Liberal Atlantic blogger Matt Yglesias once offered these tough words to FOX News — and to those who appear on the network’s programs:

…[I]ndeed, progressives have every reason to want the opportunity to present their arguments in a persuasive manner to the Fox News audience. The problem, though, is that this can’t be done because Fox News is run by the people who run Fox News. As I well recall from my appearances on the Hugh Hewitt showing, appearing on hack-controlled media outlets is not an effective method of persuading the audience. The rules are rigged. A debate organized and run by a Republican Party propaganda outlet is not, in practice, going to provide the opportunity for Democrats to persuade Fox-loving conservatives anymore than appearing on Hannity and Colmes contributes to the creation of a balanced and vigorous public sphere. Television is especially tricky for providing the illusion of unmediated reality while, in fact, allowing a thousand different kinds of mediation. Thinking that you can beat television professionals whose job is to make you look bad on a television network that they control is just hubris. Nobody’s that smart. Nobody’s that clever. Nobody beats the producers.

And, yet, there Yglesias was today on FOX News, chatting amiably about Mike Huckabee’s presidential bid. Have the producers gotten better? Or did Yglesias change his mind once his bosses at the Atlantic told him to get his butt on TV to help promote the magazine?

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Gay, gay, gay! Gawker editor Choire Sicha proves that old addage once and again:

The December Atlantic will have bear-blogger Andrew Sullivan on Barack Obama as its cover. Can you hold your breath until then? Let’s hope Sully is as right on Obama as he’s historically been on everything from “the end of AIDs” to publishing excerpts from The Bell Curve in The New Republic to his participation in a religion that hates him to his misreadings of Susan Sontag to supporting the war in Iraq to linking the 2001 anthrax mailings somehow to the war to endorsing Bush in 2000!

Related: The Atlantic to Get (More) Political in 2008

And: Andrew Sullivan’s Lover Makes Art (But is That Andrew’s Butt???)

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“David (Bradley) [owner of The Atlantic magazine] regularly offered me tea and scones every year or so for the better part of the last seven years, to find out what I was up to, and always suggested ways to go work for him,” Andrew Sullivan told Howie Kurtz today.

And it worked. Sullivan left for The Atlantic after a brief period blogging for TIME.

Shoot, where might he go for a donut and soda? Big Head DC???

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