FLEISCHER: There are some reporters, you know, in that briefing room, you can imagine, Bill, you get a lot of dot coms and other oddballs who come in there. They’re screened.

O’REILLY: Like the Huffington Post. Now it gets called on.

FLEISCHER: And I used to seat them all in one section. I would call it “Siberia.” And I told the president, “Don’t call on Siberia.”

You’d never know that Stein asked (and elevated) a question that the White House had been dodging, about whether it supported “truth and reconciliation” prosecutions of former Bush officials. You’d think Stein had asked about Alex Rodriguez or something. Nope: That was the Washington Post.

“Hrm,” I thought. “They must have a ton of start-up capital for PajamasTV.”

Today we learn the other side of this story, as PajamasMedia tells the conservative bloggers who signed up with PJM’s blog ad service (launched in 2005) that this phase of the company is coming to an end.

Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom posted the Dear John letter from Simon.

[W]e have decided to wind down the Pajamas Media Blogger and advertising network effective March 31, 2009. The PJM portal and the XPressBlogs will continue as is.

Since our ad relationship continues for the time being, you should note that in order to be paid for the 1st quarter of 2009, you must leave the current Pajamas ads up until 12:01AM April 1. We will be sending you information in mid-March on removing the ads. As of April 1, 2009, you will be free to arrange syndication or re-sale deals.

We thank you very much for participating during the formative years of Pajamas Media and we look forward to working with you in other ways. One of those is, of course, Pajamas TV. If you have any ideas in that regard, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Roy Edroso has the rest of the details, and the intra-blog sniping, which peaked with a shockingly snotty letter from Simon in which he explained that the ad business had been losing money, so:

… people getting their quarterly checks from PJM were getting a form of stipend from us in the hopes that advertisers would start to cotton to blogs and we could possibly make a profit. Didn’t happen. No wonder those people are kicking and screaming now that they are off the dole. I might too. [What's their beef? I thought most of them were free marketeer libertarians or something.-ed. Go figure.]

Leaving aside the fact that bloggers weren’t exactly told that they were a bunch of welfare queens — who had been aggressively courted by PJM, remember — Ann Althouse nails the other problem here. PajamasTV’s content is significantly worse than that of, say, BloggingHeadsTV and ReasonTV*.

*Full disclosure: I am a contributing editor at Reason magazine.

This is why.

The crucial bit, if you don’t want to watch it all:

I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting. You know, war is hell. And if you’re gonna sit there and say, ‘Well look at this atrocity,’ well you don’t know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it.

The PJM bloggers think this is great stuff, and they compare him to Stephen Crane. PJM’s Bill Hobbs writes, in a post defending the enterprise:

I don’t know if he can craft a coherent sentence or conduct an revealing interview. And perhaps he’ll be an absolute disaster as a journalist, even as he’s created a PR explosion for PJTV.

I’m still hung up on why this guy matters at all. Has he given up on buying that plumbing company and cruising into the $250k+ tax bracket? That, I thought, was why we were supposed to care about his unschooled, incoherent views.

This is all happening at Macworld in San Francisco. Apple said it’s not going to show up for the conference after this year, since analysts and investors always leave unimpressed, according to Bloomberg. But who cares about them anyway? Let’s move on to the iTunes news. From Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. the most popular source of music in the U.S., stripped copy protection from all the songs in its iTunes music store and announced plans to charge as little as 69 cents a track.

Under a new variable pricing plan, songs will cost 69 cents, 99 cents or $1.29 starting in April, with most albums going for $9.99, Apple marketing head Phil Schiller said today at the Macworld conference in San Francisco. He spoke in place of Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs, who said yesterday that he is undergoing treatment for a “hormone imbalance.”

Apple had drawn criticism for using so-called digital- rights management, or DRM, on most tracks, prompting Jobs two years ago to make a public plea to music labels to change their licensing terms. The protections prevented customers from listening to music on unauthorized devices and limited the copies they could burn onto CDs. The company also faced competition from Amazon.com Inc., which charges as little as 79 cents a song — with no copy protection.

Investors again scoffed that Apple had nothing to say and that lowering the price of iTunes was no big deal, according to Bloomberg.

Somehow, I don’t think music lovers will agree.

The decline is the continuation of a long trend of falling sales for CDs and albums as consumers download music online.

From the Journal:

Despite their languishing sales, CDs remain the most profitable and common medium for recorded music sales, accounting for nearly 85% of album sales. Their decline—to 360.6 million in 2008, from 449.2 million a year earlier—has hurt the four major record labels as they try to migrate to digital sales on services like Apple Inc.’s iTunes Store, which in 2008 surpassed Wal-Mart Stores Inc. as the world’s largest music retailer. U.S. album sales including digital downloads fell 14% for the year, while factoring in individual song downloads, sales were off 8.5%.

Here’s the music that did do well, according to the Journal:

The biggest album of the year was Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter III,” which sold almost 2.9 million copies. Other top sellers included albums from Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida,” Taylor Swift’s “Fearless,” Kid Rock’s “Rock N’ Roll Jesus” and AC/DC’s “Black Ice.”

Just something to think about as you download a song from iTunes today to mitigate that hangover.