Over at Defamer, Stu VanAirsdale has received an anonymous tip about graceless behavior in the screening room. The subject: a "well-known but little respected TV critic whose son is also a well-known but little respected TV critic, trash-talking highly respected older critic who was replaced by his son." This, the site and commenters agree, can point in no other direction than Jeffrey Lyons and his spawn Ben, who — along with Ben Mankiewicz — makes up the tag-team that's replaced Roeper & Ebert on "At The Movies." Apparently Lyons senior went on to label Ebert a "pathetic old putz" and was cackling over the fact that no one wants to watch "two geeky guys."

Now, frankly, Roeper's departure from the air is no great loss; he was just a place-holder with guests of varying quality until Ebert could talk again, and who knows when that'll happen. People talk shit about Ebert and his extremely generous standards these days, and the two thumbs up/down system surely did no favors for serious criticism in the public eye. (Anthony Lane once made a sarcastic crack about "the rotation of a chubby thumb through 180 degrees." On the Brazil commentary track, Terry Gilliam more succinctly announced that Siskel and Ebert could go fuck themselves.) But Ebert did a lot of important work in the '70s, championing Herzog as fervently as anyone and generally doing a lot to expand the general public's understanding of film. He gets a lifetime pass. His successors display none of his commitment, fervor or knowledge.

But, for all their graceless, hacky evaluations and banal pronouncements, people seem to have missed Lyons and Mankiewicz's biggest blunder so far: they think 12 million died in the Holocaust.

In their review of The Boy In The Striped Pajamas — a British Holocaust drama — Lyons and Mankiewicz, unsurprisingly, prove incapable of denying how "incredibly powerful" even a mediocrely-reviewed Holocaust drama is. "This is a movie that will most likely remain with you the rest of your life," Lyons opines. (Points for piety.) Mankiewicz concurs: "Not to sound too heavy-handed here, but the Holocaust is not really a story, of course, of the murder of 12 million people, but rather 12 million individual stories of murder."

What?

Six million European Jews died in the Holocaust; if you factor in all the other targeted groups, the total lies roughly between nine and 11 million. I'm forced to conclude that Mankiewicz mentally doubled the number for no real reason, other than either ignorance or simply indifference to this "powerful" subject. I'm also forced to conclude the show has no fact-checkers for anything outside the press kit, and that — amazingly — no one working on the show bothered to check or correct this.

(To see the clip in all its stupid glory, go to the At The Movies website and click under the "Now Playing" tab. The stupidity - after a little over a minute of plot summary - comes in roughly at about 1:20.)