Sandra Bullock trumps health care

"It continues to be a big issue at Newser, our gossip quotient. Some of us (principally Newser's older men), have a continued aversion to gossip-ish content -- mainly, the hundreds of infidelities and marital break-ups that we have duly followed. We've even added a button on the upper right of the homepage allowing users to filter out the gossip, which practically no one has ever used. Indeed, the more we older men get cranky about all the gossip, the more our users seem to gobble it up. . . .

"Private lives may be the big subject of our time, a vastly more complicated and relevant subject than public life. Most people really could care less about what's behind the political spin machine, but they're incredibly curious about what's behind our personal spin machines. . . .

"As broad as it is, tabloid journalism really may be emotionally truer than most other kinds of journalism. In an incredibly phony and managed world, celebrity infidelities and break-ups are as close as we come to something real."

Something real within the unreal world of the rich and famous, which journalists never really penetrate. Just look at Tiger's coverage before the Thanksgiving crash.

Gawker says that when In Touch magazine broke the Bullock story, "at first, even gossip-industry insiders didn't believe it was true. 'The first day, those first couple hours, I wasn't going to touch it because it wasn't a People magazine exclusive or any of the standbys,' said Courtney Hazlett, who writes the Scoop column for MSNBC and has worked for People and OK!. . . .

"Both James' and Bullock's reps initially denied the report; it wasn't until Bullock pulled out of The Blind Side London premiere that the story started to be taken seriously.

"Though official numbers have yet to come in, sources tell us that the cover was likely In Touch's biggest seller ever, at around 1.4 million copies -- in contrast to the magazine's average newsstand sales of 800,000. But what of the allegations that the magazine paid McGee $30,000 for her story? 'I actually can't comment on that,' said In Touch executive editor Michelle Lee."

Translation: It's true.

And in case you needed to know, TMZ says there's a third Jesse James mistress: "Brigitte Daguerre -- a Los Angeles photographer -- claims Jesse hired her in 2008 to do styling work for a West Coast Choppers photo shoot. She says the two emailed and texted each other for a year, but claims they only had sex four times before she cut it off. Daguerre has 195 text messages between her and Jesse (the cell phone numbers sync up). . . . many of them extremely graphic."

Health-care autopsies

The House and Senate approved the "fixes" bill hammered out in the health-care deal -- yes, the dreaded reconciliation was used -- but the media focus has shifted to the issue of threats and vandalism.

"In the days surrounding passage of healthcare overhaul legislation," says the L.A. Times, "Republican lawmakers have been left to strike a fine balance between harnessing voter outrage and fueling it."

At Powerline, John Hinderaker says this about the threats: