It’s a classically awkward confluence of old and new media: The Gray Lady turns down her nose at a blogger exacting revenge on a dishonest source, but revels in the spectacle of it all.

And what a spectacle it is!

We assume. Thing is, while the Times churns over the media ethics of what Deadspin did to ESPN, the paper never comes out and says what exactly it was the blog did, and whom, specifically, they did it to. It’s a morality tale in which the immorality has been whisked behind the curtain, and readers just have to take the paper’s word and trust that, when they say dirt got done, dirt was done.

There’s an oblique reference to publishing “rumors of sexual liaisons and harassment involving several other ESPN employees, some of whom are married to other people, along with headlines linking ESPN to phrases like ‘sexual depravity,’ ” as well as a quote from the blog’s editor, who cops to “bend[ing] the rules a bit.”

What rules? What line was crossed? What was said, exactly? Here are two links to some of the line crossing in question, although it would be beneath the Times to even mention them. But, believe them, the maybe-true libel found within would make your blood boil. Possibly.

Um?

So we know that Bernie Madoff’s post-Ponzi life has gotten more than a bit weird: Maybe he’s got cancer, maybe he doesn’t, but we can say for sure that he’s shirtless and banging on a drum in a Native American sweat lodge, and also running with the gay gangs because no other prison gang wants him. All that, we know.

But. BUT. Did you know what the other billion-dollar Ponzi swindler, Allen Stanford, did before he greased up an Antiguan bank regulator with cash and Pats Super Bowl tickets? Oh, he just slit his wrist and swore a primitive blood oath with the Antiguan dude is all. No word yet if any virgins were tossed in a volcano for good measure.

Hoyt calls Stanley’s appraisal of Walter Cronkite’s journalistic career “particularly embarrassing,” mostly because it was littered with seven (!!!!!!!) factual errors. The “short answer” to the question of how those errors landed in print, Hoyt says, is that “a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not.”

He then goes on to detail a longer, more nuanced answer that does nothing to further the mocking of inept journalists. So we’ll skip it, and fast-forward to this gem: “For all her skills as a critic, Stanley was the cause of so many corrections in 2005 that she was assigned a single copy editor responsible for checking her facts. Her error rate dropped precipitously and stayed down after the editor was promoted and the arrangement was discontinued. Until the Cronkite errors, she was not even in the top 20 among reporters and editors most responsible for corrections this year.”

The money shot: “Now, she has jumped to No. 4 and will again get special editing attention.”

Gawker provides a more detailed run-down of the public editor’s public flogging.

Jay Fitzgerald correctly notes that that prospect makes those old cash-out estimates look “quaintly high.”

That’s the take of one of several media analysts polled by David Carr in today’s Times.

And the beautiful thing is, that $1 isn’t even the lowest price that these pros predict the paper could sell for. Mark Simonton, who popped up in last week’s Journal to say that the paper’s union troubles essentially make it untradeable, revises that estimate – downward. He’s now estimating that “the Times Company would have to pay a buyer around $20 to 40 million in order to sever their ties with this untenable cost.”

Because: One of Hopey’s first official acts as King of Amerika was rolling back restrictive restrictions on FOIA inquiries. That helicoptering ex-dictator of ours had instituted an eight-year crackdown on FOIA disclosures. Because messing with a reporter’s access to TRUTH and JUSTICE is just about the next best thing to shooting a reporter in the head. All that’s over now. Hooray, right?

So, thanks, Mr. President. What I’m going to do now is fire up the magical demand-letter-demanding-machine, get all up in some public documents, and then rain those things down on the public. Or maybe take some Indecent Proposal money-bath in inter-agency memos. The possibilities are limitless.

Or: Conspiratorially: This is just a sneaky play for Obama. Everybody wants what they can’t have, and doubly so when the everybody in question wields pocket-sized notebooks. Guy probably knows that once reporters can actually get their hands on incriminating internal documents, they won’t want them anymore. Damning torture memos will go the way of Appropriations Committee hearings – free for everybody to get at, but boring as hell and a pain in the ass to make sense of, and thus totally, completely undesirable.

Today, the Times ran a story about how Europe’s greatest almost-dictator, Vladimir Putin, props up his power-spherical dicto-buddy Alexander Lukashenko by “observing” Lukashenko’s awful, techno-poppy fake elections.

And, yes, we’ve done this dance before. But this post isn’t a halfway funny screed so much as it is a solicitation of a favor: If you can, everybody, plz keep today’s Times out of Southie. And the Globe newsroom. It’s best not to give them any ideas…

Nieman’s got the self-congratulatory memo.

We increased our number of fans more than three times in just 24 hours — from 49,000 to 164,000 — and in the process far exceeded our 2008 goal of 100,000 fans…Possibly the greatest success of this campaign, however, is that our fans continue to rapidly grow…into a powerful, free word-of-mouth network that we will leverage for future marketing messages.

So basically, this is the greatest news the paper could ever get. It will, of course, reverse those ugly balance sheet losses and instantly put money back in shareholders’ pockets. Didn’t the SEC just add a check-box on the 10-K that asks, “Do people like you on Facebook?” If they didn’t, they should. Because the internets are magical: As long as you’re popular, people don’t ask uncomfortable questions about cash flow.

And, bonus! This memo suggests that the Times has managed to leapfrog that awful step between having friends on the internet and having money: Fellating this guy on MTV.