Time Warner subsidiary People Magazine fucks up, and Rupert Murdoch nominates its corporate chairman for mayor. That is some power, folks (Photo: Gawker)

The city's gossip elite are abuzz with all sorts of dissonance today, most notably as they comb through the multi-car pile-up resulting from People Magazine's Jennifer Aniston / Vince Vaughn photo goof. Let us look first at Lowdown's Lloyd Grove, who grabs some penetrating perspective from Aniston's publicist:

Turns out the the woman in the photo was Aniston's movie double - and red-faced People types stopped their press run Wednesday to substitute a caption reflecting that fact. Alas, there was no good explanation of why the mag would run a pic of Vince snuggling up to non-Jen. "What is there to say?" Aniston's flack, Stephen Huvane, told Lowdown. "It is just another example of the overanxious media and their desperation to exploit the privacy of Jennifer."

Like hell, says dish-osaur Liz Smith, whose Post went wood with something supposedly a little more authentic earlier this week:

The inside skinny on the [Post's front-page] pics is that "somebody" close to one or either actor set this up — with Jen 'n' Vince's knowledge. It was "time" for the story to break, but naturally, neither star wants to actually say the words "Sure, we're fooling around." Two grown single adults, but heaven forbid they confirm a perfectly natural thing. Anyway, it seems a nice match. Vince is very much the anti-Brad. (Jennifer has had her hard-bodied golden boy. Now for something earthier. And, probably, funnier.)

Whoa, stop the "presses." That is "quite" a fucking earth-shattering "scoop" that Ms. Smith's monoverbal source has handed down. Maybe it was one of those "Nod once over the brie if it's true, nod twice over the Beluga if it's false" kind of things. Either way, this would imply that Huvane's got some 'splaining to do about all that "privacy." Hit the Rolodex, kids!

Meanwhile, Grove's and Smith's tabloid colleagues were on the media mogul beat yesterday, wringing every last droplet of navel-gazing twaddle from the dais at the Center for Communication's roast of Time Warner chairman Richard Parsons. I know that media insiders accounted for 15 percent of Manhattan's population in the 2000 Census, but believe me, even with all of this morning's nightmarish commute snafus, this coverage could lay out straphangers like an equine dose of Tylenol PM:

Rush and Molloy: The guest of honor came in for only the lightest of toastings from CNN anchor Paula Zahn, who played the cello, and his first lieutenant, Jeffrey Bewkes, who joked that he wasn't about to ruin his chances of succeeding Parsons. "Does anyone remember [fired HBO chief] Michael Fuchs?" asked Bewkes.

Page Six: News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch pointed out that Parsons, who worked for Nelson Rockefeller and then in the Ford White House, would be a formidable politician: "If my suspicions are right about Dick's future, we just might be honoring him again in November 2009, except this time on the steps of City Hall."

Nice plug for the boss, RJ. But goddamnit, how did these guys score with Murdoch without having to pre-qualify on eBay? Doesn't anybody play fair anymore?