Personalities

On the night last week when Lou Dobbs announced he was leaving CNN, before his final show had even ended, WebNewser was one of the first to groundlessly speculate about a presidential bid for the controversial news host.

Look who's groundlessly speculating now: Lou Dobbs himself. Reuters' Tim Gaynor reports:

A week after abruptly quitting his longtime job as a CNN television news host and commentator, Lou Dobbs said on Thursday he is considering career options including possible runs for the White House or U.S. Senate.

"Right now I feel exhilaration at the wide range of choices before me as to what I do next," Dobbs told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Since his departure, some have speculated he might run as a candidate for the U.S. Senate in New Jersey, where he has a home, or even run as a third-party candidate in the 2012 U.S. presidential elections -- options he says remain on the table.

Flashback to November 11, when WebNewser wrote:

Dobbs's comments tonight almost sound as if he's considering running for public office: "Some leaders in media, politics, and business have been urging me to go beyond the role at CNN and to engage in constructive problem solving as well as to contribute positively to the great understanding of the issues of our day."

A presidential bid? The GOP field is wide open, his ego appears up to the task, plus his anti-immigration views mesh with the party's base. It'll be interesting to see how it all plays out.

It's eerie. Admittedly, we made two or three other predictions in that post about what Dobbs will do, but only because of our exhilaration at the wide range of choices before him.

OK, this is the second time this week WebNewser has run across a "Jimmy Fallon isn't funny but this clip from his Late Night show is" item on the Internet. (Here's the first.) We don't want to miss a trend.

In this Late Night video from NBC.com, Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue" book takes on a life of its own, engaging in acts of violence uncharacteristic of a quickie political as-told-to autobiography. But the book's title should have given us plenty of warning.

The background art on Sarah Palin's old and new Twitter accounts tells us everything about the former Alaska governor's recent career arc.

As WebNewser reported earlier today, "Palin is shutting down her AKGovSarahPalin Twitter feed, directing users to her SarahPalinUSA feed."

It's fair to say there are slight differences in the look and feel of the two Palin accounts, subtleties of tone, if you will.

Here's the background art for the old, soon-to-be-deleted AKGovSarahPalin Twitter account:

How deliciously wholesome! There's Mother Earth Gov. Palin, gazing down maternally at the pristine and barren Alaskan landscape, a proud (and MILFish) mama bear calmly watching over her young.

And now here's the background and Twitter page for SarahPalinUSA, which seems to indicate that Palin might have a book out or something.

Honestly, all that's missing is someone to take your credit card number. And is it just a coincidence that the East Coast is cut off the map on SarahPalinUSA? Maybe that's what "Sarah Palin's USA" looks like!

Because if she did follow @kingsthings, she would have seen this tweet prior to last night's show on CNN:

Also tonight the attorney for the suspected Ft. Hood shooter and Carrie Prejean explains her sex tape. It's a 3 topic night!

But things didn't work out that way, as The Huffington Post reports (and as the video below shows):

Carrie Prejean threatened to walk off Larry King Live Tuesday night (WebNewser note: it was Wednesday, not Tuesday), in the middle of her interview with Larry King. Prejean's threats came after King asked the former beauty queen about the reasons behind her recent settlement with the Miss California USA pageant. King asked Prejean why she agreed to strike a deal with the Pageant and drop her claims of libel, slander and religious discrimination. "Why settle since you had a fight to carry on?" King pressed. Prejean demurred. King asked again: "You can't even say why you settled?"

Prejean, visibly displeased, refused to answer: "Larry, it's completely confidential and you're being inappropriate."

The inappropriate issue at hand isn't King's probing question, but the alleged reason why Prejean settled: TMZ reported that she decided to strike a deal only after the lawyer for the Pageant revealed a home-made sex tape of a 17-year-old Prejean.

That wasn't the end of Prejean's dramatics, though. She took off her microphone and threatened to walk off again as King was taking a call from a viewer. Later that night Anderson Cooper reported that Prejean said "she was told she wouldn't have to take any calls from viewers."

Honestly, is Prejean a beauty queen or a drama queen? And what did she think King was going to talk about? The Twitter fail whale?

CNN star Larry King has 1.4 million Twitter followers, which makes him a Twitter star as well.

But get this: He's 775 tweets into his Twitter career, and only now has Larry learned what the "fail whale" is. Here he is from earlier this afternoon:

I've been educated on the "fail whale" -- thanks for all your answers.

It doesn't end there, though. Larry wants to make sure his dedicated followers also understand this complicated and obscure Twitter symbol. A bit later (after wishing happy birthdays to "@MrsKutcher Leonardo DiCaprio, Calista Flockhart, Barbara Boxer, & Stanley Tucci!") he tweets:

It's a visual metaphor, "Fail Whale" = too many people on the servers. Birds trying to carry a whale = too much info so Twitter can't fly

It's almost poetic.

Tomorrow Larry explains what the word "tweeting" means, using a Venn diagram and haiku.

(Thanks to my colleague, TVNewser editor Kevin Allocca, for passing along this gem.)

Turns out Levi Johnston doesn't have a Twitter account, much to Conan O'Brien's consternation.

The Tonight Show host offered an apology to Sarah Palin's Wasilla nemesis after learning that the Twitter account from which William Shatner recited tweets on Wednesday night's show was created by an imposter. Made out of loin whole cloth, as it were.

WebNewser earlier today featured the Shatner segment in a video. Sadly, the clip, like many things in the media today, was entertaining but not based on fact. Here's O'Brien from last night's show:

"We'd been following Levi on Twitter and felt his gift for the written word needed to be shared with the world," he explained. "Today...I got some shocking news: Apparently the tweets that we read are counterfeit. They were written by a clever imposter posing as the witty Levi Johnston. And the real Levi is very angry with us."

"I would like to personally apologize to Levi Johnston and his lawyer and publicist for misrepresenting him in any way," he continued.

No doubt this pains the former Alaska governor even more than it does O'Brien, who, in retrospect, shouldn't have crossed swords with the pending Playgirl pin-up. WebNewser is trying to confirm rumors that, as part of an out-of-court settlement, O'Brien will have to "whip it out" on tonight's show.

The Business Insider CEO and Editor-in-Chief Henry Blodget sits down with WebMediaBrands CEO Alan Meckler for this video interview in which Meckler traces the evolution of his entrepreneurial career and some lessons he learned along the way. (Note: Mediabistro is a division of WebMediaBrands.)

Meckler went from pursuing a Ph.D. in American history in the '70s to starting a microfiche media company targeting university libraries. He discovered the Internet in 1990 (when it still was text-based) and eventually founded Mecklermedia Corp., which he sold to Penton Media in 1998.

Two key observations from Meckler in the interview: 1) Entrepreneurs must be "willing to fail" and 2) "Focus" is critical to business success.

Coming segments (according to Blodget) will cover Meckler's thoughts on the media industry and where it's headed.

British author, actor, comedian, television presenter and film director Stephen Fry isn't nearly as worried as Miley Cyrus is that social media and the Internet are turning us into passive idiots.

Far from it, Fry says in this fascinating video interview (below) in which he puts such concerns in historical perspective and points out the tremendous advantages of modern communications technology. Fry, by the way, has more than 920,000 followers of his Twitter account and already has been "listed" nearly 5,000 times.

Some excerpts:

"I'm not particularly negative or pessimistic about the social qualities, the linguistic qualities, the concentration qualities of 'Generation Web', as they're called."

"We are constantly in need of connecting with people for friendship, love, sex, knowledge, growth, enmity, territoriality...all the imperatives that drive us as human beings. And we've created villages and towns to help us do that, and roads. And now we've created something that allows us to do it even more."

"Where people make their critical error and criticize all this and think it's a danger and is reducing our capacity to act as proper human beings is they think it's all this: You either sit in front of a screen of some kind, tapping away all your life, going 'LOL' and being childish, and not writing in proper English sentences, or you sit in an old-fashioned study with books, and you read properly and you engage properly and you go for walks. Well, I do both. And most people do both. It is not one or the other."

The clip below is billed as Part 1. Looking forward to more.

It's one thing to make a personal decision to delete your own Twitter account. It's another thing altogether to declare that "everyone should leave Twitter."

But that's what tween singing sensation Miley Cyrus said in an interview this week with a Chicago radio station (video below), as reported by MTV.com.

Cyrus even goes a step further than the California watchdog agency that is considering proposing regulations for the privately owned microblogging service:

"I think Twitter should just be banned from this universe."

No doubt we soon can look forward to Miley suggesting that insipid television shows marketed toward kids also be banned from this universe. Like, you know, Disney's Hannah Montana. Because it undoubtedly pains her to see young people wasting their time on mindless, passive entertainment when they could, you know, "get out and do stuff and be in the world" -- buying Miley merch!

You may remember Chris Ariens' post from Wednesday (Oliver Stone Doesn't Much Care for the Internet) in which he describes the Hollywood director's verbal trashing of the web, television and traditional media while speaking at an event in New York sponsored by Hispanic web portal Terra.com.

A tipster pointed WebNewser to a video of Stone's comments, which come in a conversation with Terra CEO and founder Fernando Madeira at the New Museum of Contemporary art in Manhattan, in front of an audience of Internet professsionals. The exclusive video is on Guanabee, a web site devoted to Latino commentary on media, pop culture and entertainment.

I watched the video and read the quotes excerpted in the article by Cindy Casares. Judge for yourself if he's making valid points, is just being a "grumpy old man" or some combination of both. He certainly wasn't ranting -- this was no "get off my lawn" meltdown -- but I'm sure at some point Madeira must have been thinking, "I'm paying $75,000 for this?" (That was the amount of Stone's speaker fee, a Terra employee told Guanabee.)