Official Website of Jason Pinter

An update from my previous post, since a lot of people haven't seen the cover in question or know the deal. Here's the story in a nutshell.

Jared Paul Stern is a freelance gossip flunky, who writes for "Page Six" in the New York Post and edited their first glossy magazine. Stern, basically, is a self-important buffoon who makes his living writing about the lives of people more significant and newsworthy than himself (end blogger editorializing). About a month ago, it was reported that Stern allegedly blackmailed billionaire Ron Burkle, recipient of some scathing press in the Post, offering him favorable coverage. His asking price? $100,000 up front, plus a $10,000 stipend. You can read some of the coverage here and here. Burkle and the FBI caught Stern making these demands on tape, snippets of which were printed everywhere but Osama bin Laden's cave. After the story broke, a tidal wave of scrutiny hit the unregulated waters of the gossip pages, where it seems trading money and gifts for positive coverage happens more frequently than we thought.

Fast forward. Stern goes on the attack, claims he was set up by Burkle, and that he's a victim of entrapment (Yeah, right. That's the same excuse people who get fat from eating too much McDonalds offer. Ok, end editorializing part II). Gawker also gave Stern editorial control over their site one weekend, where he proceeded to take shots at everyone from Burkle to the Daily News, claiming if not for his discovering them, celebrities like Estella Warren wouldn't have a career (Of course discovering Estella Warren, last seen covered in mud and hanging onto Marky Mark in the atrocious "Planet of the Apes" remake, is like bragging about discovering three acres of ebola-infested swampland in Hoboken).

Anyway, like any disgraced journalist trying to hold onto his career while turning lemons into lemonade, Stern has been making waves about the multitude of television, film and book deals he has in the works. He even went so far as to allegedly "commission" a book jacket, designed by renowned artist Chip Kidd (above).

Stern, who's so full of shit that he's being subsidized by the federal government, neglects to mention the fact that there is no book deal in place or hard film/tv offers. Trust me, I would have heard if there was a book deal. Anyway, all of this is merely posturing because any smart editor and publisher would take their ten-foot pole, sanitize it, and run as far away from this disease as possible. In my last post, I was offering hard evidence that these kind of books (memoirs by tainted journos) get lots of press, offer tons of sob stories about how none of it is their fault, and in the end nobody gives a shit.

All it does is give another black eye to the literary establishment, which at this point looks like Jared Leto after Edward Norton teaches him a lesson in "Fight Club."