Rebecca Dana should have little trouble adjusting to her "new" home—she's already spent a year and a half there. As you may have read, Dana, the New York Observer's 24-year-old TV reporter, is no longer jumping ship to the New York Times. (Radar first reported the defection was in the works in December.)

An anonymous e-mail making the rounds this morning suggested that Dana wore out her welcome pre-arrival by making disrespectful remarks (possibly in jest) in public about Bill Carter, the Times's top TV beat writer. Her comments purportedly made their way back to Carter, resulting in the Times rescinding its offer in favor of a lesser arrangement. Now, sources close to the situation tell us that Dana, who had already signed a formal employment contract with the Times, has decided to simply stay put at the Observer.

Carter is known as a prickly personality: he once warned a Radar staffer that he had made an "enemy for life" by embarrassing Carter in print. Moreover, Dana was on Carter's bad side even before her recent contretemps thanks to a dismissive May 2005 review of Carter's book, Desperate Networks. "Carter breaks no big news in Desperate Networks, and what little nuggets he offers have already been picked over by the blogosphere or rendered obsolete by the passage of time," Dana opined. "[A]s far as I can tell, [it] contains no explicit message other than 'It's difficult to find a hit show.'"

But that's not as bad as what she said about the book's name: "It must have seemed like a really cool, relevant title when Mr. Carter came up with it."

Dana declined comment; calls to Carter went unreturned.

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