Scandalous

There’s no mention of a gossipy Hollywood Reporter item on Alec Baldwin’s Twitter feed, yet. But because the piece disparages the all-powerful Harvey Weinstein, perhaps there soon will be.

In the headline and first few paragraphs, reporter Merle Ginsberg suggests that at a May 17 IFP party in Cannes, the actor went around calling Weinstein the D-word because of the latter’s refusal to participate in a French Riviera-focused documentary Baldwin is making with James Toback. But further into the piece, it gets murky:

A source close to the actor parses that Baldwin actually said the mogul… “was an a-hole, not a d-bag.” Both Baldwin and Weinstein’s reps declined to comment.

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Following up his initial report about some Ynet-published content lifting, Tablet staff writer Marc Tracy today itemizes additional examples of apparent plagiarism committed by Italian freelance journalist and author Giulio Meotti. Including this passage from a February 2011 contribution to Commentary magazine:

In the post, Meotti wrote: “A nostalgic, utopian, and well-ordered traditionalism is the future heralded by the Brotherhood.”

In 1995 (!), John Balzar wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “A nostalgic, utopian and well-ordered traditionalism is the future heralded by the brotherhood.”

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A remarkable essay has been published on the Village Voice website. Under the headline “Tupac Shakur, the Los Angeles Times, and Why I’m Still Unemployed: A Personal History by Chuck Philips,” the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist details for the first time his version of the events leading up to, and following, March 26, 2008.

That’s the day The Smoking Gun exposed as fake court documents referenced in a Calendar front-page story by Philips about a 1994 assault in Queens, NY on rapper Tupac Shakur. He says it was not his idea to web-publish and liberally source the FBI-302 documents, but rather that of his LAT editor and the paper’s lawyer. Philips also accuses the paper of failing to properly support one of their own by refusing to litigate against the target of his piece (and subsequent accuser) James “Jimmy Henchman” Rosemond:

Lawyers and editors rejected my recommendations, arguing it would be foolhardy to fight the case. The Times refused to defend the story in court. Instead, the paper crafted a retraction that sounded as if I had made up the entire story and sneaked it into print behind management’s back, without the knowledge, consent or guidance of senior editors and lawyers directly involved in its publication.

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Ben Shapiro is absolutely right. The italicized preface to Breitbart.com’s May 17 item makes it perfectly clear that their release of a 1991 biography booklet proclaiming President Obama to have been born in Kenya is not an attempt to resurrect the birth certificate controversy. “It is evidence,” the preamble concludes, “not of the President’s foreign origin, but that Barack Obama’s public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.”

Nevertheless, among the careless MSM pick-ups of this Drudge-fed “The Vetting” dispatch is an unbylined Huffington Post item. Arianna, Shapiro insists, aggregated this one all wrong:

What was Huffington Post’s headline? “Birthers Make Another Blunder.” Once you click in, the headline becomes, “Obama Birther Rumor Debunked As Literary Agent Clarifies Mistake.” The first line of the piece? “Barack Obama birth certificate conspiracy theorists have been foiled again.”

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Guy Adams, LA-based correspondent for UK’s The Independent, recently traveled to Texas to interview Marty Rathbun. The resulting article made it clear why this former high-ranking (and now self-proclaimed “independent”) Scientologist has become such a thorn in the side of the Church since publicly resurfacing in 2009:

His blog, Moving on Up a Little Higher, gets around 10,000 hits a day. It has been visited a total of six million times, is credited with encouraging scores of former Scientologists to quit, and has broken a string of sensational news stories about the Church, including film director Paul Haggis‘ resignation, in 2010, and January’s decision by Debbie Cook, a senior member of Church clergy, to quit in protest at what she called its “extreme” fundraising. Almost every former Scientologist I have spoken with checks it daily.

True to form, Rathbun has shared another dramatic post today. He reveals a recent email exchange with Belinda Robinson, a reporter for the National Enquirer, during which he was offered $20,000 to spill his Tom Cruise auditing-session secrets. Rathbun had zero interest in the payola journalism pitch, but he does use it as an opportunity to link to some older pieces and warn the actor:

As the recent email cycle between a National Enquirer “journalist” and myself clearly demonstrates, you have nothing to fear from me or the independent Scientologist community. As a matter of well-demonstrated fact, we have your back. As the referenced posts above clearly demonstrate you have every reason to continue to distance yourself from [David] Miscavige (any perceived “leadership” abilities notwithstanding) and corporate Scientology…

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When Kim Kardashian first started seeing wedding bells with Kris Humphries, producer Jonathan Murray didn’t bat an eyelash — because he knew it wouldn’t last.

“With Kim and her marriage, she showed up for Kourtney and Kim Take New York a week after the honeymoon, and we just documented what happened,” the executive producer of Keeping Up With the Kardashians said in mediabistro.com’s So What Do You Do? interview, “and it was pretty clear that these two people maybe weren’t exactly right for each other, that they didn’t have as much going for them as a couple as they thought they had when they entered the relationship.”

Murray, whose Bunim-Murray Productions also created The Real World, Road Rules and Bad Girls Club, also debunked rumors that his team encouraged the two to get hitched. “Kim did not seek us out as to who she should marry, nor should she. ”

Think you’ve got what it takes to be a reality TV producer, read the full interview for Murray’s tips on breaking in.

Part-time Los Angeles resident Manny Pacquiao might have to find a new place to spend his free time when he’s in town.

The Filipino boxer and politician was barred from The Grove and the television show Extra after the shopping center was tipped off to a quote Pacquiao reportedly told the Examiner, saying that gay men “must be put to death.”

Well, that’s if you listen to the LA Weekly, who took the original article out of context and tipped off The Grove owner Rick Caruso.

This is what the Examiner article originally said:

Pacquiao’s directive for Obama calls societies to fear God and not to promote sin, inclusive of same-sex marriage and cohabitation, notwithstanding what Leviticus 20:13 has been pointing all along: “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”

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Media mission accomplished.

As TIME managing editor Rick Stengel explained earlier today to Forbes blogger Jeff Bercovici, “the whole point of a magazine cover is to get your attention.” Even if, as is the case with the May 21 issue, the person depicted on the cover is not actually featured in the accompanying article.

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There have been several memorable remembrances of journalist and biographer Charles Higham, who passed away in LA late last month at the age 80. Most notably, locally, was Joel Bellman’s guest post on LA Observed about the time he interviewed Higham for an Orson Welles radio documentary.

Another worthy piece comes from the country where the British-born Higham began his transcontinental journalism career, Australia, in the form of a Sydney Morning Herald obit written by Philippe Mora, a French-Australian writer-director who occasionally contributes to the paper. There is much about Higham’s most famous work, the 1980 Errol Flynn biography The Untold Story, as well as this funny anecdote:

Higham had a delight in the macabre and the absurd, exemplified by his invitation to the English widow of Hermann Erben for dinner in Los Angeles with a Flynn double, Chuck Pilleau. Higham coaxed from her a bizarre revelation: SS agent Erben was circumcised.

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This is just bizarre. At the criminal trial of John Edwards today in Greensboro, North Carolina, his former speech writer Wendy Button testified that the politician ran his January 2010 admission of extramarital guilt through some surprising Tinseltown channels.

Per a report by WRAL-TV5, Button says the text of her boss’s eventual admission of fathering a child with Rielle Hunter was circulated as follows:

As the draft statement went through more than a dozen revisions, Button testified, Edwards sent copies to actor Sean Penn and actress Madeleine Stowe and to writer-director Paul Haggis… No reason was mentioned for circulating the draft.

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