"SILLY BITCH" UNWELCOME IN LOS ANGELES? Over here it seemed that Jared Paul Stern's Gawker stint was an obnoxious embarrassment. But that's not how Ellen Barry made it look at the Los Angeles Times.

Barry wrote:

On the website Gawker, which he guest-edited over the weekend, Stern launched a cavalcade of gleeful attacks on Burkle, whom he termed a "fishy financier," a "puffy potentate" and a "rubbery robber baron."

Hmm. Over here, Stern's "gleeful cavalcade" seemed to be a pathetic and ineffectual outburst of name-calling and regurgitated innuendo during which he also stooped to tamper with reader comments.

Barry also wrote:

Sometime before lunch, he posted a photograph of Estella Warren, an actress who had told a reporter for the New York Times that Burkle "is a good guy and he is not being portrayed as the guy he really is." In the photograph, she is topless, her breasts covered only with strands of hair.

Actually, in the photo, Warren's breasts are covered by her hands, not "only with strands of hair."

Barry continued to misrepresent Stern's post:

"We were amused to see this comment," he wrote. "[She] seems to have forgotten that I put her on the map via Page Six back when Paolo Zampolli first brought her over from a pig farm in Peterborough, Ontario."

As you might recall, the "gleeful" Stern actually wrote, "The silly bitch seems to have forgotten that I put her on the map...." [Emphasis added.]

I suppose readers of the Los Angeles Times have such delicate sensibilities that they must be protected from such "gleeful" phrases as "The silly bitch." But substituting "She" for "The silly bitch" without making more of an effort to capture Stern's tone could be interpreted as misleading.

OH YEAH... The word is that Stern and three other freelancers aren't going to have lunch on Page Six again.

Photo: David Marc Fischer