For me, the most painful part of watching Donald Trump pretend to run for president was seeing how completely ignorant the political press chose to be about his claims of vast success for The Celebrity Apprentice. Time after time, Trump would brag about how his show was one of the biggest hits on television, and all these wise Washington insiders would pass that on as gospel. Apparently it never occurred to anyone at the Washington Post or New York Times to glance at the ratings charts, where they would have learned that the most recent season of The Celebrity Apprentice was ranked number 32 in 18-49 viewers and number 42 with all viewers. (The non-celebrity version in the fall did even worse, ranking at 92 in 18-49 — tied with America’s Funniest Home Videos — and 113 in viewers overall.)

Now Trump is back in the news, claiming (well, “sources close to the show” are claiming) in Rupert Murdoch’s NY Post that he’s got a huge new deal from NBC. According to the breathless article, already making the rounds on political blogs, the deal is worth $160 million over two years to Trump and Mark Burnett, and Trump himself will be getting $65 million per year.

Excuse me?

Let’s stop and do what political(and in this case, business) reporters seem to be incapable of doing — look at the claim.

First of all, if Trump is getting $65 million a year, that means he’ll take home $130 million of the total $160 million. He’ll make more than four times as much as the show’s co-owner Mark Burnett. Does that sound even close to believable?

But let’s say that’s true. That means NBC is paying $160 million in salary for these two men, divided over 22 episodes. Heck, let’s be generous and say they’ll do two full 13-episode cycles per year, so it’s 52 episodes. Do the math — that’s $3 million per episode just for Trump and Burnett. Add production costs — is $1.5 million per episode unreasonable? I don’t think so — and NBC is paying close to what CBS pays for Hawaii Five-O(and the same as what HBO pays for Game of Thrones for a show that can’t crack the top 30. And more importantly, a show that has no backend potential whatsoever. CBS just sold Five-O to TNT for more than $2 million per episode, HBO will be selling DVDs and downloads of Game of Thrones as long as there are young men who like swords and breasts — Celebrity Apprentice doesn’t even rerun on the network.

I’m sure Donald Trump makes lots of money off The Celebrity Apprentice. This article claims he’s going to be the hightest-paid reality star on television. Yup, more than Simon Cowell made on American Idol, which actually is the hit the Donald wants us to think his show is.

And the geniuses in the press will continue to repeat it without ever bothering to check. Because, you know, it’s only television…

Geeze, you can’t take me anywhere. The panel on tie-ins is, as I said, on June 18. June 18, however, is not Friday, but Saturday. This is why they never let me set the controls on the Wayback Machine…

The Los Angeles Times accelerates its death-spiral into complete irrelevance today by running a front page story in which intrepid reporter Scott Collins… has a private cooking class with Gordon Ramsay. Just in time to promote the season finale of Ramsay’s Fox show Hell’s Kitchen, Collins tries to make pasta with the chef and ends up getting called mean names. But the complete lack of substance isn’t the worst thing here. The front page placement isn’t either, although it comes just hours after the similarly-placed exclusive interview with Farah Fawcett they’ve been sitting on for eight months until her publicist approved publication (or whatever their ludicrous rationalization is). No, the worst part comes in this paragrah:

In the rarefied world of fine dining, the 42-year-old Ramsay is a very big deal. His eponymous restaurant at the London West Hollywood hotel is part of a mini-empire that has vaulted him into the ranks of celebrity chefs. His restaurants have earned a total of 13 of the elusive Michelin stars, a measure of critical acclaim that places Ramsay in the company of Alain Ducasse and Joel Robuchon. His Gordon Ramsay Holdings controls multiple outlets in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. Britain’s Sunday Times in 2007 estimated his personal fortune at more than $100 million.

Now I will say I’m a huge fan of Ramsay’s shows — particularly the British ones where he’s two thirds chef and only one third cartoon character.  And everything Collins wrote is or at least once was true… technically. But Ramsay’s restaurant empire has been in serious trouble lately. And on top of the financial, legal, and tax issues, there were British press reports that he’d had an affair for seven years, jeopardizing his image as the loving father to an adorable family. He’s even fallen out of favor with Posh and Becks. And that “eponymous restaurant at the London West Hollywood?” Well, it’s still eponymous… but it’s not his anymore. He sold it months ago. And I happen to know this piece of information that Scott Collins was unable to unearth — because I read it in the Los Angeles Times.

Even if this fluff had run in the food or Calendar section, it would have been appropriate to have a little actual information about the man being fluffed. But to put this on the front page and then ignore a year’s worth of news about its subject is the equivalent of printing press releases. I realize the LA Times doesn’t actually believe in the importance of either writing or reporting these days — if they did, they’d never publish Jonah Goldberg. But is it asking too much that they learn how to use Google?

Much controversy about the infamous, never-to-be Scooby Doo/Diagnosis Murder crossover, all of it so far coming from various members of the Goldberg clan. Over at his blog, my former partner Lee has his own version of our prospective story, which has the dubious virtue of probably being true. It does make more sense that it would have been Jesse who was hallucinating that he was a cartoon character, but I have to say that I’m glad my mind doesn’t work in such a way that I could actually remember which of our actors we wanted to play which member of team Scooby after all these years. 

And then my boss Tod Goldberg was  kind enough to suggest in a phone call that if we had indeed done the cross-over, it would have been the “worst fucking thing in the history of television” and that Lee and I would have been on the front page of the New York Times under the headline “the men who killed TV.” I think he’s just bitter because he was planning on bringing Scrappy Doo into his next Burn Notice book and now he can’t.

All over the media, I keep hearing that Thursday was the “six-year anniversary of the Iraq war.”

It wasn’t.

Yes, it is certainly true that the sun has gone around the earth six times since we invaded. (Or is it the other way around? Note to self — ask that flat-earth lady from The View.)

But it can’t be the “six year anniversary” because THERE IS NO SUCH THING. Because the word anniversary means the yearly recurrence of an event, or the celebration of that recurrence. You know, because the root of the word comes from the Latin for year.

Granted, we’ve been hearing for a decade or two of stupid and hopeful dating couples who would celebrate their “two and a half week anniversary” because this was the longest that any of their relationships had ever lasted. But some reason, it seems that America has collectively decided to follow the lead of those by-now long broken up lovers.

So now we never hear about the first anniversary or the sixth anniversary — it’s the “one-year anniversary” or the “six-year anniversary.”

It’s not like we don’t have other words for celebration or commemoration. Just off the top of my head there’s celebration and commemoration. We only have one word for the yearly remembrance of an event. Or at least we did. Now we don’t have any.

A. O. Scott in the New York Times has been on a roll lately — he also provided the quote about the Witch Mountain aliens in the post below — and is almost at Anthony Lane’s level of pith. In today’s review of Knowing he manages to encapsulate everything wrong with the average Nicolas Cage performance in one sentence:

But the odd thing about Mr. Cage in this movie is that even when he is responding to the threat of complete human extinction, you still can’t help feeling that he’s overreacting.

The whole review is worth reading, especially the paragraphs relating to Cage…

…but I’m going to be doing it anyway at this year’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. I’ll be at the Mystery Bookstore’s booth on Sunday, April 26 at 2 pm. And for your extra added entertainment, I’ll be joined by the two kings of USA Network tie-in novels — Lee and Tod Goldberg, authors, respectively, of the Monk and Burn Notice books. Stop on by for the trifecta — or walk right past them and come see me!