I know I should be able to pull off some kind of stunning analysis of this morning’s New York Times story, in which Tom Cruise’s producing partner Paula Wagner defends United Artists against the bad buzz swirling around Valkyrie, but I’m not feeling it. The story just adheres to such a tired formula: “The Internet says there’s trouble, but I talked to a studio exec for an hour and a half and she said everything was okay! And Bram Stoker’s Dracula made $83 million! So take that, Internet!” Yawn. Plus, the timing of the piece just seems bizarre. It’s been ages (in internet time, at least) since Valkyrie’s release date was pushed back to February 2009. Cruise is getting good press for his cameo in Tropic Thunder. Why would UA jump to defend themselves now? Why not just let Bryan Singer shoot (or reshoot) whatever he needs to shoot, and project confidence about the film and the release date through non-defensive silence?

Whatever. I’ll just point you towards David Poland’s piece on the piece, which begins as a clarification of the statement “Valkyrie is dead,” which was quoted from Poland’s blog in the second sentence of the NYT piece without much context. Mostly, he’s annoyed at being lumped into a story in which Roger Friedman is heavily quoted. “I just wanted to say, I would never make any of the silly, lazy reaches that The Inhuman Stain would. They are unfair and uninformed. But then again, what do you expect from a gossip columinst who works for a right-wing organization that stands against much of what he stands for and who “reports” what he is told to report?”

But it could be worse. “At least [NYT's Michael] Cieply didn’t call me ‘a blogger,’” Poland writes. On his blog.