Gossip

Media law experts and journalism groups expressed outrage Thursday that Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies obtained phone records from a notable Hollywood gossip journalist during a leak investigation, calling the action a serious violation of the reporter's rights. Several said they believed that sheriff's investigators violated state and federal law when they obtained a search warrant for the records of TMZ founder Harvey Levin as they tried to identify who gave him details about Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic tirade during a 2006 drunk-driving arrest.

When it comes to the glare of the paparazzi, age apparently has its advantages. Just ask actor Kiefer Sutherland, who walked out of the Glendale jail early Monday mostly to a collective shrug of tabloid indifference. He'd done 48 days behind bars without fanfare, judged uninteresting in the age of Britney, Paris, Nicole and Lindsay. Fame, a Santa Monica-based photo agency, sent a photographer, to little avail: Only one publication called with a request.

The TABLOID world -- led by the magazine Us Weekly, along with the paradigm-exploding websites TMZ and Perezhilton.com -- is simultaneously bursting and flat. Bursting, in the sense that these media spill over with several dozen characters whose ongoing stories are meticulously and minutely dispensed to readers in the same lurid and addicting manner that a 19th century Penny Dreadful once was.

A rumor found its way onto the Internet recently. It involved a high-profile athlete. It was scandalous. And entirely unconfirmed. As skeptics might say, it was perfect for the Wild West territory of sports blogs. But an interesting thing happened to that bit of gossip about Lakers star Kobe Bryant. Blogs such as Deadspin and the Big Lead treated it with relative caution, while others ignored it altogether.

There ARE many photos out there purporting to show Mischa Barton's lumpy, bumpy, cellulite-riddled bottom, and I love poring over them. The photos of an "exhausted" Heather Locklear before she was carted off? Love them too. I could stare for hours at the fine lines around Angelina Jolie's eyes. (C'mon. Didn't you see the cover of last week's People magazine?

To the mortgage crisis and the energy crunch and the devalued dollar, add this: a recession in the Britney market. The young woman who rose and fell (and fell and fell) in the paparazzi's strobe lights seems to have put bizarre public displays behind her, and the photographers who made hundreds and thousands -- and in some cases, hundreds of thousands -- capturing her missteps must look elsewhere for celebrities more predictably unpredictable. "She's boring.

DO you feel the need to know exactly when Osteria Mozza, Pizzeria Mozza's sibling, will open or where Daniel Craig eats when he's with his agent? Is it hard to concentrate at work while you wonder who had dinner at Cut last night and which pastry chef just donned a new toque at the Water Grill? Now you can log on and find out.

In Hollywood, the website TMZ.com has already transformed celebrity culture, putting stars on notice that cellphone-toting tattlers and aggressive paparazzi are ready to splash their indiscretions all over cyberspace. Now, the site that first disclosed Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic rant and the medications stored in Anna Nicole Smith's refrigerator is coming to the nation's capital. And local denizens are wondering why.

Two Hooksett town employees fired for gossiping about their boss have lost an appeal to get their jobs back. Four women were fired in April after a closed-door vote of the Town Council. Two administrative assistants appealed their firings this month, but the council rejected their bid to be reinstated.

Even by New York standards, this is absurd For public humiliation, you can't beat this: Alex Rodriguez's wife wakes up in New York last Wednesday. Her husband is in Toronto, where the Yankees are playing the Blue Jays. The front page of the New York Post features a picture of Rodriguez and a "mystery blonde" walking into a Toronto hotel, accompanied by the headline "Stray-Rod."