Christopher Byron of the New York Post has an excoriating piece ("End the Martha-thon") on Martha Stewart and the precipitous drop in shareholder value at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. According to Byron, Martha Stewart is nothing more than a glorified ex-con and a national embarrassment. But he saves the biggest pie in the face for the "media elite" -- the misguided souls at NBC who are responsible for putting together the reality TV disaster known as "The Apprentice: Martha Stewart":

"For the aforementioned [reality TV guru] Mark Burnett bloke to have begun cobbling together a celebratory knockoff of his Donald Trump reality TV show for Stewart even before she headed for the joint, may have seemed at the time like a clever, if cynical, way to capitalize on her rapidly spreading notoriety, if not fame. But for NBC's Zucker to take Burnett's fatuous drivel about Stewart and her business smarts, and power-spray it every Wednesday evening into millions upon millions of American homes, is arrogance and cynicism of a sort one rarely encounters even on Sixth Avenue. This isn't "The Beverly Hillbillies," it's a reality TV fraud show about a woman pretending to be a paradigm of business virtue when she's actually a recently released white-collar jailbird."

That might be true, but have you checked out Martha's absolutely precious "spooky and stylish Halloween ideas"?