"Parade added 71 new newspaper partners, with a circulation of 2.42 million, to its national distribution. The addition of scores of new newspapers–most of them local dailies serving small and mid-sized cities–brings Parade's total circulation to 33 million, with distribution via 470 newspapers nationwide. Parade claims to reach 73 million readers every week. Doing a bit of competitive boasting, Parade noted that 53 of the 71 new newspaper partners had switched from USA Weekend, another leading newspaper-distributed magazine." [MP]
• Pam Anderson is a first class flier. If by "first class" you mean Stripperella.
• Finally, an explanation for why Val Kilmer gives everyone the heebie-jeebies.
• Mischa Barton leaves little to the imagination; proves she truly was too classy for the likes of The O.C.
• We want the number of Britney Spears' fake hairstylist. And no, it's not because we want to schedule an appointment.
• Adam Sandler, in Big Daddy the sequel. Thankfully, in this version the kid is toilet-trained.
• Perez is claiming John Mayer and Jessica Simpson have called their inexplicable relationship quits.
A week ago yesterday, Parade sent out a press release like any other, hoping to generate a little buzz for its website, which polled readers on their thoughts about Tom Cruise. We saw the same shocking statistic that Parade's editors did: 84 percent of of the 5,200 votes said the media were to blame for Cruise's "difficult year," while the majority of respondents claiming they sympathized with Cruise.
Sounded a little bit odd to us, too, except we still get dumbfounded looks from friends outside the industry when we make an aside about Tom and Katie Holmes' relationship being a sham. Maybe Americans are that gullible.
Or, as it turns out, Cruise & Co. are that sophisticated. While nobody is making the outright claim Cruise or the Church of Scientology rigged the poll, Parade says there was plenty of suspicious behavior, reported Page Six this morning. Then Parade followed up with Jossip directly, relaying this:
Parade.com conducted an online poll asking readers whether they thought Tom Cruise was responsible for his difficult year or whether it was the media¹s fault. We were surprised when 84% of respondents said the media was to blame for his tough year and that Cruise did NOT bring his image problems on himself.
We at Parade found this a little bit fishy - so we did some investigating. We found out more than 14,000 (of the 18,000+ votes) that came in, were cast from only 10 computers! Furthermore, there was one computer responsible for nearly 8,400 votes alone, all blaming the media for Tom's troubles. We also discovered that at least two other machines were the sources of inordinate numbers of votes.
It seems these folks (whoever they may be) resorted to extraordinary measures to try to portray Tom in a positive light for the Parade.com survey. There is even a chance they wrote a special "bot" program for the sole purpose of skewing the results, rather than casting the votes by hand on a computer.
Sounds like a pretty devoted group of people, don¹t you think?
Which leaves us in the precarious position of applauding Cruise for a brilliant (though poorly orchestrated) attempt at PR spin and giving Parade more publicity than they probably deserve. Damn those techno-wiz Scientologists.
After the jump, the original release sent out by Parade on April 10.
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