"Hitwise reports today that VanityFair.com traffic spiked by a factor of 20, that searches for the Leibovitz photos doubled the searches for Lindsay Lohan's for-real topless pics in New York Magazine. Hitwise Director of Research Heather Dougherty says 98% of Vanity Fair's traffic was comprised of visitors who had never visited the site before." Just wait till you see the newsstand numbers. [WPN]

And so it has come to this: A spoof of the Miley Cyrus-Vanity Fair photo shoot, starring Annie Liebowitz's nose and dad Billy Ray Cyrus who gives Joe Simpson a run for his creepiness.

Already the Miley Cyrus-Vanity Fair "scandal" has been defused by certain rational arguments, such as, "We see kids younger than Cyrus appear on film wearing fewer clothes and in more sexually compromising situations, and nobody is crying foul there." But nothing helps combat the idea that Cyrus's photo shoot is a non-issue like another still photograph — this one also of a Disney brand.

A Disney underwear brand. In China. That can be described as nothing more than a pedophile pinup.

How did something much more scandalous than a photograph of Cyrus' back get plastered on a billboard? For starters, the age of consent in California might be 18, but in China, where this billboard appeared, it's a mere 14.

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Rosie O'Donnell: "Leave Miley Cyrus alone," O'Donnell says in a video posted Monday night. "Disney [is] making her apologize. Ay yi yi. [...] Listen, Annie Leibovitz – I had two photo shoots with her. You kind of do what she says. It's intimidating. I also didn't think it was a pornographic photo in any capacity. I thought it was sort of a beautiful portrait. [...] "I like the one of her and her dad, too. I don't know. It's Annie Leibovitz, people."

Bonnie Fuller: "Does anyone else find it ironic that men in a polygamy cult in Texas are being locked up for sexually exploiting teenage girls while here in medialand, a half-nude photo of 15-year-old Miley Cyrus in Vanity Fair is being touted as art?"

• Miley Cyrus and her parents saw an opportunity to boost her profile with a Vanity Fair photo shoot that portrayed her as more than an innocent little girl.

• Vanity Fair saw an opportunity to sell magazines by shooting America's tween sweetheart as more than an innocent little girl.

They both exploited each other. Neither should apologize. Except for one little thing: that the the photos are, uh, actually quite terrible.

Photographer Annie Leibovitz, responding to criticism over Miley Cyrus' topless Vanity Fair photoshoot: "I'm sorry that my portrait of Miley has been misinterpreted. Miley and I looked at fashion photographs together, and we discussed the picture in that context before we shot it. The photograph is a simple, classic portrait, shot with very little makeup, and I think it is very beautiful.” [Us]

Yesterday we tried to explain, but did not excuse, Vogue's "King Kong" cover, and assumed neither Anna Wintour nor Annie Leibovitz had any idea their LeBron James-Gisele Bundchen photo would cause so much controversy.

But maybe, in fact, they did. Or at least they should have.

Here's a World War I enlistment poster (via) from 1917, famous from its era, that encouraged men to sign up with the army to fight the German enemy. (Interestingly, the Germans found it so convincing, they Nazis used the same concept for their own World War II poster.)

It's hard to imagine Wintour or Leibovitz, or their staffs, in all their years studying photos and imagery, never came across this poster, or understood its racial ramifications with the ape carrying the helpless Lady Liberty. They understood it well enough to put Gisele in an eerily similar dress.

As if there exists an alternative argument to be made, Britain's Guardian wonders aloud whether Vanity Fair, prone to give covers only to celebrities carrying untold sob stories, is merely a glossier downmarket celeb rag that's actually on par with the Us Weeklys of the world.

Even Graydon Carter's brand extensions – the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, the Waverly Inn – are brash excuses to traffic in celebrity.

VF's entrée into the National Portrait Gallery is the newspeg here; the walls are adorned with the magazine's celebrity portraits, with much owed to Annie Leibovitz's constantaly resigned contract.

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When flipping through the New Yorker for cartoons, the ad above always gave us pause. Mikhail Gorbachev, aka birthmark head, was the last leader of the USSR. A Louis Vuitton bag is like the least communist object ever. Mikhail Gorbachev and Louis Vuitton are both too serious for irony, so what’s the deal?

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• Queen Elizabeth throws a shitshow temper tantrum and storms off set after photog Annie Leibovitz asks her to pose for some tawdry pics without her crown. Reportedly, Leibovitz's attempts to cajole QEII into cooperating included telling her "all the royals were doing it" and reassuring her that it would be "tasteful, for the sake of art."

• BBC apologizes for accidentally airing footage of the Queen storming off; explains away royal temper tantrum as "a documentary clip [that] had been edited incorrectly."

• "I don't want to be remembered as the guy who killed David Halberstam," worries the Guy Who Killed David Halberstam.

• You know what sucks about working at Bauer? Everything!

• The NYT has the non-exclusive on a magazine that already folded three days ago.

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• Vanity Fair's 20-cover Darfur extravaganza has arrived! Our favorite is the extremely odd pairing of a pissed-off looking Bono with a hungover Condoleezza Rice.

• Ohhhh, apparently the covers were supposed to look like "a game of Telephone." Annie Leibovitz is so retro!

• Negligibly cute FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is still not happy about yesterday's federal appeals court decision.

• British TV Station rejects common decency, requests asking them not to air "Diana death pictures."

• Dow Jones union looking for an alternative bidder. Insiders say their criteria includes "anyone but Murdoch."

• Meanwhile, retired anchor Bernard Shaw is pained deeply by the impact Fox had on CNN's dynasty.

• New York Times copies Jossip, gets credit for taking blogging trend into mainstream.

• Annie Leibovitz shows us a side of her we never actually wanted to see.

• Yes, Bill O'Reilly gets invited to parties. If not many, at least the Fox parties.

• We find out just how sneaky Diane Sawyer can really be.

• Glamour makes it really, really hard to leave the house.

• Despite her visit to Africa, Madonna did not actually go there to adopt a baby. You'd think she would ever follow a trend she didn't actually start?

• We've had many heroes in our lifetime: Maggie Gyllenhaal, Strawberry Shortcake, Matt Drudge … yet, none of them quite compare to Shanna Moakler. She is definitely our number one right now.

• Us Weekly breaks up Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn. Since nobody was really buying the whole engagement thing. Except Ken Baker of course. Yeah, literally.

• Who is this Little Miss Seventeen who thinks she has a chance in hell of both trying to sue Atoosa Rubenstein and getting a job in the media industry ever again.

• Jay McInerney officially retires Elaine's and Michael's.

• Betsy Burton jumps New York's ship for the new stellar start-up team of Time.

• The New York Times' Joe Sharkey goes through the hellish experience of being in a plane crash he may or may not have caused. And lives to tell us about it.

There has been a bit of dust kicked up over this month's Vanity Fair cover. It's no Suri Cruise debut, but there was some controversy over the cover. Yesterday, Fishbowl reported that the reported Borat cover would not be gracing VF — Graydon Carter decided to go with someone who just hasn't been on enough covers quite yet. The lovely George Clooney.

In fact, Borat was not only snubbed for the issue's cover, it appears any would-be feature on the actor and character was cut entirely.

The only mention Borat gets is in Michael Wolff's column on anti-semitism, which, as Wolff points out, has been characterized in the New York Times as "the most risky of social toxins."

But, that's not the only surprise! As the cover touts, the acclaimed Vanity Fair photographer Annie Leibovitz "Does Demi Moore." We were thinking, "ooh, Leibovitz snaps of Demi. Nice!" Wrong.

As Borat would probably say about the actual photo "that's, eh, not so nice." At least we give you a jump and give you heads up. It is terrifying. (Give yourself at least 20 minutes to digest your breakfast before looking.)

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What makes this archived video clip of Mark Wahlberg worth watching isn't the peek into Wahlberg's former ego Marky Mark, wherein we get to see all of his muscled glory as photographed by Annie Leibovitz. It's Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, circa 1993, elevating the conversation about the magazine's Hall of Fame: "Marky Mark, having his underpants pulled down by a dog like the old Coppertone ads, is a great fun image."