Hell hath no fury like a Britney Spears fan scorned. If the editors of Lucky magazine didn’t know this already, they do now. Fans of the pop star directed their outrage at the magazine for its December cover, which features a seriously plastic-looking Spears donning a wig.

On Twitter, Spears enthusiasts blasted Lucky for the photo, calling it “horrendous” and “lazy & unprofessional.” One fan even asked the magazine to do another shoot with the real Spears.

The backlash was so excessive, Lucky issued the following apology:

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Forbes’ “Most Powerful Celebrity” list is jam packed with women. In fact, women take seven out of the top 10 spots in the magazine’s report, which ranks people according to earnings and fame. Jennifer Lopez takes the number one spot and Oprah — the highest ranking media mogul on the list — is runner-up. Other women rounding out the top 10 include Rihanna (4), Lady Gaga (5), Britney Spears (6), Kim Kardashian (7) and Katy Perry (8).

We’ve seen this “female focused” trend already, when Time’s annual Time 100 list featured 38 women, more than ever before. Does this mean that 2012 is the year of the woman? Are we even allowed to write that considering Forbes counts Kardashian as “powerful?”

Probably not.

[Pic via Essence]

The Tiger Woods car crash and scandal was the biggest news on today’s mediabistro.com Morning Media Menu podcast. Hosts Jason Boog of GalleyCat and AgencySpy‘s Matt Van Hoven were shocked by the amount of coverage the event has received since the weekend, noting that CNN quoted The National Enquirer about the story, a nod to the shift of the national conversation on the subject.

“There’s a certain glee that the media has when someone who is big and perfect like Tiger Woods falls,” Jason said. “They pounce ten times harder than they would if say, Britney Spears would have had the same thing happen to her over the weekend.”

“If you’re an important or famous person today, you just can’t have an affair,” Matt said. “It just can’t happen. You’re going to get busted…Shame on Tiger, who seems like a smart guy.”

Also discussed: Jim Lehrer‘s plans to leave PBS‘s “NewsHour” and Barnes & Nobles’ Nook e-readers selling for high prices on eBay.

You can listen to all the past podcasts at BlogTalkRadio.com/mediabistro and call in at 646-929-0321.

The press release reads like an Onion headline, “Life & Style Weekly will be ignoring Jon and Kate Gosselin, announcing a completely GOSSELIN-FREE issue, on newsstands now.” What a weirdly evocative gimmick, sort of like the Megan Fox-ban day. With so much being said about the TLC stars and their marriage, affairs, and subsequent seasons of their show (who is suing whom, will Gosselin ever stop wearing Ed Hardy shirts, etc.), this fundamental family has become white noise in of pop culture. But producing a Gosselin-free issue of any tabloid magazine – while at the same time announcing it in bold letters on the front of the magazine – a little contradictory? You can’t produce a Gosselin-free issue without trumpeting it as such?

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Someone is hacking Twitter! We noticed a warning on our Twitter page when we logged in this morning and it turns out other, far more bolder faces, may have been taken for a bit of a twitter ride.

WebNewser has more info, but it looks like Britney Spears (y’all!), CNN’s Rick Sanchez, and Bill O’Reilly have all fallen victim to the 140 character hacker. See here for deets.

Hey! Looking to increase traffic for your website? Try writing about the election (of course at this stage of the game, we’d be hard-pressed to name anyone not writing about the election). Anyway, looks like politics has paid huge dividends for both HuffPo and Politico, who, according to Comscore’s latest tally for stand-alone political blogs and news siteshave seen “explosive” growth over the past year.

HuffingtonPost.com led among a group of selected stand-alone political blogs and news sites with 4.5 million visitors in September, up 472 percent versus year ago, while Politico.com attracted 2.4 million visitors (up 344 percent) and DrudgeReport.com saw 2.1 million visitors (up 70 percent).

Time, which recently relaunched its website, has also seen a big increase reaching 7.2 million unique visitors for September (up 79 percent year over year). It’ll be interesting to see what happens to some of these sites after Nov. 4 when much of that traffic experiences some sort of severe political news hangover and looks to other subject matter. Or not. There is, we suppose, the small possibility that this election has radicalized the population enough that Barack Obama really is the new Britney Spears and will continue to enjoy high levels of attention (presuming he’s victorious), but we’re not holding our breath.

Apparently John McCain missed the Barack Obama teflon memo. The latest, and now controversial, ad out of the McCain camp includes images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, that maybe are supposed to suggest…we’re not sure, that Barack doesn’t wear underwear? That he’s a bad parent, who dates his bodyguards? Maybe if the whole thing wasn’t so laughable we’d be offended (we mean, seriously, Britney and Paris? they don’t exactly inspire adulation). Some people are suggesting that the ad is racist because, in the words of Josh Marshall, it is “pushing the caricature of Obama as a uppity young black man whose presumptuousness is displayed not only in taking on airs above his station but also in a taste for young white women.” Many people are noting it was just this sort of imaging that the GOP used against Harold Ford Jr. back in 2006.

McCain says the interpretation is ridiculous. Obama responded with his own video saying McCain is taking the low road. Truthfully, we think it’s just one more instance of McCain demonstrating he actually has no idea whatsoever about anything that could remotely be called current. Watch both videos for yourself after the jump.

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“Four Questions For…”: Because five’s a commitment, but three seemed sparse

Sometime subject and full-time friend of FBNY Melissa Walker got herself into a neat piece in this weekend’s installment of T — no mean feat since her latest novel Violet By Design‘s been on shelves for six weeks, inspiring some to argue her promotional moment has passed. She does a nice job on her personal blog in a section she dubs “Marketing Monday” describing how the weekend’s piece came about, so in our new “Four Questions For…” feature, we got her to tell us the stuff the NYT piece left us wanting to know more about.

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In the wake of the embarrassing debacle of NBC’s now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t $1 million deal for Paris Hilton‘s first post-penitentiary interview, Matt Lauer said during a conference call to promote next Sunday’s “Concert for Diana” telecast that there was “no quid pro quo” involved in his exclusive interview with Princes William and Harry — despite the fact that the network paid $2.5 million for the rights to broadcast the tribute.

“When the concert deal was signed they hadn’t even decided they were even going to do an interview,” said Lauer. “There was no ‘We’ll do the concert and we get the boys.’”

Lauer, who will act as host of the one hour special, says courting the princes “was like an audition.” He explained: “If you had any idea how much stuff I had to go through to get that interview you’d know there was no quid pro quo.”

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Tears

Best media summary we’ve seen of today’s Paris Hilton penitentiary developments:

Los Angeles had not seen anything quite like it since O.J. Simpson‘s slow-moving attempted flight from justice. Today it was the turn of Paris Hilton — and her journey back to justice — which was recorded in every inch of its 13 miles by a swarm of helicopter-born camera crews. …

News channels abandoned all coverage of the G8 summit, before reluctantly tearing themselves away from the live coverage of Hilton’s front door to report, briefly, that America’s top general had resigned. And now back to the “breaking news” on Paris Hilton, where an excited TV reporter was pointing out the expensive homes of nearby celebrities such as Rod Stewart and Britney Spears, adding: “Some of the houses date back to the 1920s!”

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