Michaele and Tareq Salahi -- otherwise known heretofore as the alleged White House dinner party crashers -- defended themselves on NBC's “Today Show" Tuesday, claiming they did not crash the state dinner and were invited.

In the first interview with the duo since their infamous state dinner appearance, the Salahis told Matt Lauer they have been “mischaracterized” by the media.

After years of on-again, off-again talks of selling Broadcasting & Cable and the rest of its business magazines, Reed Elsevier, the Dutch parent of Reed Business Information, said on Tuesday that it has sold three of them -- B&C, Multichannel News and TWICE -- to New Bay Media.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. New Bay said it has no plans to fold any of the newly-acquired properties.

Today is executive editor John Byrne’s last day at BusinessWeek. Tomorrow Bloomberg officially takes over following its acquisition of the magazine in October, and Byrne – editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek.com and one prolific tweeter – is leaving to form a digital media company.

Sirius chief executive Mel Karmazin offered a sneak peek this week into upcoming contract negotiations with Howard Stern.

A day after appearing on the "Today" show claiming they were invited to Barack Obama's first state dinner, Tareq and Michaela Salahi supplied NBC with the e-mail exchange with Michele Jones -- a top defense department official -- which they say proves they were "not crashers."

ABC News said late Tuesday that Charles Gibson’s last “World News” newscast will be on Dec. 18, and that the handoff to Diane Sawyer, whose first show had been scheduled for January, has now been moved up.

Meanwhile, Sawyer's last day on "Good Morning America" will be Dec. 11.

Sam Zell, who engineered a daring, $8.7 billion buyout of the Tribune Company in 2007 only to see it fall into bankruptcy a year later, abruptly resigned as its CEO on Wednesday.

Randy Michaels, formerly the head of the company's interactive and broadcast divisions and who has served as its chief operating officer since May, will succeed Zell as its chief executive; Zell will retain the title of chairman.

GE and NBC Universal hosted a conference call with investors this morning to discuss the game-changing sale of NBCU to Comcast. (And in what appears to be the first post-deal flub, both Comcast and GE scheduled their investor calls at the exact same time. No investors would want to listen in on both, would they? Nah.)