Just a few days after Gawker introduced their recent and short-lived foray into corporate espionage-cum-pranksterism in the form of The Fox News Mole, one Joe Muto found himself on CNN, speaking with Howard Kurtz on Reliable Sources about the week he'd just had. In that interview, he explained that he was "completely blackballed within the cable news industry after working at FOX News," which is to say nothing of how his job prospects might be now ("it’s pretty safe to say my career in cable news is over"). Is it, though?

The paradox the Fox Mole presents is simple: News organizations rely on sources for news stories, but are often taken aback when they, themselves, are news stories. Sources have any number of motivations and incentives to betray the trust of a secret and talk: They could have something to gain from the secret being out there. They could, in their minds, be partaking in an altruistic act for the public good. Or they might just be petty and annoyed. Whatever the case, the news-gathering industry has relied on people telling reporters things they're not always supposed to since the Fourth Estate was established.

Which is why as any media reporter can tell you, it's always interesting to watch the way media companies react when they are the ones subject to leaks. Some are empathetic; others, who would argue that reporting organizations are subject to a higher need for confidentiality than those they report on, become Wrath-Of-God furious. Which, it could also be argued, is rife with laughable naivety, double-standards, and blatant hypocrisy.

We were curious, both about the legitimacy of the motives Muto claimed and about his prospects in media after Life As A Mole:

1. Was Joe Muto truly "completely blackballed within the cable news industry after working at FOX News," as he claimed he was?
2. Assuming he met all qualifications as a hiring prospect, given his now well-documented past, would people working in media hire the Fox Mole?
3. Muto joked that the only place he might be able to get a job now was CurrentTV. Could he?

Network executives at CNN and MSNBC were adamant that both networks had hired and currently employed workers who had once worked at Fox News (naturally, none of them wanted to be quoted or named for this particular story). As for the top brass at these networks:

Ken Jautz (Executive Vice-President, CNN):

"Going to pass on this," through a network spokesperson.

Phil Griffin (President, MSNBC):

"Going to pass," via a network spokesperson.

David Bohrman (President, Current TV):

[Didn't return a request for an interview, after speaking with Mr. Bohrman and a Current TV communications exec.]

We polled some editors to see, given that they work in the news business, what kind of trust they would instill in someone who had publicly gone through the episode Joe Muto just did:

Kerry Lauerman (Editor-in-Chief, Salon):

"I'd need to know more. I certainly wouldn't disqualify him for working at Fox News. And I wouldn't disqualify him for being a mole, if he could convince me it was an act of moral righteousness. But it does bother me that he lied to Fox honchos after they confronted him. Journalists who are comfortable liars should make everyone supremely uncomfortable."

Ben Smith (Editor-in-Chief, Buzzfeed):

"I'd be very leery of hiring someone who had been a disloyal an employee, an obvious contradiction because of course I've long relied on leaks from people acting against their bosses' interests."

Elizabeth Spiers (Editor-in-Chief, The New York Observer):

"I think the whole thing's more of a management lesson: Don't do anything you'd be embarrassed to have leaked by a mole. And assume all internal communications might as well be prefaced with FOR PUBLICATION."

The Fox Mole has not posted since April 12th, the same day Jeff Bercovici at Forbes reported that Joe Muto made $5,000 off of his grand exit from the network and Gawker posted the legal threat Fox sent them. The stunt has earned Gawker over 1.8M pageviews.

That doesn't count the recent Gawker post bylined not by Muto, but staff writer John Cook: a small cache of Roger Ailes' internal network missives sent "to staffers at The O'Reilly Factor in 2008 and 2010," which were "recently obtained" by the site.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

If Current TV misses the audience benchmark in two consecutive quarters, another clause is triggered that would allow Time Warner Cable to drop the channel. The condition was built into the most recent distribution pact between the two parties, which was signed in 2010.

"Time Warner Cable has been flirting with the idea of pulling Current off its systems for some time now," said one of the sources, who all spoke on condition of anonymity.

To make the egg on Current's face even tastier for Mr. Olbermann, an anonymous source informed Reuters that if not for Olbermann's now-defunct Countdown, "Current TV likely would have missed Time Warner Cable's viewership benchmark."

Mr. Olbermann, who regularly drew more than a million eyeballs a night in his prime slot at MSNBC, was averaging just 177,000 viewers a night on Current TV.

According to Reuters, Current is distributed to 60 million cable subscribers nationwide.

According to the Times, Current management "unanimously" agreed that Mr. Olbermann had failed to honor the terms of his five-year, $50 million contract, giving them the right to give him the boot. After declining to speak to the Times, Mr. Olbermann slammed network executives Mr. Gore and Joel Hyatt on Twitter, saying they had fired him unethically and he would seek legal recourse.

"Current was also founded on the values of respect, openness, collegiality, and loyalty to our viewers," the network wrote in a letter to viewers. "Unfortunately these values are no longer reflected in our relationship with Keith Olbermann and we have ended it."

"I'd like to apologize to my viewers and staff for the failure of Current TV," Mr. Olbermann tweeted Friday afternoon. He went on, 140 characters at a time:

"But for more than a year I have been imploring @AlGore and @JoelHyatt to resolve our issues internally, while I've been not publicizing my complaints, and keeping the show alive for the sake of its loyal viewers and even more loyal staff. Nevertheless, Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt, instead of abiding by their promises and obligations and investing in a quality news program, finally thought it was more economical to try to get out of my contract. It goes almost without saying that the claims against me  in Current's statement are untrue and will be proved so in the legal actions I will be filing against them presently.  To understand Mr. Hyatt’s “values of respect, openness, collegiality and loyalty,” I encourage you to read of a previous occasion Mr. Hyatt found himself in court for having unjustly fired an employee. That employee’s name was Clarence B. Cain: http://nyti.ms/HueZsa. In due course, the truth of the ethics of Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt will come out. For now, it is important only to again acknowledge that joining them was a sincere and well-intentioned gesture on my part, but in retrospect a foolish one. That lack of judgment is mine and mine alone, and I apologize again for it."

Mr. Olbermann's exit has been rumored since January, when, due to his dissatisfaction with Current's technical capabilities, he "declined" to cover the Iowa caucuses. Mr. Olbermann left Countdown's previous home, MSNBC, abruptly in January of 2011, after clashing with network executives. With any luck, this pattern of interpersonal problems will be further elucidated by The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin's new HBO project based on Mr. Olbermann.

Mr. Spitzer's first foray into TV, CNN's Parker Spitzer, was also plagued by infighting until the network dropped co-host Kathleen Parker. Parker Spitzer's one-man iteration, In the Arena, was canceled in a line-up shuffle last summer.

Update (6:44 pm): A source with knowledge of the situation told us Mr. Spitzer began talking with Current last November as tensions mounted between Mr. Olbermann and the channel's owners. Mr. Olbermann was reportedly angry about the channel's low production values compared to his former home, MSNBC. Despite these tensions, our source said no deal was made to bring Mr. Spitzer to the network because Mr. Gore, was desperate to keep him.

"Gore just tried to kiss Keith's ass," our source said. "It was like the geek trying to impress the cool kid in high school."

Mr. Gore's attempts to placate Mr. Olbermann were clearly unsuccessful.

The hour-long show will be produced live in San Francisco and will air at 9 p.m., after Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

"The War Room will be a nightly show for political junkies like me and anyone who cares about the future of our country, focusing on the 2012 election from all angles," she said in a press release. "Democrats will love it.  The far right will hate it. Those in the middle will appreciate it.  I can't wait to get started."

Ms. Granholm teaches at UC Berkeley School of Law and appears regularly on Meet the Press.

David Bohrman (Getty Images)

David Bohrman, former senior vice president of programming and D.C. bureau chief for CNN, has been appointed President of Current TV, the news network centered around Keith Olbermann's revivified Countdown. "Those of us inside the media business have a responsibility to anticipate what viewers want and need, and we must constantly reinvent the medium," said Mr. Bohrman in a press release; that reinvention may include Current's transformation over time from a YouTube-style aggregator of user-created content to a network whose lynchpin is an MSNBC veteran. Now the president is an MSNBC veteran, too--Mr. Bohrman was on that network's launch team.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

According to Mr. Ronen, the MLB.tv deal is a "holy grail" of sports content—with thousands of ball games, available  live and on-demand. MLB.tv's premium package also offers DVR-like features so users can pause and rewind a live game. Users will dole out a $89.95 yearly fee so they can watch MLB games streaming on their PCs. (Peanuts compared to box seats!)

The Boxee team worked directly with the company to create the MLB.tv application. Mr. Ronen declined to give further details on the deal (like whether Boxee will itself generate revenue from the subscription service). But he emphasized Boxee's big step in working so closely with a content provider and said that he hopes other media companies will team up with him to create customized services for the software.

"It proves that Boxee is friendly to content providers," Mr. Ronen said. 

Mr. Ronen called in to The Observer yesterday hours before he stood before more than 900 Boxee fans at a San Francisco club and announced several new updates to the platform with a flashy party.

On his blog, Fred Wilson, who is a Boxee investor as managing partner of Union Square Ventures, wrote about the new developments. "This is just the beginning for Boxee, and bringing video on the Web to your living room television. I'll use a baseball analogy in honor of MLB's partnership with Boxee. I feel like this 'Web video to the living room' is a nine-inning game and we are in the first or second inning right now. It's going to be exciting to watch and participate in."

So far, Boxee has been sequestered to a slightly underground, early-adopter crowd, despite all the media buzz about their content battles with with Hulu.

But Mr. Ronen announced another update that will bring Boxee out of its britches—an early-stage release of a Microsoft Windows application.

Previously, Boxee was only available to the Apple and Linux faithful and, so far, Boxee is only halfway to their one-million-user goal. But opening up the platform to PC users will push them into the mainstream—which is where Mr. Ronen wants to be to stay ahead of his competition and get on a more TV-friendly, TiVo-like device by 2010.

Along with rumors that Steve Jobs might have his eye on a more Web-to-TV-friendly device than the Apple TV, other TV companies are integrating Internet capabilities with their new screens. Vizio, for example, is releasing a Twitter-, Flickr-, Netflix-enabled TV.

So Boxee has a long way to go, yet—but is certainly still in the race.

Being a developer-friendly platform has been helpful for Boxee. They love the platform and want to work for it—for free. Last night, Mr. Ronen and his team announced winners of their Developer Challenge, in which about 40 developers rushed to create applications and integrate new content into the system. The platform now offers about 120 applications, including ones for Drop.io, AnyClip, BBC Live, and We Are Hunted, a music site that tracks the bands generating the most discussion on social networks.

Boxee will also be adding more social features. They are integrating Current.tv content and a "Digg for TV" application, in which users can browse the most popular videos their computer (or TV) screen.

Digg "has been instrumental in discovery on the Web and discovery about what is going on with TV is what is missing in the Internet age—it's missing the discovery tools," Mr. Ronen said. Boxee plans on allowing users to "Digg" stuff on their TV screen in a future release.

Finally, David Karp's Tumblr team also worked with the Boxee team to allow users to stream music and click through photo slideshows from their followers. We're sure they'll "like" that.