Blackballing Arianna?

NBC has turned down pitches to have Huffington plug her new book and many in the blogosphere smell conspiracy. You see, Arianna takes aim at Washington bureau chief Tim Russert for supposedly letting Bush and his cronies go unchecked. He pops up a lot in the book, "Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded The Constitution, And Made Us All Less Safe." Nikki Finke reports that Huffington had been booked on MSNBC's Keith Olberman and Joe Scarborough shows - and then unbooked. The NY Post's Keith Kelly picks it up from there:

Sources said that Huffington was at a dinner in the home of Barbara Walters on Tuesday night when she heard that word had come down from on high that she no longer appear on NBC or MSNBC, where talk show hosts Keith Olbermann, Joe Scarborough and Dan Abrams were all interested in booking her. Phil Griffin, senior vice president of NBC News, who would seem to be the main man behind any such edict, insisted, "I haven't seen the book. I don't know anything about it."

Here was the huffy response from a network spokeswoman: "At NBC News, we receive countless books from authors and publishers, in hopes that they get on our air." It all sounds pretty silly - on both sides. NBC should get its story straight, and Huffington or her minions shouldn't be making a federal case out of Russert’s already inflated ego. As if both of them need any more attention.