The king of U.S. reality TV, Mark Burnett, has added a royale-with-cheese-like element to tonight’s live broadcast on Spike TV of the 10th anniversary edition of the Video Game Awards (6 p.m. PT/9 p.m. ET). Per an article in Variety by Marc Graser:

Through Xbox Live, viewers will choose which weapons from various video games that host Samuel L.Jackson will appear with onstage, or the video games they want to see him integrated into via what’s being dubbed “Sam Jackson Mode.”

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In recent weeks, FishbowlLA has written about two separate Variety.com blog posts that alleged the time-stamps of Emma Stone and Sundance Film Festival news items on Deadline.com were false. In both cases, Variety‘s BlogDogger–based on some stated live Web monitoring–insinuated that Deadline.com must have jerry-rigged the date-time stamps of these particular articles, to make it appear that the items were posted earlier than when they actually were.

Baloney, counters the author of both Deadline.com items, Mike Fleming. Speaking to FishbowlLA today via telephone from New York, he explained that he has the ability to direct-post articles to Deadline.com and did so with the first article in question, about Stone’s project Little White Corvette.

“I had the story done the night before,” Fleming explains. “I wake up early every morning here in New York, before driving my daughter to school. My computer is always on, and even though I had been in touch with GK Films the previous day and was told I could post the item sooner, I figured I would just break it in the morning.” In other words, Fleming says the 6:00 am ET/3:00 am PT time-stamp on the Stone item reflects what he did at his computer the morning of Thursday, January 5.

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A few weeks ago, we picked up a report from Variety‘s in-house BlogDogger, which claimed that the time-stamp for a Deadline.com item about an Emma Stone movie project had been falsified to match the 3:00am PT January 5 mark of a similar report on Variety. On behalf of Deadline, Nikki Finke responded a few days later, without—as Variety film writer Jeff Sneider and others subsequently tweeted—addressing the core issue of an apparent magical time-stamp. She explained that Deadline.com reporter Mike Fleming had been working on the same Stone news for several days beforehand, and this, apparently, justified whatever may or may not have followed.

Well, here we go again. According to BlogDogger, after Variety posted an item by Sneider and Josh Dickey on Monday night at 7:37 p.m. PT about the Sundance sale of The Surrogate, the article was followed in short order by similar items at LATimes.com and HollywoodReporter.com. Then, once again, a Deadline.com Fleming item appeared with a time-stamp that BlogDogger alleges was illicitly tweaked to cozy up to that of THR‘s third-place report posted at 8:19 p.m PT/11:19 pm ET.

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Rather than engage a high-priced PR specialist to blast out e-mail notices to LA media types, Variety has gone more in the Walter Winchell direction to protect its scoops. And FishbowlLA loves them for it.

The trade has launched BlogDogger, a web watchdog (in the truest sense of the word) that is dedicated to “prowling the perimeter of entertainment journalism, hounding hypocrisy, snarling at snafus and sometimes just howling at the moon.” Here’s one of the latest bits of chewed up neighbor property this canine cop brought back home:

Blogdogger was surfing the web late last night when we noticed Rachel Abrams‘ scoop on Variety.com—time-stamped for 3:00 a.m. PST—that Michael Dilberti‘s Little White Corvette, starring Emma Stone, was driving from MRC over to GK Films. We sniffed around to see if anyone else had the news and even several minutes later no one had…

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