few weeks ago with Kristin Chenoweth as a guest soared to creative highs; the next week, however, proved something of a letdown, and the ongoing "Crazy wife faking pregnancy" subplot increasingly looks like the show is writing itself into an unfortunate corner.

For all that, "Glee" continues to perform well among younger demos, and the show's songs have become hugely popular commodities. Entertainment Weekly will feature the show on its next cover, prompting Fox to boast with its customary restraint that "Everyone is falling in LOVE with 'Glee.'"

Fans appear willing to overlook the flaws and merely embrace the good points -- a sense of generosity that I don't entirely share. That said, when the series lets Lea Michele unleash those golden pipes, the program hits highs that little else on television can rival. (TV doesn't get much better than her sort-of duet with Chenoweth on "Maybe This Time" from "Cabaret.")

Fox's philosophy is pretty clear: Wring every penny out of the show as fast as possible, simultaneously seeking to promote "Glee" by every available means -- from music to mall tours to DVDs. What can often look like overkill in this case is the wise move, with the hope that "Glee" might find an additional gust of wind beneath its wings once "American Idol" returns in January.

Although I originally questioned the show's spring-preview strategy, the honchos at Fox look determined to give "Glee" every chance to succeed. And at times in spite of itself, the show just might.

Even for those who aren't unabashedly "Glee"-ful, amid TV's preponderance of chalk outlines, that would be a welcome development.

Can "The Simpsons" really be up to "Treehouse of Horrors" No. XX? Egads, where did the time go?

The 20th edition of the show's annual Halloween episode will air Oct. 18, and to put the half-hour in the parlance of Fox's upcoming World Series coverage, it bats about .333.

The first segment, an homage to Alfred Hitchcock with a lot of references to movies like "Strangers on a Train," is extremely clever, containing all sorts of stuff that's too good for the kids to appreciate. (Remember, those who were in middle school when the series premiered are in their 30s now, so its audience cuts across a wide swath, to say the least.)

The next two installments -- one loosely derived from "28 Days Later," and reasonably gruesome, which is quite a feat for animation -- are considerably less effective, including a stage show complete with musical numbers.

There's a great line in "Chinatown" about how politicians, ugly buildings and whores becoming respectable if they last long enough. "The Simpsons" has become an institution, perhaps -- as one jaw-dropping longevity milestone after another has fallen -- and will even be honored by the Paley Center for Media as the centerpiece of its annual gala this December.

But to its credit, as the latest "Treehouse" attests, the Fox program has managed to steadfastly avoid the dreaded "respectable" label.

David Letterman often seems indifferent at the desk -- especially when sitting across from guests with whom he's not particularly familiar -- in the best of times. But his two interviews this week with pretty young women -- "Glee's" Lea Michelle on Monday and "Dollhouse's" Eliza Dushku on Tuesday -- were especially awkward.

The host seemed distracted in both cases, a complete stranger to both of the Fox series (he told Dushku he's asleep when he isn't doing his program) and perhaps -- and maybe I'm projecting here -- uncomfortable being juxtaposed visually with beautiful young women in extremely flattering dresses while conjecture swirls around him about who he might have slept with on his show's staff.

Both nights, notably, Letterman's monologue was quite funny. But you have a feeling for the foreseeable future that what comes after that will give a pretty good indication of what sort of toll having his private life exposed is exacting upon him.

Fox News Channel's Chris Wallace did some whining about President Obama conspicuously skipping Fox's Sunday-morning program in his media blitz this week, which seems to ignore the obvious: By setting itself up as the "opposition network," FNC gains as many privileges as it might lose in terms of access to the White House.

As noted during a discussion on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" (see clip below), Fox has been the official organ for former Vice President Dick Cheney to address the world since he's left office, presumably because he thinks he'll get the best possible outcome on the network. Moreover, Fox's activist role in stoking and promoting protests against the current administration included video of a Fox producer actually pumping up the crowd for one of its live segments.

Fox hasn't fully addressed what's happened in that case -- or the clearly misleading ad that the network ran claiming that its rivals hadn't covered the protests.

So if Obama's perceived snub of "Fox News Sunday" was a shot across the bow, as it were, that too simply plays into Fox's marketing niche, mostly in a helpful way.

The disingenuous part is for Wallace to act like his feelings are hurt because the administration bypassed him. Because getting to play the aggrieved party in this case is actually good for Fox, in the broader picture.

Fox is doing fabulously well ratings-wise thanks to the current approach, but such a strategy can yield consequences. So while Wallace called the Obama team "crybabies" for skipping Fox, I suspect the only real tears here are of the crocodile variety -- and Wallace qualifies as whiner in chief.

A tale of two medical dramas....

Despite my consistent admiration for Hugh Laurie's brilliant work in the title role, I've been only an intermittent viewer of "House" the last couple of seasons, having grown somewhat weary of the medical procedural format. (For starters, I could barely get my health insurance to approve an MRI for a sore shoulder; these guys think nothing of running about a million dollars worth of tests every week, just for the hell of it.)

All that disappears, however, during the excellent two-hour season premiere on Sept. 21, with Laurie's Dr. House doing time in a mental-health facility for his painkiller addiction and running into an equally formidable adversary in the form of the Mayfield Psychiatric Hospital's administrator (guest Andre Braugher). Although House plots to bend his keepers to his will, the two hours explore the character in a compelling way and showcase some of the best acting you're apt to see on television this year.

It's an extraordinary departure, the sort of creative lark (inasmuch as other series regulars go largely unseen) in which established procedurals occasionally indulge, but seldom this well.

A few days later, "Grey's Anatomy" returns, having painted itself into an unfortunate corner in last spring's cliffhanger, which left both George (T.R. Knight) and Izzie (Katherine Heigl) hovering near death, less in the service of drama than backstage shenanigans about who would be leaving the series. (It remains to be seen whether "The Ugly Truth" will scare Heigl straight, as it were, but it's no secret that she'll be hanging around at least for a little while.)

Without giving too much away otherwise, the episode's highlight comes when the doctors indulge in a bout of gallows humor that finds them laughing uncontrollably over all the improbable things that have happened to them in a short span of time. Of course, that also exposes the fact that "Grey's" has indulged in too many plot twists that border on the absurd, in part driven by what appears to be a potentially unhealthy amount of off-screen angst.

There are still fine moments in the premiere -- primarily courtesy of Chandra Wilson and Sara Ramirez -- and there's an introduction of some corporate hospital politics that the program could certainly use, if only to take some of the focus off A) death; B) chronic bed-hopping; and C) marriages, or the lack thereof.

For the most part, though, "Grey's" feels like a cautionary tale about where a good show can go bad. That likely won't prevent the series from running successfully several more seasons, but even so, some new cast additions can't arrive fast enough, since this is a series that needs help, stat.

Back when Paula Abdul tweeted her farewell I proposed that altering the judging dynamics would potentially be good news for "American Idol," injecting some new energy into a familiar format.

Adding Ellen DeGeneres as the fourth judge would definitely seem to achieve that objective -- providing a "win-win" for both the series and the daytime host.

Whatever the mutterings of those Abdul fans pledging to stay away because of her departure (including New York Post critic Linda Stasi's ramblings that Abdul was a wronged woman a la Bette Davis' character in "All About Eve"), DeGeneres' arrival -- bringing additional comedy to the program, albeit here of the intentional as opposed to train-wreck variety -- will both promote the comic and foster a jolt of curiosity about "Idol" that the Fox heavyweight hasn't enjoyed in some time. Frankly, the fourth judge didn't really do all that much to alter the chemistry, but because other media are obsessed with all things "Idol" (think traffic, baby, traffic), it nevertheless produced torrents of coverage.

DeGeneres would appear to be an ideal fit -- a genuine fan whose enthusiasm for the show is obvious, but also somebody who can ventilate some of its self-importance and Simon Cowell's trademark pomposity with humor instead of merely rolling her eyes. It's the kind of new wrinkle that producers love -- offering considerable benefits and scant risk (although don't be surprised if some religious bigot tries to drum up publicity by assailing the propriety of DeGeneres' sexual orientation on a "family" show).

Whatever Abdul chooses to do next, her ex has found a new relationship that amounts to plenty more than a mere rebound. Abdul's fans can only hope that her own fortunes pan out half as well.

Jay Leno has always prided himself on being an equal-opportunity offender when it comes to politics. But by airing on NBC, he's now a target for an occasional guest on his show: Fox News' Bill O'Reilly.

At the end of Wednesday's program, O'Reilly featured Leno in his "Pinheads & Patriots" segment, right after the pictures of topless protesters. Well actually, not Leno so much -- that was just the tease to go hunting for bigger game.

"If Jay Leno fails at 10 p.m.," O'Reilly said, the entire network might be "doomed for another year." He then moved on to deride NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker for ruining NBC and referred to Keith Olbermann merely as "someone" on MSNBC, which is as close as O'Reilly will come to saying Olbermann's hated name. Of course, on Tuesday's show, Olbermann said he has the de facto top-rated program in cable news, since Fox doesn't qualify as a news network.

Once again, New York Times, great work on that "Voices From Above Silence a Cable TV Feud" Page One story.

Earlier in the show O'Reilly hosted Fox's Glenn Beck, as he regularly does, this time to allow Beck to talk about the orchestrated protest against him that has cost Beck's program about three dozen sponsors. O'Reilly never seems quite to know what to make of Beck, which is understandable: Olbermann has taken to calling him Lonesome Rhodes -- a reference to Andy Griffith's loathsome TV huckster in Elia Kazan's prescient movie "A Face in the Crowd" -- and Beck manages to stay interesting mostly by always appearing as if he's thisclose to a complete on-air meltdown.

Not to say that the whole feud/name-calling thing is growing tedious, but in hindsight, my favorite part was probably the topless protesters.

Kind of a ho-hum performance by Fox's two-hour "Octomom: The Incredible Unseen Footage," which averaged a mere 4.2 million viewers. That only works out to a little more than 500,000 viewers per octuplet. Not much of a return on investment.

The ho-hum numbers are more surprising given that the special -- whatever one thinks of the topic -- was pretty compelling in a train-wreck kind of way. For my full review, see here.

In fact, with AMC's "Mad Men" drawing its biggest audience ever for the show's stellar third-season premiere and this sort of usually reliable trash proving less reliable, I may have to start recalibrating some of my assumptions about the TV audience. Either that, or the major networks' low summer circulation is more of a problem than many have recognized.

On the plus side, "Octomom's" mediocre results probably mean that Fox won't proceed with all the other "octo"-related programming that it had waiting in the wings, including a reunion of the "Octopussy" cast and a reality show based on "Eight Million Ways to Die."

OK, I'm making that last part up.

Although I have never been a huge fan of Seth MacFarlane's shows -- the rat-a-tat, 10-jokes-a-minute animated humor has always struck me as a little too high on the "miss" end of the hit-miss equation -- I found myself extremely impressed with his recent Playboy interview.

It wasn't just that MacFarlane took a big dump all over Fox News Channel, which is part of the same News Corp. empire that supports him. Frankly, as acts of defiance go, biting the hand that feeds you feels a little passe.

What stood out, rather, was both MacFarlane's well-reasoned defense of "liberal Hollywood" and his willingness to name names when asked, "Name five people who don't make you laugh."

To the latter, MacFarlane dutifully rattled off the following: "Rob Schneider. Rob Schneider again. Oh, Rainn Wilson -- I'm sure he's a super nice guy, but he doesn't make me laugh. I'm sure Adam Sandler is still funny, but he doesn't do funny things anymore; it's that Eddie Murphy curse. ... And 'Shrek,' not funny. The thing that drives me nuts about those Pixar movies, those DreamWorks CGI movies, is that they're gorgeous to look at, impressive beyond belief, but not incredibly nutritious. A lot of the jokes are obvious and kind of tired."

OK, I'd disagree with him about Pixar (find me a better movie this year than "Up"), but I'm pretty much in agreement with him on much of that list -- and more than anything, impressed that he would brazenly violate the "Thou shalt not speak ill of others in the community" commandment. I suppose being wildly wealthy at a relatively young age (he's now 35) will do that for you, but the image of publicists squirming nervously is pretty irresistible.

As for that wealth, MacFarlane also tackled the notion that people in Hollywood are "out of touch," pointing out that he came from extremely modest means: "For years I lived in a shitty one-room apartment with no air-conditioning, barely able to pay my rent. Look at the Bushes. That's out of touch. It's also a very ill-thought-out label. Hollywood is not full of people who are wealthy because they were born that way. It's full of people who are wealthy because they did something people were interested in."

Bingo. Many conservative talking heads love to ridicule liberal celebrities, but beyond those born into the biz, many of those celebrities actually represent the kinds of self-made success stories that the right loves to champion -- often speaking out, by the way, against their economic self-interest as members of the highest tax bracket.

MacFarlane also says that he can drink a lot of Jack Daniel's and still function reasonably well, which I used to be able to do when I was in my 30s.

So while I might not be the biggest supporter of "Family Guy" and "American Dad," let me be the first to recommend the full Playboy interview -- to be slowly consumed while hoisting a Jack Daniel's in the producer's honor.

Activists on the left and the right might not agree on much, but everyone seems to love boycotting advertisers as a way of expressing their displeasure with program content.

The latest two targets: Fox News Channel's "Glenn Beck," and the Comedy Central "Roast of Joan Rivers."

The Parents Television Council has not only issued a strongly worded press release of condemnation (fortunately, all the PTC's press releases sound this way, so it's nothing to get too alarmed about) regarding the vulgarity of the Rivers roast but even warned viewers in advance. And something like 2.8 million of them still tuned in (perverts), although that represented a steep decline from the last showcase featuring Larry the Cable Guy.

Frankly, I tried to watch some of the roast and quickly turned it off -- not because it was offensive to my delicate sensibilities, but simply because it was awful, unfunny and most of the comics on hand make me weep all over again for the loss of George Carlin.

Beck, meanwhile, has come under fire since a rant in which he called President Obama a "racist" and said he has a "deep-seated hatred for white people," which is among the more sober and restrained things that the Howard Beale wannabe has said lately. The New York Times reports that about a dozen sponsors have withdrawn from Beck's program, which is always amusing -- like these sponsors were shocked, shocked to discover that lunacy is going on in this establishment.

Frankly, sponsor boycotts make the protesters feel better but seldom serve much of a purpose in the long term. If a program's successful, the advertisers that slip away will be replaced or eventually return. It's happened over and over, from "NYPD Blue" (too blue for Christian conservatives) to "Dr. Laura" (who drew fire from gay-rights activists).

In other words, it's a shell game -- one that networks have pretty well mastered, whether the fire comes from the left or the right.

Keith Olbermann skewered Glenn Beck and the "Fox & Friends" gang on Monday. Bill O'Reilly insisted again that NBC News is corrupt, accused MSNBC of "left-wing lunacy" and gloated (despite saying that he wasn't) about Fox News Channel's booming ratings.

Gee, if this is a truce, it's hard to imagine what war would look like.

The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz assembled a good deconstruction of the supposed Fox News-MSNBC truce that wasn't, and also visited the issue on his CNN program "Reliable Sources" (clip below). Meanwhile, the New York Times' Brian Stelter seemed more determined to defend his original over-statement of the story than actually advance it in his follow-up piece.

Kurtz's key passage states that the high-level talks between News Corp. and General Electric about their respective networks was "never intended to be a cease-fire." Rather, he writes, "The best that the men who run two of the nation's media giants were hoping to achieve was a ratcheting down of the rhetoric between their warring commentators. But Keith Olbermann refused to play along this week, Bill O'Reilly returned fire, and the New York Times got wounded in the crossfire."

Kurtz also paraphrases Fox News CEO Roger Ailes as saying that he can control his nutcases but that GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt couldn't wrangle his. This dovetails with my latest column, which makes the point that diva talent isn't easy to control.

Frankly, I still think the simple goal of toning down the barbs and restoring a semblance of civility is a laudable one. The big problem is where it originated.

If the guys actually running these networks imposed editorial control over their news stars, that would be fine. In print, after all, that's what editors are supposed to do.

In other words, it wouldn't be unreasonable if MSNBC President Phil Griffin prevailed upon Olbermann to be less personal or merely less relentless in skewering O'Reilly -- and let's face it, he often veers outside his lane just to run him over -- in the same way CNN Prez Jonathan Klein theoretically ought to talk to Lou Dobbs about backing off on his "birther" movement obsession, and Ailes should curb the rhetorical excesses of his "nutcases."

What's troubling is for that mandate to filter down from Immelt, who was clearly reacting to O'Reilly's unsubstantiated slams against the company. Update in response to comment below:  These include charges that Immelt is a "despicable human being" directly responsible for the death of American soldiers because GE conducted business with Iran and allegations that NBC has given the Obama administration favorable coverage in exchange for favors from the government. At one point, O'Reilly said it's "not a stretch to assume" that NBC might be assisting Obama hoping for a payoff. Sorry, but that's innuendo, not evidence.

As for Ailes, if all the reporting is accurate he has been fairly unabashed about the quid pro quo twist that says, "Leash your dogs and I'll restrain mine."

The odd part is the hand-wringing assumption that criticism of Fox News would somehow be silenced if MSNBC dialed down its nightly jabs. Historically, though, networks haven't targeted each other (think of it as "Honor among thieves"), leaving it to print critics -- or more recently, satirical outlets such as "The Daily Show" -- to analyze, expose and shame TV channels.

This whole "feud" started, remember, when Olbermann began mischievously punching up at O'Reilly, who took the bait more fabulously than he ever could have imagined -- to the point where the FNC host now sees "smear merchants" around every corner.

But now -- with so much vitriol already in the ether -- the tit for tat has grown petty. There are bigger fish to fry, and these networks should get to the business of frying them. As for the Times' Stelter, he should probably wait until he actually sees a white flag waving before reporting on the next "truce."

Kudos to Fox for getting the TV Critics Assn. and tackling the Paula Abdul question head-on during their press tour session Thursday. Fox's handling of the matter was in pretty stark contrast to NBC, where the execs who were left to appear seemed ill-prepared to address the inevitable "So what happened to that Ben Silverman guy?"

Granted, NBC's scripted programming chief Angela Bromstad and reality topper Paul Telegdy are the wrong people to ask those questions, but since nobody above their pay grade was on the panels -- and new exec Jeff Gaspin didn't show up until the network's Wednesday-night party -- a little more prep might have spared Bromstad from eliciting guffaws when she responded to Silverman's departure.

Fox Entertainment Prez Kevin Reilly also registered an interesting point that's been discussed here regarding NBC. While taking the high road generally, he noted that any analysis of Jay Leno's new program has to be undertaken "holistically" -- that is, in the context of how the network's faring from 8-10 p.m., as well as what sort of tremors Leno's 10 o'clock performance might send through late local news and into latenight, where much of the network's older audience has already left "The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien."

Meanwhile, still-minty-fresh Fox Entertainment Chairman Peter Rice received smatters of applause just for showing up, reflecting how the TCA executive sessions are shrinking in both duration (now about a half-hour each) and stature, with top network officials often skipping those events. What, are they allergic to bloggers or something?

After a session where Abdul/"American Idol"-related questions accounted for about half of those asked (fewer than I would have bet on going in), Rice actually sounded like he enjoyed himself. "These guys are funny," he said at one point, suggesting that his comedy standards are already being compromised.

Yep, TCA's a laugh riot. But given the general drift of things most of it qualifies as gallows humor.

Erratic woman in her mid-40s who is a lightning rod for controversy, speaks gibberish and quits a plum job prematurely....

I think we're looking at the next Governor of Alaska!

Given the challenges we all face, print journalists should take no pleasure in the misfortunes of colleagues at this point. But any way you slice it, this has been a bad week for the TV coverage at the New York Times.

First, public editor Clark Hoyt wrote a column about TV critic Alessandra Stanley's correction-filled tribute to Walter Cronkite under the headline "How Did This Happen?" In the course of that piece, Hoyt made the rather remarkable disclosure that Stanley "was the cause of so many corrections in 2005 that she was assigned a single copy editor responsible for checking her facts." In the wake of the Cronkite memorial, he added, she will "again get special editing attention."

Knowing a little something about the state of journalism, it's hard to see many newspapers supporting a one-to-one editor-to-critic ratio under current staffing levels.

Then on Monday, Keith Olbermann returned to MSNBC's "Countdown" and pretty much eviscerated Times reporter Brian Stelter's Page 1 piece titled "Voices From Above Silence a Cable TV Feud."  In it, Stelter reported that brass at parents General Electric and News Corp. had essentially brokered a truce between the feuding networks.

Olbermann had stated in the Times article that he was party to no such deal, and proceeded to prove it and then some Monday by labeling Stelter, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly and News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch as his "Worst Persons in the World."

Even allowing for the fact that Olbermann was having some fun by thumbing his nose at the Times and GE -- and that the real goal of the truce isn't so much to muzzle the hosts as simply tone down the rhetoric flying back and forth between the networks -- it's hard to conclude that the story wasn't significantly overplayed, despite evidence (topped by Olbermann's statement) that might have raised caution flags. Notably, the Los Angeles Times' Joe Flint (full disclosure: a former colleague) took a much more measured and skeptical approach in reporting on the efforts at corporate peacemaking.

Let's just say sometimes the hunger for a great story can get a few steps ahead of the story itself.

On the plus side, I don't see the need for a correction. After all, Stelter did say the corporate intervention regarding the feud was designed to "bring it to at least a temporary end." The paper just wasn't specific as to precisely how temporary that was going to be.

Both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times are reporting about a supposed truce between Fox News Channel and MSNBC brokered by top News Corp. and General Electric executives.

Although I've long advocated that the two sides exercise some restraint in their increasingly heated war of rhetoric -- which has come to resemble the HBO movie "Weapons of Mass Distraction" -- let's just say I'll completely believe it when I see it. Hell, even corporate behemoths might discover that when it comes to star personalities, creating monsters is easier than controlling them.

At the source of the fracas are MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and FNC's Bill O'Reilly. Having been made the butt of Olbermann's barbs for the last several years, the thin-skinned O'Reilly has become increasingly venomous in leveling counter-attacks at NBC News and GE, clearly hoping to retaliate against those who employ his tormentor. (The odd part is that while Olbermann mentions O'Reilly almost nightly -- regularly naming him "The worst person in the world" -- O'Reilly will never stoop, in his view, to utter Olbermann's name.)

Olbermann has been off the last couple of weeks, but via email he told the New York Times' Brian Stelter that he was "party to no deal." Without Olbermann agreeing to dial back his invective toward O'Reilly, it's hard to imagine a unilateral cessation by Fox.

At least marginally toning down the vitriol would be a step in the right direction. It's gotten to the point where the opposing sides have come close to accusing the other of murder -- O'Reilly maintaining that GE is contributing to the death of Americans by doing business with Iran, Olbermann by alleging that O'Reilly's frequent reports about George Tiller, a doctor who performed abortions, helped lead to his killing. Urging them to play a little nicer hardly seems out of line.

Thanks in part to Lou Dobbs and his pigheaded insistence on flogging the "birther" movement questioning President Obama's origins, both networks seem to agree on at least one thing -- sharing a common contempt for CNN, albeit not for the same reasons.

Given the overheated, conflict-driven climate in the talk/opinion space from which these networks have handsomely profited, it's difficult to squeeze the genie back into the bottle. About the best the bosses can hope for, perhaps, is trading in one bogeyman for another.

Update: Salon's Glenn Greenwald zeroes in on the most disturbing aspect of the story: That GE would seek to muzzle Olbermann (and potentially other MSNBC hosts) in order to protect its corporate interests. By that measure, O'Reilly's retaliatory assault on GE Chairman Jeffrey Immelt and NBC News -- one often characterized by distortions and unsubstantiated allegations -- will have paid off. Indeed, O'Reilly has transparently gone after GE specifically to bring about this sort of concession.

The real question, yet to be determined, is how the supposed "truce" will work in practice -- and whether Olbermann can abide by the restrictions. If it's strictly a matter of toning down or dialing back his commentary -- as opposed to eliminating criticism of FNC -- that falls under the heading of the network exercising editorial discretion over its talent. MSNBC brass has a right to ask that O'Reilly bashing no longer need be a nightly occurrence. The motives might be venal, but it's not unheard of, which is why CNN is receiving such well-deserved criticism for behaving as if it has no control over what comes tumbling out of Dobbs' mouth, just as Fox merits criticism for Glenn Beck's more unhinged statements.

On the flip side, it's hard to envision Olbermann (who is scheduled to return from his vacation next week) accepting an order to completely expunge references to O'Reilly or Fox News from his coverage simply to take the heat off of GE. If that's really what's happening here, this is a much more serious issue.

Bill O'Reilly was back from vacation and instantly in rare, midseason form on Monday. His hour included lamenting the blanket media coverage devoted to the Michael Jackson story -- in a segment where, without a trace of irony, he devoted at least five minutes to talking about the Michael Jackson story.

The inevitable highlight that I tuned in to see, though, was O'Reilly's reaction to Al Franken being sworn in as a U.S. senator from Minnesota. The host didn't disappoint, calling Franken's long-deferred election "a sad day for America."

Franken, of course, built up his slim political resume by picking feuds with prominent conservative voices, writing the book "Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot" and "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right." Moreover, O'Reilly unintentionally helped promote the latter by prodding his bosses at Fox to file suit in an effort to legally block the second book's publication -- a bid that the judge dismissed as "wholly without merit, both factually and legally."

Beyond the indignity of being pictured on Franken's book, O'Reilly was still smarting over a joint appearance at the Los Angeles Book Expo in 2003. With each allotted time to speak, Franken pretty much filibustered for about a half-hour (C-SPAN covered the event) before an exasperated O'Reilly shouted, "Hey, shut up! You had your 35 minutes. Shut up!"

Conservatives in general are apoplectic about the phrase "Senator Franken," but for O'Reilly -- who has plenty of imagined enemies, never mind the real ones -- seeing those words together is a much more personal affront and must be, indeed, a sad day. Still, for his viewers -- or at least those fascinated by the host's combustible nature -- watching him fume whenever the former "Saturday Night Live" writer's name gets mentioned is doubtless going to be extremely entertaining.

Fox News Channel's Stuart Varney came up with a hilarious excuse for Sarah Palin's surprise decision to resign as governor of Alaska before her term's completed.

It's David Letterman's fault!

Throughout Fox's breaking coverage Friday, fill-in anchor Varney kept repeating the question of whether Palin was hounded out of politics by the "vicious" and "scurrilous" attacks against her, citing Letterman's joke about her daughter (and the subsequent controversy that Palin and her supporters stoked) as a prime example.

Sorry, it doesn't wash.

Even if you accept that Letterman's poorly constructed joke was beyond the pale -- and for the record, I feel all that righteous indignation was highly calculated and overblown -- it's hard to defend buckling to such comments as the rationale behind Palin's action. After all, if she truly aspires to higher office, the criticisms will be a lot more pointed than the kind that get delivered by latenight comedians.

Of course, the notion that Palin is nobly stepping aside to A) advance her political career or B) for the greater good of Alaska doesn't endure close scrutiny, either, so Varney was in essence grasping at straws. As Fox News' Carl Cameron put it -- summing up the hanging curve that Palin has served up to detractors -- the political ads against her in any future race will simply say, "Sarah Palin wants to be president, but she quit her last job."

Meanwhile, the unhappiest man in America is probably John Ziegler, the conservative talkshow host turned documentary filmmaker who has sought to transform defending Palin -- or rather, lambasting the mainstream media's handling of her -- into a cottage industry. If Palin is truly out of politics -- as some, in the frenzy of instant analysis, suggested she might be -- it's another sign that the Wasilla native was out of her depth all along.

Strictly as TV theater, Palin's rambling speech -- with her bizarre basketball analogy about when to "pass the ball for victory" -- rightfully should mark the end of her time on the national political stage. As the New York Times' increasingly indispensable Gail Collins noted, not only was the delivery bizarre, but the timing served to "interrupt the plans of TV newscasters to spend the entire weekend pointing out that Michael Jackson is still dead."

The Jackson experience, however, might also explain why Palin is destined to be with us for awhile. Because as with the so-called King of Pop, the Palin circus is just too outlandish, too irresistible a story, to go away anytime soon.

To no one's surprise, Fox News' Bill O'Reilly managed to find four guests who completely agreed that he bore absolutely no responsibility for the murder of Dr. George Tiller -- the Kansas doctor who performed late-term abortions -- to open Monday's "The O'Reilly Factor."

To no one's surprise, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann devoted a sizable portion of his own "Countdown" program to leveling precisely that charge, showing video of O'Reilly saying in regard to Tiller, "There's got to be a special place in Hell for this guy."

O'Reilly said any criticism of his attacks on Tiller were being mounted by his enemies -- Fox News "haters" and "vicious individuals" on "the far left" -- implying that no rational person could find the heated and repeated rhetoric emanating from the channel toward a private citizen troubling.

Saying that viewer and advertiser boycotts would be ineffective, Olbermann suggested a "quarantine" of Fox News Channel, saying that O'Reilly's verbal attacks against Tiller were "blindly irresponsible" and "set the stage for his assassination."

Flipping back and forth between the two programs, I kept thinking that these kind of charges and counter-charges are too serious to be thrown around blithely as part of a cable-TV feud, and that maybe it's time for self-reflection -- for both sides to take a deep breath. Perhaps more than anything, it's time for the bosses at each of these networks to sit down their star talent and calm them down -- for management to actually try managing these mercurial personalities. What a novel thought.

On Tuesday, O'Reilly was back at it, urging an email campaign to GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt. Seriously, does anybody at Fox think this childish finger-pointing benefits anyone? Sure, conflict sells, but someone needs to say that with these platforms comes a need for at least a measure of restraint.

This all started with Olbermann jabbing up at his rival, and O'Reilly has taken the bait more fabulously than the MSNBC host ever could have hoped. But now it has gotten to the point of absurdity, and you get the feeling -- a bit like the HBO movie "Weapons of Mass Distraction" -- that it's going to continue until somebody gets hurt. At that point, even "The Daily Show" won't be able to make this electronic-age Punch and Judy show amusing.

Like I said, a deep breath is in order on both sides. But based on past performance, I won't hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

He threw the competition because he didn't want to have to pose for this picture, taken of Kris Allen (he's the one on the left) at the new "American Idol Experience" at Walt Disney World in Orlando:

Sample captions:

"Haha! AT&T rigged the voting ... and now you're going to Disney World!"

or

"Whew. For a second I thought you were the one who's supposedly coming out in Rolling Stone."

If you've got a better one, send it in.

Republicans and "American Idol" viewers apparently have a lot in common. If they lose an election, they immediately insist that the results must have been influenced by massive voter fraud.

OK, I admit, that's unfair to "American Idol." But you wouldn't know it from the faux controversy being ginned up regarding Kris Allen's "victory" over Adam Lambert.

Inasmuch as "Idol" has never adhered to the "one man, one vote" ideal, I have a hard time taking questions about voting improprieties seriously. And of course, Fox cultivates doubt about the "fairness" of the process by treating its system as if it were the College of Cardinals. (The New York Times, by the way, has been responsible for igniting this latest mini-fracas with the headline "AT&T May Have Swayed 'Idol' Results," proving yet again that whether or not the mainstream media is biased, it certainly has too much time on its hands.)

Although I understand that people become invested in who wins, the truth is once "Idol" reaches the last couple of contestants, everyone has a pretty good shot at a singing career that they wouldn't have otherwise enjoyed. And isn't that ultimately what the whole exercise is about? (See Chris Daughtry, Clay Aiken, etc.)

So I'm shedding just as many tears for Lambert as I am for John McCain and all those GOP crybabies who are still boo-hooing over a few doltish members of community group ACORN trying to register Mickey Mouse, as if that accounted for losing by 7 million votes.

Get over it, gang. Your guy didn't win. And hey, look at the bright side: With both "Idol" and the midterm elections, we get to do it all again next year!

Frankly, I don't give a rat's ass who wins the latest cycle of "American Idol." But I am wincing at the prospect of the new volley of "culture war" arguments that the outcome is sure to unleash.

The faceoff between Adam Lambert and Kris Allen will inevitably yield the red state-blue state/"will America vote for a [in this case (presumably) gay guy]?" debate that circled the 2008 presidential election, thanks in part to Lambert's theatrical style and photos of him that surfaced on the Internet. Headlines like "Could Adam Lambert Be First Gay American Idol? have already conflated a Fox reality karaoke competition into a social referendum to rival Barack Obama becoming the first African-American president.

Pundits and print outlets desperate to latch onto the coattails of the show's success will spend untold hours seeking to parse the larger significance of the voting results. For awhile, anyway, any talk about the franchise cooling or its ratings decline this season will be lost amid the "What does this all mean?" blather.

The whole ritual is as predictable as it is pointless, but hey, anything that can connect TV's most-watched program to politics is a big win for cable news and consumer newspapers, who would like very much to ignore the fact that their average viewer/reader is more likely to be retired than fall within the coveted adults 18-49 demographic. Think I'm kidding? Let's not forget, the median age of Fox News Channel viewers is 65, and CNN and MSNBC's profiles are only slightly younger.

"The future's all yours," Simon Cowell told both contestants on Wednesday.

The present, unfortunately, is all ours. Please wake me when it's over.

Upfront presentations have to be graded on a curve, so I begin my annual scorecard with relatively passable marks for Fox -- which, with NBC doing its "in-front" shtick, essentially opened the broadcast festivities on Monday.

There wasn't much of a wow factor in either Fox's presentation or the programs displayed, based (an inexact science at best) on the brief new-series previews that the network showed. Indeed, if there's any headline out of Fox it's that the network has largely stood pat, trotting out relatively few new programs, despite Fox Entertainment Prez Kevin Reilly's pledge that Fox wouldn't use its frontrunning status thanks to "American Idol" to hide behind its big lead.

In terms of upcoming programs, Fox got the most mileage out of its musical "Glee," including a rousing live number to showcase the series. The new sitcom "Brothers" and animated spinoff "The Cleveland Show" each generated a few laughs, which is a few more than the preview of "Sons of Tucson" could muster.

On the drama front, Fox clearly wants to leverage "Idol" again, as it did this year to establish two mediocre dramas, "Fringe" and "Lie to Me." Notably, both of those new one-hour entries will arrive at midseason to cash in on "Idol's" benevolent lead-ins and promotional base.

Alas, "Past Life" looks like another "The X-Files Lite" entry, though God knows Fox has gotten enough mileage out of that formula. The potential breakthrough in the bunch would appear to be "Human Target," which stars Mark Valley as a bodyguard for hire. If the show can maintain the snazzy look and tone of the presentation, the series might fill a breezy action niche that's been long dormant.

As for the presentation itself, which I watched at a closed-circuit feed in L.A. where the sound was slightly off, there wasn't much sizzle. Fox seemed to miss an opportunity in failing to bring out Wanda Sykes -- the host of a new weekly latenight program premiering in November -- to provide some stand-up fresh off her newsmaking turn at the White House correspondents dinner. The opening was also flat, with too much "network TV is still king" cheerleading from Fox sales chief Jon Nesvig and newly arrived Fox Entertainment Chairman Peter Rice.

For his part, Nesvig couldn't even utter the word "recession," referring only to looking forward to teaming with advertisers as we approach "the coming recovery." I get that the glass is always half full at these things, but geez.

Rice did make one interesting point by citing how the "Idol" audience is equivalent to the entire boxoffice haul for "Iron Man" if you charged $10 for each of those viewers -- an observation I've frequently used in the past to demonstrate TV's reach. But I have a suspicion most of those watching were thinking, "So what?" It's an interesting cultural touchstone but in this context doesn't have much to do with negotiating ad buys.

So all told, a couple of promising-looking shows, a few more that didn't look quite so promising, and a relatively short (about 75 minutes, by my count) presentation, for a lineup that appears to be saying to the rest of the TV world, "We're ahead, and we've got the ball. If you want it, you're going to have to take it away from us, because we're not taking any risks." Not the worst strategy in this environment, but nothing to knock me off the uncomfortable wooden chairs that they put out for us in L.A.

Overall grade, subject to revision: C+ 

More than 1,200 people had the odd experience of watching TV as a shared communal event on Monday, as Fox screened the two-part season finale of "24" at the Wadsworth Theater to what could only be described as a wildly appreciative audience.

It was clearly a sign of studio support for the show, which has rebounded creatively this year. That's no small accomplishment, since the series followed up its Emmy-winning season with what most agree (including yours truly) was a subpar Day Six, then saw its latest flight delayed by the writers strike.

To my mind, the key to the current season has been its villain-by-committee approach. As opposed to trying to sustain a single thread, as in the past, the show has essentially mined a threat for an extended arc, then handed off to a new bad guy that helps carry the story line for the next batch of episodes. The fact that those heavies have been cast with top-notch actors like Jon Voight and Will Patton certainly doesn't hurt, though in terms of inheriting a mess, the roller-coaster format has given the show's fictional president (played by Cherry Jones) a series of headaches that makes Barack Obama's situation look like a relative picnic.

As I stated in moderating the event, "24" also remains a political Rorschach test, seized upon by forces on both the left and right who are eager to frame real-life issues in pop-culture terms. More than anything, the "Does America support torture because it watches Jack Bauer?" nonsense is representative of how the cable networks covet casual news viewers and try to cloak their coverage in anything that they think will help lure them in.

Yet despite the current torture headlines, series co-creator Joel Surnow's outspoken conservatism and former Vice President Dick Cheney's unintended promotional tour for the program, "24" is at its core a thriller. As exec producer Howard Gordon stated, people have been watching James Bond for more than 40 years, with the spy having by now outlived the Cold War that birthed him by a couple of decades.

A small cloud hovers over "24" because of the latest off-screen fracas involving star Kiefer Sutherland, but the show is currently scheduled to begin production on its next season in a few weeks and be back on its traditional January-through-May schedule for 2010.

Perhaps by then, God willing, Cheney will be out of the news.

Fox News Channel didn't endorse Barack Obama, and one suspects few of its primetime hosts would publicly admit how happy they are to have him in office. Nevertheless, his administration is working out very, very well for the right-leaning cable network.

From News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch's comments regarding today's quarterly earnings:

"Our Cable Network Programming segment showed remarkable growth, led by the Fox News Channel, which nearly doubled its operating income over the year-ago quarter. ... The Fox News Channel (FNC) almost doubled its operating income versus the third quarter a year ago, primarily from increased affiliate revenues on higher rates. In the quarter ended March 31, 2009, FNC primetime ratings were up 23% compared with the same period a year ago."

The practical implications of this -- amid an otherwise tough quarter for the media conglomerate, in keeping with the deflated results put up by its peers -- are that Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes and his posse should continue full steam ahead in delivering voice-of-the-opposition attacks on the Obama administration. Murdoch might have personally softened his political views (or so Michael Wolff says in his biography of the mogul), but he's nothing if not a pragmatist, and feeding red meat (and of course Tea bags) to the disenfranchised right has been very good for business.

So remember, the next time you see someone on Fox complain about the president being a socialist/Marxist/fascist/foreign-born/closet-radical/terrorist sympathizer, strictly from the standpoint of good old-fashioned capitalism, they wouldn't have it any other way.

Attention, pundit and political classes: Can we please, please, declare a moratorium on filtering the torture debate (or if you prefer, "harsh interrogation techniques," or "enhanced interrogation methods") through the prism of the Fox series "24"?

 This is hardly a new issue, and one of the program's co-creators, Joel Surnow, probably contributed to perpetuating the discussion in a chest-puffing New Yorker interview in 2007. In the piece, Surnow jokingly proclaimed himself a "right-wing nut job" and boasted about his relationship with Rush Limbaugh.

Seriously, though, I'm beginning to wonder if the punditocracy A) thinks its audience is so stupid that they can't engage a policy discussion without dramatic visual aids; B) is so desperate to link news to pop culture that they're grasping at straws; C) somehow made it all the way to adulthood without ever watching a James Bond or "Dirty Harry" movie; or D) thinks "24" is actually a reasonable facsimile of reality -- you know, the kind of reality where African dictators can assault the White House by water with an elaborate Scuba attack. Sadly, it's probably all of the above.

Yes, "24" premiered shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which made all those spy shows introduced that fall (the others being "Alias" and "The Agency") seem oddly prescient, when it was mostly just one of those weird coincidences. As a consequence, the show's questions about how far America and its defenders would go in the name of thwarting terrorism got sucked into the national discourse. As he suffered to save us, Jack Bauer went beyond being just the unluckiest counter-terrorism agent on the planet to become a symbol, especially for those who feel the end justifies virtually any means.

The convenient amnesia here is that there have always been heroes that pushed into vigilante territory, without trying to extrapolate from that to yield a referendum on torture. Bond had a license to kill, and did so cold-bloodedly. Dirty Harry shot down a suspect and stepped on the bleeding wound to get information. Batman swooped in from rooftops to mete out justice.

These characters are entertaining on a number of levels, not the least being that violence and vengeance can be extremely cathartic when they're done well. But that doesn't mean the people tuning in or anteing up for tickets are gung-ho to see alleged real-life terrorists and criminals dangled off buildings or have electrodes attached to their vital areas.

Perhaps conservatives were so desperate for a Hollywood production that appeared to endorse one of their own that they got carried away and sought to conjoin this hyper-stylized thriller to current events. My guess is it's more a sign of the fact that news organizations see pop culture as the Holy Grail to lure younger viewers and women to newscasts they wouldn't otherwise be caught dead watching. So we get Paris Hilton's arrest being covered like a national emergency, and constant references to "24" in the context of how the public feels about torture and "ticking-bomb" scenarios.

Call me wacky, but I'd like to think that most people can tell the difference between fiction and reality. And if they can't, then they're such pathetic, hopelessly befuddled lost causes that they probably have a future in cable news.

Update: "The Daily Show" weighed in on torture in a big way on Tuesday, as Jon Stewart went back and forth with Cliff May, president of the impressive-sounding-but-I-have-no-idea-what-it-does Foundation for Defense of Democracies, one of those groups that seems to exist largely to have its founder/leader/front man booked on cable news.

Click here for the interview, which Comedy Central has broken into multiple parts.

Just got through reading Bill O'Reilly's latest column, in which he quotes questionable poll data and insists that the New York Times is experiencing financial troubles because of its diabolical left-wing bias.

This has become a favorite canard for O'Reilly, whose antipathy toward MSNBC for employing Keith Olbermann has led him to make some remarkably specious and unsubstantiated statements of late, like his assertion that there's a secret quid pro quo between NBC News and the Obama administration. A presidential appointment for GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt to join the president's team of economic advisers was thus "payback for Immelt allowing NBC News to openly support Obama for president," O'Reilly flatly said on his Fox News Channel program, without a shred of proof.

The line that really stuck out in a column full of howlers, though, was this one: "In this very intense marketplace, insulting half the country on a daily basis may not be a great business plan."

Hate to rain on your parade, Bill, but it seems to be working out pretty well for FNC's Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, doesn't it? In fact, playing to half the country -- or the slightly less than half that voted Republican in the last election -- is of course precisely Fox's business plan, and it's a brilliant one. If you only need 2-3 million viewers to be an unqualified hit in the cable space, catering directly to them -- as Fox did in actively championing the Tea Party protests -- is a shrewd marketing maneuver. And fortunately, Nielsen meters aren't equipped to discern how many of those viewers are living in armed bunkers or wearing tin-foil hats.

Newspapers have plenty of problems with their financial model these days, and the Times (or for that matter, Variety) is hardly immune to these forces. But BO's assessment of the source of those woes is just plain BS.

There are plenty of reasons why Rupert Murdoch's journalistic enterprises are viewed with a jaundiced eye, and the recent announcement that former Fox News Channel exec John Moody has taken an uber-position at News Corp. should raise additional red flags at rival studios.

That's because Murdoch has never been shy about using his far-flung assets -- foremost among them the New York Post -- to jab at competitors. And if that happens to destabilize other media conglomerates -- or have reporters yapping at their heels at inopportune times, like leading up to primetime's upfront sales period -- so much the better.

Because of this history, the timing and tone of reports in the Post are often suspect, even when there's a rational basis for them. The paper's most recent salvos against NBC Universal and Disney, helpfully for the purposes of this demonstration, appeared simultaneously. One report last week stated that CNBC is in a supposed panic over its anti-Obama image, while another the same day placed ABC Entertainment chief Stephen McPherson in the Post's gun sights, with anonymous sources (and one ad buyer) saying the ABC exec desperately needs to find a new hit because of this spring's poor performance with a crop of new series.

Page Six used "an insider" to report about a "top-secret" dinner in which top GE and NBC brass held a "powwow" to discuss "whether CNBC has become too conservative and is beating up on Obama too much." CNBC denied that was the point of the meeting, but this alleged cabal has already provided ripe fodder for Bill O'Reilly on Murdoch's Fox News Channel, who has been in a blind rage against NBC ever since Keith Olbermann began regularly mocking him on-air.

As for McPherson, there's no question that ABC has struggled of late, though I'm not clear as to how that distinguishes the Disney-owned network from any broadcaster except CBS and, to a far lesser degree, the CW. Even the Post conceded, "To be sure, McPherson's job isn't in jeopardy ... but his reputation as a talented script doctor and series shaper is indeed on the line." And as we all know, there's nothing more painful for a TV honcho than a tarnished rep as a "series shaper."

Again, these articles wouldn't particularly stand out until you consider the source -- which is why Moody's News Corp.-level gig bears watching. Obviously, there are cost-cutting advantages and synergies to be found in allowing "worldwide editorial properties to share content and resources across the entire company." With one person coordinating all that coverage, however, the question is whose ox will News Corp. gore? Already, a Post-Wall Street Journal-Fox News echo chamber exists, with the first paper's conservative tilt and the latter's editorial pages feeding and legitimizing items for use by FNC's right-wing talent.

Moody was famous (or notorious) for circulating "the memo" to Fox News staff, which directed them on how to approach that day's coverage. It will be interesting to see what kind of marching orders emerge from his new role, but don't be surprised if well-timed barbs at other studios just keep on coming.

After Rosie O'Donnell's dreadful one-and-out variety show for NBC and Fox's critically lambasted introduction of "Osbournes Reloaded" on Tuesday, one has to wonder if the networks' plans to revive old-time variety shows aren't being quickly dispatched back to the drawing board.

Even jaded reality producers were full of "holy crap" reactions (safely anonymous, of course) to the 35-minute "Osbournes" premiere, which I foolishly took a whack at in a hastily written review without help from a single hallucinogenic substance. At the risk of redundancy, the best email that I received came from a producer who said, "Bernie Madoff should have to watch that show over and over again until he dies."

Apparently, even in liberal Hollywood, Dick Cheney isn't alone in advocating torture.

"Osbournes" averaged 8.4 million viewers overall and a 3.7 rating among adults age 18-49, but a closer inspection of the numbers is considerably less respectable than that. For starters, "American Idol" averaged 24.8 million viewers in its last quarter-hour, and despite a seamless handoff "Osbournes" drifted downward to 7.3 million people for its last 15 minutes. When that many viewers simultaneously lunge for their remote controls, it's a wonder somebody didn't hurt.

The special also irritated a handful of Fox affiliates that opted not to broadcast it, yielding the requisite gloating from the Parents Television Council. Yet even a blind pig finds an acorn once in awhile, and there is some truth in the criticism that Fox went straight from "Idol" into a program whose main purpose seemed to be testing how many times it could bleep its foul-mouthed hosts.

Although I'm all for playing around with kinder and gentler (or at least different) forms of reality, the cynicism inherent in "Osbournes Reloaded" was a throwback to Fox's bad old days. The network has yet to schedule any additional telecasts of the program, and I wouldn't suggest holding your breath waiting for another anytime soon. And while it's always dicey to read too much into one specific failure, my guess is a few of the variety shows in development are currently being reconsidered faster than you can bite the head off a bat out of you know where.

National Public Radio's David Folkenflik is a little late to the party in noticing the surge in Fox News Channel's ratings during President Barack Obama's young presidency. Yet one wonders if News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch isn't becoming a prisoner, in some respects, of Fox News' success.

Always a pragmatist, Murdoch has plenty of business to transact that could involve the new administration, and according to biographer Michael Wolff has seen his own notoriously conservative political views soften somewhat. Yet Murdoch's conservative assets have grown more strident than ever, from Glenn Beck's tearful rants to the New York Post cartoon flap, over which Murdoch himself ultimately apologized.

Fox News CEO Roger Ailes has done a bang-up job in capitalizing on conservative/GOP resentment toward the Democrats' electoral victories, but it's hard to argue that FNC has veered harder right in the process -- not only adding Beck, but allowing Sean Hannity to go solo since Alan Colmes stopped lending his tiny voice to that program. And even Bill O'Reilly has pretty much dispensed with the pretense of fairness and balance, as Monday night's show demonstrated, in which the host asked if Obama is "over his head," then discussed the question with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and two right-leaning pundits who mostly just agreed with him.

(O'Reilly, by the way, continues to experience Captain Queeg-like moments on air, the latest involving an ambush interview with a blogger that dared to criticize him. Couching the story as one of "good & evil," he ended up bringing the whole thing around to attacking NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker -- clearly as a means of lashing out at MSNBC for employing Keith Olbermann. I don't have the time or patience to recount the entire dust-up, but see this Huffington Post link for the video and back story.)

Ailes is enjoying such success at Fox News that it's unlikely Murdoch will rock the boat, especially with so much else going on at the studio as No. 2 Peter Chernin steps aside.  Put simply, Murdoch has a lot on his plate, so FNC can run on auto-pilot for awhile. The really interesting part, though, will be seeing how and whether Murdoch can seek to gingerly distance himself from FNC when the need arises to try cozying up to Obama. If Murdoch can master that two-step, he'll qualify as not just a man amongst moguls but the Lord of the Dance.

The latest management shakeup at News Corp. (detailed by my colleagues Michael Schneider and Tatiana Siegel) has resulted in another slightly unorthodox executive reshuffling from Rupert Murdoch, placing Fox Searchlight's Peter Rice in charge of the Fox network as chairman of Fox Entertainment.

This got me to thinking about the last 20 years at what was once called the Fox Broadcasting Co., which has a history of reaching beyond the roster of TV industry usual suspects in choosing presidents and chairman. Please forgive me if I miss anybody, but my list of the last two decades goes as follows -- and given that my first stint at Variety began in '87, it's also like watching my professional life flash before my eyes.

Let's stipulate that cable news chews through a huge number of guests on a daily basis. Even so, Fox News Channel and the bookers of Sean Hannity's program really aren't trying hard enough if the best conservative actor they can find is former "Saturday Night Live" member Victoria Jackson.

Jackson appeared on "Hannity" earlier this week (Crooks and Liars has the video), and wherever one falls on the ideological spectrum, it was flat-out embarrassing. Jackson brandished a bible, ranted about Barack Obama being a Communist and suggested that Hannity or Rush Limbaugh should run for president.

Frankly, I'm not a huge fan of enlisting actors -- whatever their political views -- as guests in such venues, mostly because it's such a transparent ploy to try broadening the cable-news audience. Besides, Bill Maher has that "Odd dinner party chat" niche scoped out on HBO.

Assuming you're determined to do so, though, there are helpful guides to conservative/pro-GOP performers out there despite the entertainment industry's liberal bent (Newsmax.com has even published a list, labeling them "Hollywood Heroes"), and some aren't still dining out on credits like "Larry the Cable Guy's Star-Studded Christmas Extravaganza" and an "SNL" stint that ended in 1992. Either that, or the recession has really hit in an unexpected way and we're finally running out of famous people.

While I recognize the value in a little comic relief now and then, Hannity isn't doing Jackson -- or for that matter his own cause -- a service by acting like she belongs in their arsenal of advocates. Then again, even Hannity appeared slightly shellshocked as Jackson prattled on for several uncomfortable minutes. "I'm speechless," Fox News contributor Bob Beckel said after some give-and-take with her.

He shouldn't have been the only one.

1) After listening to the contestants on Tuesday night, shouldn't they add a 14th number for a "none of the above" category, even at the risk of connecting to another phone-sex line?

2) Paula Abdul has officially begun creeping me out, so much so that watching the show has become uncomfortable. I've been at parties before when I was talking to someone who acted like that, and the fascination with how they're holding themselves together begins to mesh uncomfortably with the sense that they might fall into you, throw a drink at you, or throw up on your shoes. Abdul's on-air demeanor has gotten so weird that even my buddy who got fixed up with her on a blind date in high school has finally stopped talking about it.

3) Fortunately, we have other people here that watch "American Idol" with religious fervor. I just can't bring myself to do that. Thanks to TiVo, however -- zapping through all the human-interest fluff, Ryan Seacrest's non-interviews and the commercials -- I actually finished a two-hour episode in about 50 minutes. Then I watched "The Daily Show" to cleanse my palate and reactivate my brain.

4) Favorite moment: When Simon Cowell turned to Gordon Ramsay in the audience, and he didn't have a microphone, so his lips just moved without any sound. That's actually the first time I've ever found the "Hell's Kitchen" chef tolerable. And at least his hair looked way better than his mentor, Marco Pierre White, from NBC's "The Chopping Block."

5) Cowell had a fabulous burst of honesty when he blurted out that "American Idol" isn't about art. Bingo.

6) Now that it's been pretty well established that becoming the official chronicler of "American Idol" is not going to stop the bleeding at -- much less save -- the sadly beleaguered Los Angeles Times, is there any chance that the paper might reduce its coverage of all things "Idol" back to merely a ridiculous amount, instead of a breathless, pandering, embarrassingly ridiculous amount?

Attention, Joss Whedon-ites. Determined to give the show a second chance, I watched the upcoming fourth episode of "Dollhouse," which Fox sent out in advance. I was momentarily confused, however, when the DVD began with several minutes of silent footage, either by accident or for "B-roll" purposes. Anyway, Eliza Dushku jumped in the pool and swam a lap, took a shower and got out wrapped in a towel, all while sporting a vacant stare. The full episode then followed, complete with dialog and sound.

I actually liked the first part better.

OK, that's kind of mean. But I can't escape the feeling that this entire series is structurally flawed. And while I admire Dushku's willingness to flaunt her assets in playing Echo, the show's mentally manipulated heroine, it's hard to remember a scripted project -- short perhaps of "Barb Wire" -- that more persistently objectified its female protagonist, who played a half-dressed dancer in episode three and first appears as a stripper in the fourth hour. (Frankly, I was tempted to work the word "naked" into this post in a lame effort to increase traffic, but that would be a naked ploy, and therefore wrong and create pictures in my head that are very, very dirty.)

The ratings for "Dollhouse" are somewhat difficult to analyze, especially given that "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" is providing such an anemic lead-in. Both shows are clearly being recorded and played back (apparently, some sci-fi geeks actually do have better things to do than stay home on Friday nights watching this and "Battlestar Galactica" -- not that there's anything wrong with that), but even accounting for that boost the overall numbers remain pretty low.

Whedon fans have preached patience, but if "Dollhouse" doesn't survive chalk this up as another bit of collateral damage from the writers strike -- a show greenlit based on its beguiling elements but that looks to have been shoved into production lacking a well-defined blueprint. It's a reminder that giving talent the latitude they seek occasionally means allowing them to leave you sitting there with a rather Echo-like vacant-looking stare.

Bill O'Reilly's eagerness to bash what he likes to call the "liberal media" has led to a bizarre distortion of reality in both his "Talking Points" and his latest column, titled "The End of Obama-Mania." But in the process the Fox News Channel host not only contradicts himself, he seems to throw some of his FNC colleagues under a bus as well.

While touting Fox News' solid post-election ratings, O'Reilly takes an extra step and argues that newspapers are struggling financially because "the folks" are "gravitating toward news agencies that seemingly tell it like it is. Committed left wing newspapers are folding in Seattle, Minneapolis and perhaps in San Francisco. The New York Times had to borrow money from a Mexican guy at 14% interest." Ole!

Except that newspapers' economic difficulties began long before the election. And the demand for news content online is actually at record levels. The real, well-documented problem is that papers haven't figured out how to monetize that web readership, which has been seriously exacerbated by the economic downturn in print. (For a pretty good backgrounder on where newspapers went wrong, read recovering journalist Joe Flint's blog item about the Rocky Mountain News folding on the Paley Center's website.)

 The truth is that O'Reilly has become so blinded by the "smear merchants" he sees behind every criticism of him that he keeps making utterly bogus connections. But the most interesting part of the column is his conclusion about right-leaning news sources. "Obama bashing doesn't do the folks much good, either. Why waste time on attacks, when information is what the folks need?" he writes, which sort of sounds like he doesn't even acknowledge the existence of his Fox compadres Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, who are openly hostile toward the administration. Their ratings, after all, are up too. Is that because "the folks" simply want sources that will "tell it like it is," or (more likely) because "the folks" who are still smarting from the spanking they took during the election want somebody to reinforce their worldview? (Notably, several progressives/liberals responded to my earlier post about Fox's ratings saying they're watching the channel now just to savor the theater of listening to conservatives whine. In my review of Alexandra Pelosi's HBO documentary "Right America, Feeling Wronged," I likened this to taking pleasure in seeing the other team's cheerleaders cry after they lose the big game.)

O'Reilly is welcome to bask in the glory of his own ratings accomplishments, but he undermines his cause when he so obviously mangles the facts in order to lash out at his ever-growing enemies list. Because there's enough spin emanating from that quadrant of the "No-Spin Zone," frankly, to give you a throbbing headache.

Not to pat myself on the back (OK, maybe a little), but this was easily predictable the day after the election -- and even more so as President Obama's inauguration approached: Conservative talk hosts, or at least those who anchor Fox News Channel's lineup, are enjoying a solid post-election bump.

Bill O'Reilly -- not a self-professed conservative, but clearly more antagonistic toward what he calls "secular-progressives" than any other political constituency -- was up 33% in February compared to the previous year, averaging 3.6 million viewers in just-issued Nielsen data. Sean Hannity -- an unapologetic pit bull for the right -- rose 38% (to nearly 2.8 million) now that he's shed former co-host Alan Colmes and, along with Rush Limbaugh, picked up the mantle for the GOP cause while proclaiming his radio show "conservatism in exile." And Fox has further burnished its openly conservative credentials with the addition of Glenn Beck -- one of the least sophisticated voices in the cable space, who started in January and has doubled his timeslot.

Granted, like all the cable news channels, Fox still skews heavily toward those over age 55, but it's overall gains have included solid increases among adults 25-54 -- the prime currency for news ad rates, which should put a smile on the face of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. It's no secret that Ailes and outgoing News Corp. CEO Peter Chernin were never particularly close, and the strong performance by FNC should ensure that others within the News empire tread cautiously in encroaching on Ailes' fiefdom.

The one potential negative is that Fox risks narrowing its lens -- becoming a balm to those still angry over the election results, resentful about Obama's victory and ranting about socialism -- while excluding more of the moderates and liberals that the channel attracted. Frankly, when I turned to FNC not long ago and heard Hannity still railing about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, it was hard not to think, "Geez, dude, let it go. We've got bigger fish to fry."

Still, when a relatively small slice of the U.S. population like 2.4 million viewers (Fox's overall primetime average in February -- a 28% year-to-year improvement) can tower over the direct cable-news competition in total audience, you needn't please all the people all the time. And fortunately, when it comes to delivering eyeballs media buyers don't quibble about little things -- beginning with how bitter they might be.

Update: O'Reilly addressed Fox's post-election ratings on his program in the "Talking Points" opening on Feb. 26, but he appeared to draw the wrong conclusion. "Americans are worried, and they want the truth," he said, attacking the usual targets -- NBC News, the New York Times -- in his self-serving argument that nobody can expect "real" news for those left-leaning sources.

Perhaps that's parly responsible for FNC's rise, but another source seems considerably more likely: Americans who can't believe that their side lost, and who look to Fox News for reinforcement of their views and reassurance.

The real action in pundit circles over the next few weeks might be less about the usual Punch-and-Judy act involving left vs. right than the pragmatic right vs. partisan right.

That schism was very much in evidence on talkradio station KABC-AM (790) in Los Angeles on Inauguration Day, when local host Al Rantel -- a conservative who occupies the afternoon-drive slot following the nationally syndicated Sean Hannity -- said that Hannity has "lost his mind in some respects" by declaring his program "conservatism in exile."

Hannity and Rush Limbaugh have become the de facto voice of the opposition since Barack Obama's election, giving not a moment's grace period to the new president. Rantel has been more pragmatic, and during Tuesday's program openly questioned Hannity's motives -- Input from consultants? Attempting to bond himself closer to listeners? -- in promoting the notion that conservatives were somehow "in exile," as if their rights had been revoked.

As I recently stated in a column about Hannity's ascent at Fox News Channel before he officially became a solo act, appealing to the red-meat Republican base -- the one yelling that Obama's a wild-eyed socialist -- probably bodes well for Hannity commercially, inasmuch as you only need a couple of million viewers to be a success in cable news. That said, Hannity and fellow hard-liners do figure to isolate themselves from more moderate conservates -- those willing to give some latitude to the new administration -- in the short term.

As Rantel implied, though, there may be some method (or at least marketing savvy) behind this madness. In that respect, Hannity could be "losing his mind" all the way to the bank.

Handling TV Critics Assn. tour executive sessions has become a delicate task for network executives, one they tend to approach with all the enthusiasm of root-canal surgery. So we thought we'd make like NFL scouts and see how they grade out in their limited appearances.

Fox Entertainment Prez Kevin Reilly was up on Tuesday morning, and he handled the chore with the usual aplomb. Besides winning points for opening with a joke about the porn industry (quoting a Variety headline, no less), he deftly deflected the obligatory question about "American Idol" judge Paula Abdul and explained why producer Joss Whedon and the "Dollhouse" gang should be enthusiastic about a difficult Friday-night time slot. Now that's diplomacy.

Reilly built credibility by complimenting one rival network (CBS, for its growing Monday-night comedy block) and dissing another (his former stomping grounds, NBC, which he likened for him to "the crazy ex-wife I can't get away from"). He also exhibited a self-effacing sense of humor by noting that the critically panned comedy "Do Not Disturb" at least "made a lot of year-end lists." Finally, the exec told the room of critics, reporters and bloggers that he considers press tour valuable, and right now the group is desperate to hear that anybody has use for what they do ("You need us! You really need us!"), given what's happening to newspapers.

In terms of general style notes, Fox also outfitted its all-female microphone minions in short skirts and knee-high boots, which sort of made them look like they were about to audition for a remake of "The Avengers." To which I say as a middle-aged guy who had a huge crush on Diana Rigg as a kid, "Well done."

To his credit, Reilly has also mastered biz-speak while still being able to sound legitimately enthusiastic about the programming itself, which is increasingly rare.

Scores might be amended once the four network sessions are over (such grading really has to be done on a curve), but Fox's preliminary grade: A-