In the crowded world of cable news, it’s tough to stand out. This is what we call stiff competition:

A reader writes in to alert us to some truly impressive sycophantic gymnastics in today’s Note. This massive, gaping suckfest jimmies four distinct feints of flattery into one apparently prosaic event listing:

Tomorrow, Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy and the Center for New York City Affairs and its Dean Fred Hochberg play hosts to a star-studded post-election roundtable exploring the 2005 New York City mayoral election with that perfect 20/20 hindsight. ABC’s Mark Halperin moderates the discussion which will occur in two pieces — the primary and the general — and include campaign operatives and strategists from each of the campaigns as well as members from the New York City political press corps who covered the race.

We fell asleep after “roundtable” until the wooshing sound of someone sticking their nose into at least four separate behinds woke us. Those being flattered include: New School prez Bob Kerrey, Fred “Who?” Hochberg, Hochberg’s circle of fundraisers, and, er, “ABC’s Mark Halperin.” And we thought the press just gazed into their own navels. MORE »

Will Saletan enlightens us with a probing look at the Great Anal Sex Cover-up. According to Saletan’s review of the national sex survey whose more celebrated factoids included our best evidence ever that a woman may get elected president, the kids are totally getting in the rear. Thirty-four percent of men and 32 percent of women ages 22–24 admit to coming in through the out door and it just gets worse (better?) after that. But Saletan thinks that the study’s findings on the prevalence of oral sex got more play because “Even liberals can digest sexual revolutions only one taboo at a time. We think oral sex is the new frontier. We think talking about it in print and sex education classes makes us hip and candid.” We disagree. We think the media avoided spreading the assfucking news because the very thought of it makes makes people uncomfortable. We’re doing our part to change that. MORE »

Editor and Publisher reports that despite the leak of his anti-local, pro-bigness screed about the Washington Post’s decent into becoming the “bulletin board in a middle school social-studies classroom,” WaPo reporter Hank Stuever has not “received anything disagreeable or upset from inside or outside.” Okay, maybe one thing: Blogs “put up items like, ‘Stuever tells the Post to stuff it.’ There was no payoff to that.” MORE »

As the much-deserved memorials pour in for ABC anchor Peter Jennings, it is difficult to resist speculating about the future of the network nightly news. Television execs will cast about for how — or even if — they can revitalize the genre. It might involve fog machines or podcasts or Jon Stewart. Jennings was there when the first generation of old men gave way to the network suits’ bright ideas about people wanting to see a hipster read the news:

“It was a little ridiculous when you think about it…A twenty-six-year-old trying to compete with Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley. I was simply unqualified.”

Jennings may have realized it right away, though it took three years for the network to send him back into the field for seasoning. The good news is that things move faster today. The bad news is that networks don’t seem to learn from their mistakes. After a couple months of podcasts, television journalism will be “Fear Factor” meets “Dateline.” MORE »

Yesterday was a good day for unhinged rants about long-simmering grudges. Robert Novak finally got his Howard Beale moment and WP Style writer Hank Stuever used the Post’s new project in “radical self-criticism” — a daily critique of the paper by someone at the paper — to pronounce that the publication reminded him of “a bulletin board in a middle school social-studies classroom” and that they’ve “overlistened [word?] to people who never read the paper, and yet insist it include more about their neighborhoods, lives, and concerns.” MORE »