So last week, I was flipping through the channels when I stumbled onto what appeared to be a documentary about Elvis Presley's gospel singing hosted by Sander Vanocur, and though that was a somewhat jarring combination, I figured okay, what the heck, I'll go with it. Then the whole thing turned out to be an informercial for a CD boxed set, at which point I just felt sad, because whenever a journalist becomes a paid spokesperson, even for things as intrinsically cool as Elvis, the world dies a little, don't you think?

Yet I'm not quite as choked up to read in today's NYT that Bill Maher's hosting Amazon.com infomercials online. Oh, they call it a "weekly talk show," but let's face it, when you've got "buttons that will let viewers instantly buy the book, DVD or CD they are discussing, as well as links to pages with their other works or those by similar artists," right there adjacent to the content, you've got yourself an infomercial. Maher's only going to shoot twelve of the things before he goes back to his real talk show, at which point Amazon will develop new infomercials to take its place, although there's no word on who'll be hosting them or what they'll be selling.