So last night, for all the high-minded talk about doing news differently, the fine journalists at News Night (on HBO's The Newsroom) decided it was important to cover the Casey Anthony case and Anthony Weiner's twitpics of his "manhood".  And why?  Because Nancy Grace was kicking the crap out of them in the ratings.

Oh, sure, there was much handwringing about it.  In fact, the whole show was about handwringing.  You see, News Night wants to be the network of choices for a Republican presidential debate, and they can't get the Republicans to go along if all their viewers have  migrated to Nancy Grace.  News Night wants the GOP debate badly because they want to change the way debates are run… forever.

Now, if I had a time travel machine (which could also warp into fictional realms), I would tell these people that the Republicans had 200 debates and Dunkin Donuts could have been the sponsor of one of them, so don't worry about it.

Anyway, so News Night decided to cover Casey Anthony's trial — all six weeks of it (or so we are led to believe; last night was Part One of a two-parter cleverly subtitled "Tragedy Porn", which is what covering Casey Anthony is.)

That said, the folks at Wonkette are wondering something else — why Maggie hasn't been fired yet:

Last night’s Newsroom was about many important things presumably, like good journalists being very angry about having to cover the snuff porn that was the Casey Anthony trial, and Rupert Murdoch’s British phone-tapping empire, and Olivia Munn being awesome. There was probably some other Issues in there as well, who can remember? But the only important question left is: with all the talented out-of-work journalists out there, why haven’t they yet fired Maggie?

First, last week (sorry we left you hanging, we didn’t feel like it), during the night when the ACN staff has been called in to work because Barack Obama killed Osama bin Laden, Maggie flips out and insists her boss (HER BOSS) interrupt his busy schedule of confirming that Barack Obama killed Osama bin Laden in order to role-play breaking up with Maggie’s roommate, because Maggie wants her boss to break up with her roommate. THIS SEEMS INAPPROPRIATE.

Now, it is revealed to us, during a squabble in the newsroom over who has to screen a starfucker calling in about Anthony Wiener’s junk tweets (oh right, it was about Anthony Wiener’s junk tweets too; recent history is fun!) that Maggie is actually the very lowest person on the ACN totem pole, like, under the two women who were hired as interns the same day. And yet when the executive producers walk into their news meeting while Maggie is on a tear about being personally offended by Michele Bachmann saying she hears God’s voice (oh yeah, it was about Michele Bachmann too), she tells them to hold their fucking water, because she is not done talking.

Good question.