David Perel, editor in chief of the National Enquirer, happily defends his paper and gleefully calls out the MSM for pretending to be more virtuous than Caesar’s wife:

Old media, which chooses to call itself mainstream media, pondered its lack of action on the Edwards affair ad nauseam, spending more time looking in the mirror than Mr. Edwards during a $400 haircut. (And, like Mr. Edwards, it usually adores what it sees.) In its self-appointed role as Prince Myshkin (that Dostoevsky character whose purity of motive is an ill fit for society) the mainstream media (by its own telling) desperately tried to prevent the public from being despoiled by tabloid allegations of a deeply personal nature.
Now, just weeks later, the rules appear to have changed. An anonymous blogger on the Daily Kos published a rumor that Sarah Palin did not give birth to her most recent child, Trig. Instead, Mrs. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, was said to be the mother. Liberal bloggers massed like ants at a picnic marching toward the coleslaw.

In other words: When the press fails to do its job, as the press manifestly did with John Edwards, then the seething, spitting, amorphous creature known as the “new media” (which includes the outlets of the “undernews”—blogs, the tabloid press, etc.) takes over. And it’s hard to argue with Perel when he asserts that this is a good thing:

The mainstream media would like to believe it has evolved from the era of William Randolph Hearst — he of the infamous proclamation, “you furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.” Yet, when a Republican VP nominee showed up with a pregnant teenage daughter, the mainstream media’s superego disappeared faster than Dan Quayle at a spelling bee.
The people who eventually hold the highest office in this country face unfathomable challenges. In electing them we grasp for any clues to their judgment and character, signals as to how they will react, and the verisimilitude of what they will tell the American people. An affair, regardless of political affiliation, is a breach of private trust; lying about it to the American public signals a dangerous willingness to deceive when caught in tough situations.
While John Edwards and Sarah Palin have served as lightning rods for the debatable issue of how personal controversy affects public worthiness for leadership, the mainstream media vacillates between ignoring and rushing into these types of stories. New media, with its raucous pursuit of every salacious rumor, feels no such restraint. Inchoate ideas and suppositions find purchase on blogs from both sides of the political spectrum.

Long live the internets!

I am now officially laughing my ass off at those who thought the upcoming blessed event was going to hurt McCain-Palin.

First, New York mag killed with this headline:

We’re Sorry, But Palin Baby Daddy Levi Johnston Is Sex on Skates

Then McCain greeted Bristol Palin’s baby daddy, who just flew in from Alaska for tonight’s big shindig at the RNC, where his future mother-in-law plans to wow the crowd, at the airport:

If you like soap operas, this one is getting better by the hour: VP hopeful Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is five months pregnant.

A statement released by the campaign said that Bristol Palin will keep her baby and marry the child’s father.

“Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents,” Sarah and Todd Palin said in the brief statement.

“Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family,” they added.

As I write, no retraction yet from Andrew Sullivan. Interestingly, though, Kaus defends Sullivan’s posts as the legitimate work of bloggers, whose function, he implies, is to push “undernews” to the surface:

The Case for Excitability : Andrew Sullivan’s role in publicizing the rumor seems legit too. The feeding frenzy of publicity is what flushes out the counter-evidence quickly (and then it gets a lot of attention).

[Why didn’t kf, self-appointed Guide to the Undernews, write about the rumor?–ed. It seemed more likely that an older woman would have a Down syndrome child. Nor do I see what the huge moral scandal would be if the Palin rumor were true. So I didn’t get to it. I’m not Guide to the Undernews! At least not to All the Undernews. That’s a full time job.** My argument is that the Web as a whole potentially functions as the Guide to All Undernews, as bloggers argue about whatever rumors interest them. …

**–The Edwards/Hunter undernews was also different, from my perspective–I pushed it because I knew with reasonable certainty, from off-the-record sources, that it was true. But I defend obsessed bloggers who hash out undernews rumors about public figures when they don’t know if they’re true or not.

The Edwards story takes another step up the ladder to the MSM from the undernews.

(via Kaus, your source for paranoia and for tabloid truth)

Faster Comics–Jay Leno Beats NBC News: Charlotte’s WCNC airs a hostile, smart, doomy segment on the “scandal brewing.” Pegged to Edwards “ducking reporters,” plus the suggestive birth certificate. … Leno, Conan jokes featured. Leno’s is even funny. … Resonant clip from campaign “webisode.” … Reporter Stuart Watson says Edwards is in danger of “disappearing from the national stage … unless he finds a way to squelch this story fast.” … Maybe he did: It would be paranoid to notice that the segment isn’t featured on the station’s Web site. … Update: Strangely, I am paranoid! Video is on main WCNC video playlist and on the “Investigators” page. … 12:18 P.M.

Some people just can’t get over how unfair it was to Obama to call Wesley Clark’s idiotic comments about John McCain’s service to his country an “attack.”

Someone over at the Columbia Journalism Review gets on his high horse:

It’s crucially important that we have a political debate in this country that’s at least sophisticated enough to be able to handle the following rather basic idea: Arguing that a person’s record of military service is not a qualification for the presidency does not constitute “attacking” their military credentials; nor can it be described as invoking their military service against them, or as denying their record of war heroism.

That’s not a very high bar for sophistication. But right now it’s one the press isn’t capable of clearing.

No shit, Sherlock.

But what I want to know is why it’s so “crucially important” that we have a “sophisticated” political debate in this country.

Politics is not a debating society! It ain’t bean bag, either. It’s about power struggles!

Wesley Clark is an asshole, an Obama supporter, and he is trying to torpedo John McCain’s image by belittling his wartime experience. You bet it was an attack.

Is it Olbermann vs. Matthews or Olbermann vs. Rupert Murdoch?

Gawker wants to know [but you'll need to click on the Gawker link to get the links embedded in this quote ---ed.]:

So the Post has posted the Page Six item Keith Olbermann was so worked up about yesterday, and it does indeed say Hardball host Chris Matthews “seemed” to be talking about a strategy for landing Tim Russert’s job at a memorial event for the NBC personality, and that Olbermann is threatening to quit if he doesn’t get Russert’s Meet The Press job. …

But the gossip item also quotes a source, ostensibly from the traditional broadcast side of NBC News, who claims that Russert himself wanted NBC News political director Chuck Todd as his own replacement, and that the network will never install someone from MSNBC on the show:

The insider said,

“They’re cable. They’re far too partisan. They have no gravitas. If gravitas is eight letters, they’re about seven letters short.”

I last wrote about Olbermann and the absurd notion that one of the MSNBC cablers would get to sit in Russert’s chair here and here.

But I reserve the right to hedge by saying that in the brave new media world, anything is possible.

[updated (twice) with some missing links]

As the writer of a blog called Infotainment Rules I’m in no position to criticize lowbrow culture—indeed, I defend it as the right of the people to choose their own entertainment (though I believe there’s a lot of room for improvement in the realm of pop culture, including its ability to inform while it entertains), and note that the long history of “lowbrow” entertainment (i.e., that which is created for the masses) includes many cultural products that evolved, over time, to become the highest-of-the-highbrow culture.

But new media emperor Nick Denton carries things a little too far when he defends a nasty gossip-and-vengeance campaign he has been running on Gawker ever since his nasty but addictive website was eviscerated in New York magazine and in n+1 in the fall of 2007 (the latter evisceration carried out after a long Gawker campaign against n+1 and its most prominent and vocal defender, co-founder and co-editor Keith Gessen).

Word of the end of Gawker (by the New York Times here and by me here) turns out to have been premature. Its nasty crab antics continue unabated.

Before its prematurely announced demise, in April 2007, Emily Gould (then a Gawker writer and at the time a good [read: viciously-anti-celebrity and anti-elitist] ideological fit with Choire Sicha and head honcho Denton) went on Larry King Live (hosted by Jimmy Kimmel that night) to defend the “Gawker Stalker” feature (which encourages people to write in with their celebrity sightings) as “citizen journalism”; she stated that celebrities were rich enough to defend themselves against unwanted scrutiny, and in any case, she suggested, they had invited exactly such scrutiny because they had wanted to be famous and become celebrities).

Gould was very young (25 or so), and she has since recanted (sorta; she hasn’t really been deprogrammed. Now that she herself has become a target of the crab antics she herself once practiced at Gawker, she seems to regret her participation but doesn’t ever apologize; indeed, some in the media accused her of continuing to malign people in order to build herself up. Others tried to explain to long-suffering “women writers” why Emily Gould (the wrong person, and role model) became famous while they continued to suffer in unpublished silence and while they witnessed the reputation of “bloggers”—all of them—being tarnished by this little exhibitionist.

So, no: Gould didn’t apologize. Instead, she tried to move on. She decided, it seems, to embrace her past as just that—the past—as she notes in this article recently published in the NYT Magazine. My take? She’s still waaaay too into herself. But she’s a good writer (no small thing, since writing is her career), and even something of a literary heroine to some of the commenters on her blog).***

[T]he piece reminded me of much of the “new journalism” of the 1960’s. One of the principal sources of that kind of writing was Esquire magazine, which in those days was the most exciting and interesting magazine in the world, unlike the superficial and irrelevant waste of paper it has since become. The modus operandi of the editor, Harold Hayes, as he himself described it, was to contract the best writers in the country and let them write about anything they wanted. The result was a vibrant voice that no publication has achieved since.

For years I’ve yearned for some contemporary equivalent — a source of insightful, perceptive writing illuminating the times we live in. Your NYT piece is precisely that. And I love it. At nearly 69, I’ve felt tremendously deprived not to be able to enter the world your generation lives in via the observations and insights of one of its members. (That was what the “new journalism” and especially the Esquire of the 1960s and very early ’70s provided for my generation. Your piece, for instance, reminds me a little of James Baldwin’s account of his relationship with Norman Mailer, “The Black Boy Looks At The White Boy.” Much of the best of that Esquire can be found in the wonderful, voluminous collection the magazine put out at the end of the ’60s, Smiling Through The Apocalypse.) I’m so grateful to have discovered a writer who again unlocks my mind and opens my eyes and takes me into the world she inhabits.

And, most interesting from my point of view, Gould has developed her own internet ethics:

If you wouldn’t associate your real name with a comment or you wouldn’t express those same ideas in person, given the opportunity, chances are you’re a cowardly asshole who should keep his or her thoughts to him or herself.

So that’s a good bit of the backstory, if you’re still following along. (It’s trying, I know.)

Now, some months later, Nick Denton defends his relentless and personal attacks on Gould—(a 26-year-old freelance writer now formerly of Gawker) and on her personal life, which includes Gessen, whom she once attacked from her Gawker perch).

Denton asserts (in not so many words) that his vicious attempted takedowns of a new “media elite” are the essence of journalism: the public’s right to know [e.a.]:

• Nick Denton at 01:20 PM on 06/05/08

  Connectedness Index: 1764

  @Choire: The entangling of literary, journalistic and romantic relationships is a topic worthy of Gawker. You can’t understand how the media works unless you know who dated whom. Every job, every magazine commission, every anonymous quote, every resentment-they can only be fully understood if you know that X went to school with Y who introduced them to Z who commissioned X to write that magazine piece which turned into a book contract lined up by Y’s former lover. When you and I chat over lunch, that’s how we talk. Why should all this information be reserved for the private conversations of media insiders? That’s why Gawker exists: to put all of that invaluable social information out on the web and make the media machine a little less monolithic and intimidating than it can so often seem.

Now: I have written before about gossip as the ultimate weapon of the powerless against the powerful.

Here:

[[See Joshua Gamson’s book Claims to Fame and this post about Angelina Jolie, and this one, if you want to understand where I’m coming from with my celebrity obsession. It’s the scholarly approach, ha ha. And see how Gawker calls out Glenn Greenwald for getting on his high horse about The Politico. And see why gossip is good for us. Also: read Scorpion Tongues, by Gail Collins, former editorial-page editor of the New York Times, on how gossip has always been a weapon of the powerless against the privileged. And watch this space to see if I get it together to write up a more graceful version of my neat little theory about why infotainment rules.]]

And here:

[G]ossip has traditionally been a weapon of the powerless against the powerful [which is one reason I do not criticize infotainment–i.e., institutionalized gossip–but rather accept it; in the media age, gossip may be even a more potent weapon than ever against the powerful] , as Gail Collins wrote in her entertaining and informative book Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity, and American Politics [e.a.]:

For much of human history, [gossip] was one of the few weapons available to the powerless: servants who spread stories about their masters, peasants who irreverently speculated about the most private aspects of life in the manor. … In American history, gossip has sometimes been a reaction against heavily marketed politicians who voters might suspect were being thrust upon them against their will.

But minor media and literary celebrities like Emily Gould and Keith Gessen do not exactly pose the same threat to the people (who do indeed have a right to know) as do “heavily marketed politicians” (who may eventually assume positions from which they can perpetrate much harm on the electorate, and the country). So: invective about such minor celebrities under the guise of “media gossip”—even if it’s confined to the minuscule world of people who wish they too could be similarly celebrated—is hardly in service of the right of the people to know.

It’s “only”gossip—hurtful to those gossiped about and delightful to those who love gossip. The perfect gossip item, as Denton was quoted by the NYT as saying, is:

something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head.

New-media “gossip” is (formerly private but amusing and Schadenfreude-laced) dinner-party conversation released into the bloodstream of the internet, where it lives forever, as David Frum noted four years ago for New York magazine:

Frum was merely working with the rumors [about John Kerry] that everyone else was spreading around. That’s how opinion culture has evolved, and it’s been enabled by the Internet. Who cares if you’re wrong? As it happens, Frum says he does.

“I regret it,” he says now. “I read it in the paper, I heard it gossiped about, but I didn’t do anything like reporting. I joked about it on the Internet in a way I would at dinner. Then I learned the Net is like print, not like dinner.”

The “Net is like print, not like dinner [conversation].” Those sound like immortal words, right? Four years later, tell them to Mayhill Fowler, or to Arianna Huffington, both of whom have had an impact on the political campaigns of presidential hopefuls with their passing on of “dinner party” gossip.

For his part—and damn the consequences—Gessen is fighting back. He’s not fighting the gossip, mind you; he seems inured to that. He’s fighting for his literary reputation, and against ad-hominem invective (masquerading as literary criticism) written by cretins:

Nick Denton, you fucking ninny: Everyone went to the same six schools. Everyone has dated everyone. Now what? What have you got now? Because once we grant you that, you actually have to start making aesthetic and moral distinctions between actual written texts. And you don’t know how to do that anymore. Because you’re a pissy little gossip. Your brain was once trained to think and write, and you’ve gone and turned it to mush. You don’t even put commas in the right places, much less think straight.

And Choire—I like you, I think you’re a good guy, you have a good written style—and yet I’m afraid the same goes for you. Choire, the trouble is not that Gawker makes insinuations. The trouble is that Gawker doesn’t know what it’s talking about. Just like you, when you write about books you haven’t read [he's referring to this "review" ---ed.]

Interesting times indeed.

update: Bloggers attack Gessen in ad hominem rants.

Choire Sicha pounds him, too, in a Radar posted tagged “catfights.” 

———————–

*** And she has performed a public service for readers of the New York Times like my elderly mother, who keep hearing about blogs and blogging. In her immortal words: “I don’t understand why anyone would publish their private thoughts like that, and I don’t know who cares about this silly girl’s story. But now I finally understand what this blogging is all about!”)

Here’s the background to the Norman Mailer–Norman Podhoretz “feud” that Andrew Sullivan so generously alluded to and so stingily failed to provide the context for. (Every story has at least two sides.):

In taking a critical stand on the Berkely [Free Speech Movement] uprising, we did not deny the reality of the grievances against the university that had presumably caused the trouble. Nor did we deny the need for changes in the way Berkeley, and the American educational system in general, operated. That would have been the conservative or right-wing position. What we did deny was that the situation had become so bad that nothing less than revolution could possibly do any good. We thought that Berkeley was a fundamentally sound institution that should and could be improved without resort to “tactics of force and disruption” and the rhetorical violence that always seemed to accompany tactics of that kind. …

[We were served notice] that to deviate from [the Movement party line], then, even gently, was at a minimum to risk abuse and to open oneself up to the most insulting interpretation of one’s motives.

This too was reminiscent of the experience of our intellectual elders in the thirties….
In the sixties things were a bit different, but what s ome were later to think of as the “terror” also came into play then. The word “terror,” like everything else about the sixties, was overheated. No one was arrested or imprisoned or executed; no one ws even fired from a job. … The sanctions of this particular reign of “terror” were much milder: one’s reputation was besmirched, with unrestrained viciousness in conversation and, when the occasion arose, by means of innuendo in print. People were written off with the stroke of an epithet—”fink” or “racist” or “fascist” as the case may be—and anyone so written off would have difficulty getting a fair hearing for anything he might have to say. Conversely, anyone who went against the Movement party line soon discovered the likely penalty was dismissal from the field of discussion.

Seeing others ruthlessly dismissed in this way was enough to prevent most people from voicing serious criticisms of the radical line, and—such is the nature of intellectual cowardice—it was enough in some instances to prevent them even from allowing themselves to entertain critical thoughts. The “terror,” in other words, could at its most effective penetrate into the privacy of a person’s mind. But even at its least effective, it served to set a very stringent limit on criticism of the radical line on any given issue or at any given moment. A certain area of permissible discussion and disagreement was always staked out, but it was hard to know exactly where the boundaries were; one was always in danger of letting a remark slip across the border and unleashing the “terror” on one’s head. …

They were afraid of what might be said about them … and not only to their faces but behind their backs when they would be unable to defend themselves and when, as they knew all too well from their own reluctance to defend others against such insulting charges, there would be no one else to stand up for them either. …

Of course one could recant and be forgiven; or alternatively one could simply speak one’s mind and let the “terror” do its worst. Yet whatever one chose to do, the problem remained. …

[In 1968] the new radicalism was riding so high that it was in no mood for anything but allegiance, praise, and flattery. This had been enough, and more than enough, to frighten William Phillips. but what was more surprising, and more significant, it was even enough to intimidate Norman Mailer, whom Phillips commissioned to write the piece for Partisan Review about Making It.

The author of these words is Norman Podhoretz. This is from his book Breaking Ranks (1979).

I would add two things:

One: Norman Mailer has said (I can’t find the reference, but I will) that judging a man by his politics is like looking at him from the perspective of his asshole. He and Podhoretz were friends, and that Mailer tried to keep up the friendship after this, Podhoretz reports. Under the circumstances, the friendship withered.

Two: Podhoretz went on to have a magnificent career, and a profound impact on two generations of thoughtful, politically engaged Americans—as did Norman Mailer.

update: Gawker is wondering why the dearth of Owen coverage on TMZ. Good Question! Meanwhile, Mickey Kaus is wondering why all the focus is on Kate’s tragedy. ‘Cause, Mickey, if she’s all sad about it, that makes her a good person rather than the slut she appeared to be in the rumors that were published about her at the time of Owen’s little accident.

Last week, amid the instantaneous global release of the most intimate details surrounding the presumed suicide attempt of the actor Owen Wilson, I wondered what had happened to Hollywood that there wasn’t even one layer of PR protection around this highly bankable star when the ravenous celebrity press got hold of the details.

Today, it looks like—finally—somebody is at home, even if what follows sounds like a fairy tale called “Owen Wilson’s Wonderful Recovery”:

Wes Anderson: Owen Wilson “Doing Very Well”

Actor Owen Wilson is in surprisingly good spirits after attempting to commit suicide on August 26, according to his friend, director Wes Anderson.

“Obviously he has been through a lot this week,” said Anderson, who directed the actor in his latest film The Darjeeling Limited.

“I can tell you he has been doing very well, he has been making us laugh.”

Let us agree from the outset that in the real world where we all live, Owen Wilson cannot possibly be doing “very well.” He was abusing various drugs and alcohol and was reportedly despondent or enraged shortly before he attempted to take his life a week or so ago. Only on another planet—let’s call it Bizarro Hollywood World—could this man be doing “very well.” He is human, after all. Right?

Wrong! He’s a star. Of course he’s doing well! In Bizarro Hollywood World, suicides get better overnight, with the help of their loving friends, family, and business partners.

So this news of Owen Wilson’s fabulous recovery is what I often refer to as PRopaganda ^TM: “dramatic realities” or “dramatic narratives” spun (by PR meisters) from a few legitimate details of a given celebrity’s autobiography and then embroidered with fan-pleasing details. The story-weavers get a peg to hang a plausible tale on (in Wilson’s case, he’s a comic actor, so when he’s being normal and not suicidal, we would expect him to be making people laugh) and run with it, till those of us who want to believe it, ’cause we loooove Owen, actually believe it.

[There's an entire academic and non-academic literature about this stuff, if you're interested. Start with Joshua Gamson's Claims to Fame---a fascinating read. But read it at your own risk: You will never love a celebrity in quite the same way again after you finish it, 'cause you'll know that you've been deliberately seduced. You've been had.]

Helpfully, in today’s WaPo, Shankar Vedantam tells us all about the stubborn human propensity to believe “myths” over reality:

The conventional response to myths and urban legends is to counter bad information with accurate information. But the new psychological studies show that denials and clarifications, for all their intuitive appeal, can paradoxically contribute to the resiliency of popular myths.

You should read the whole thing, but here’s the most fascinating bit:

[T]he mind’s bias does affect many people, especially those who want to believe the myth for their own reasons, or those who are only peripherally interested and are less likely to invest the time and effort needed to firmly grasp the facts.

Have favorite myths (e.g., good triumphs over evil)? Not likely to invest the time and effort need to grasp the facts? That would describe most of us, except when the subject matter is our passionate interest and/or hobby. We’re too busy to pay minute attention. Which is what gives marketers of all stripes—not to mention potential propagandists—their opening:

Clever manipulators can take advantage of this tendency.

Yes indeed. They most certainly can.This is where clever public relations comes in—in order to fight a damaged reputation, you’ve got to try to avoid repeating the claims made against you. Vedantam explains the paradox:

“If someone says, ‘I did not harass her,’ I associate the idea of harassment with this person,” said Mayo, explaining why people who are accused of something but are later proved innocent find their reputations remain tarnished. “Even if he is innocent, this is what is activated when I hear this person’s name again.

So how to you refute a false claim or reclaim a damaged reputation?

[R]ather than deny a false claim, it is better to make a completely new assertion that makes no reference to the original myth. Rather than say, as Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) recently did during a marathon congressional debate, that “Saddam Hussein did not attack the United States; Osama bin Laden did,” Mayo said it would be better to say something like, “Osama bin Laden was the only person responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks” — and not mention Hussein at all.

Edward Bernays, the “father of PR”, recommended this tactic. Don’t refute. Fight PR with more PR. This stuff is all around us—in every corner of public life—all the time. Observe, and you’ll see.

By the way, the New York Post has a ways to go to catch up with the rosy picture quoted above about Wilson’s recovery. According to the Post, Wilson is “on the mend.” But he looks like shit.

Now, that’s more like it—slow and easy. Extend the life of the story, give it more room for endless ups and downs (for the next ten years, if Wilson is really unlucky).

The Post, of course, is the undisputed master of PRopaganda ^TM.

Class dismissed.

If you were feeling guilty about following the juicy story of the Los Angeles mayor’s “journalist” girlfriend who reported that the mayor was having an affair but failed to mention that she was his paramour, you can stop feeling guilty. Now.

In a post titled “More Hot Mayoral Sex,” Mickey Kaus explains why political gossip is good for America (emphases in the original):

The lid is off: L.A.’s mayor faces some N.Y. tabloid-style questioning at a news conference. The L.A. Times reporter who didn’t get the story doesn’t know quite what to make of this new state of affairs–I detect a mild sneering tone! Luke Ford sees a “beautiful synchronicity.” … I think Angelenos may be actually getting interested in local politics for once, which will give us better government in the long run. Special interests (e.g., unions, developers) have less power when people are actually paying attention. [What will happen if all the pols in power are no longer womanizers, etc.?--ed Not a serious possibility.] …

The powerful have less power when people are paying attention. And people pay attention when their interest is piqued. One of the things that piques people’s interest is gossipy, tabloid-style “journalism.” Even that is better than their paying no attention at all … which is the alternative.

Long live the people’s interest, and may we find many infotaining ways to pique it!

Once upon a time, I was a huge Scorsese fan, so I don’t know why I was so surprised that The Departed turned out to be an excellent film. But I was.

By far the biggest surprise was Leo ***, who has grown into his talent. Nice.

Also: this was Matt Damon’s best performance since Good Will Hunting, which is a sentimental fave of mine. Damon and Affleck, born and raised in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, were familiar types for me—from the press reports, their families seemed like counterparts to my New York cohort. It was fun to watch them get famous. I saw Good Will Hunting at the Angelica, and the audience was full of Damon’s friends. They yelled: “Matty! Matty! Matty!” It was down home and sweet: local boys who made good.

The Miramax magic is no more, however. The Weinstein brothers no longer have their finger on the pulse of America. Or, rather, the America they once catered to (Clinton’s America, and Tina Brown’s New York-L.A. corridor of sizzle and buzz) is gone and buried. Tina herself says that London is now the center of the universe and the capital of cool. New York, she claims, hasn’t gotten its mojo back since 9/11.

Ya think?

——–

In his Titanic days, when he was trying to escape the media mob and work off some steam, Leo used to hang around in the West Village with his friend Vince looking for pickup basketball games. I know because my son played basketball with them.

Leo was very low-key, my unimpressed 17-year-old son said. When my daughter heard about it, she burst into tears. She was 12. That’s okay. I read that even Susan Sarandon turned into a slobbering mom on behalf of her daughter, Eva, who was also in love with Leo back then. (Our daughters took gymnastics together, when they were three, at the Sutton gym. Susan was quite the stage mom. Tim was a doll. Boy, that seems like it was a long time ago … )

How many tennis fans does it take for the bidding to get absurd for the as-yet-unwritten memoir of Andre Agassi?

I dunno how many threw their hats into the ring, but Knopf’s Sonny Mehta won the final face-off. His opponent was HarperCollins’s David Hirshey.

I like tennis as much as any “tennis orphan” can love the game—that is to say, I hated it when my father tried to get me to take up his passion, but I will never forget Borg vs. McEnroe at Wimbledon in 1980 or McEnroe vs. Connors at the U.S. Open late that same summer. I appreciate Agassi’s stick-to-it-iveness, but I will always be a McEnroe fan, because his game had an unequaled inherent drama (driven by his unpredictable emotions—and I don’t mean the “temper tantrums”; I mean the pre-volcanic rumbles deep beneath the surface) and because of his masterful touch.

That said … whoever wrote the proposal for the Agassi book is aiming to give Bono a run for his money in the Most Honorable Celebrity in the World Sweepstakes, ’cause you’re there at the creation of a new myth—excuse me: I mean, narrative—about Andre Agassi.

[[See Joshua Gamson's book Claims to Fame and this post about Angelina Jolie, and this one, if you want to understand where I'm coming from with my celebrity obsession. It's the scholarly approach, ha ha. And see how Gawker calls out Glenn Greenwald for getting on his high horse about The Politico. And see why gossip is good for us. Also: read Scorpion Tongues, by Gail Collins, former editorial-page editor of the New York Times, on how gossip has always been a weapon of the powerless against the privileged. And watch this space to see if I get it together to write up a more graceful version of my neat little theory about why infotainment rules.]]

Back to that Agassi image-in-the-making:

“I recently had the privilege of meeting with top executives and editors from eight publishing houses,” Agassi said in a statement released Wednesday by Knopf. “Everyone was very impressive, but in the end, I felt the strongest connection with (Knopf head) Sonny Mehta and his colleagues at Knopf.”

“Andre Agassi is one of the world’s most popular and admired figures,” Mehta said in a statement. “He has lived an extraordinary life, and he has a great story to tell — an inspiring story of determination, competition, and what it takes to become one of the greatest athletes of our time. Additionally, he is someone who has chosen to use his success as an instrument for change in the world.”

Galley Cat’s Ron Hogan got there way before me, but: Advantage, Agassi.

Eat the Press’s Rachel Sklar has given herself a new title: ombudsblogger. She will

will walk the hallowed halls of media, sternly issuing yellow cards to anyone who is running, shoving, or trying to stuff a freshman in a locker.

Ombudblogger? Ombudslugger, more like. She starts out nice ‘n’ easy:

Radar, your staffer mainlined your editorial meeting to Page Six. Tough luck. Take your lumps.

Page Six, “insipid” is a little unkind. Isn’t brainstorming supposed to be about throwing it all out there in a safe space? Bravo to Radar for providing one.

Radar, you could do worse than being said to aspire to Spy and Vanity Fair. And you ARE in your third incarnation with a third set of investors.

Page Six, considering the attention you pay to really hot people, I would think you’d agree that hot porn models are good for business.

Then she goes in for the kill:

Sigh. We wish that had been all. But then Radar had to go and cross the line into abject dickery, ceding the moral highground for a nasty frat-boy laugh. Yeah, you heard me. FOR SHAME.

And concludes:

Moral highground: Page Six. You’re better than this, Radar — but crap like the above will makes us doubt it soon enough.

By the way, these are the ombudsblogger/slugger’s rules. They’re good ones [e.a.]:

By all means, attack each other. Pull each other to bits — over stuff that matters. Someone goofs, or is careless? Great, call them out. It’ll make everyone more careful. Someone has a conflict of interest they don’t disclose? Well then, feel free to provide the whole picture. That stuff is important. But why are low blows necessary? If you’ve got a solid leg to stand on, they shouldn’t be.

Go, slugger, go!

This is rich.

Jossip—Jossip!—disapproves of the New York Times doing gossip. Caryn James’s dissection of Angelina Jolie’s career was

a mediocre attempt at camouflaging the Times’ eagerness to capitalize on the brewing uptick in all things celebrity while holding its head high in the same pages that run Frank Rich’s columns.

Methinks the gossips at Jossip are feeling the heat. ‘Cause James (she’s from the NYT, dontcha know) gets access and gives good dish.

Gawker is more in the spirit of things:

Caryn James Is SO On Team Aniston

Back in April, after the New York Times ditched its BoldFace column in the wake of the Ron Burkle non-scandal, I joked “NYT Ditches Gossip Column, Goes Tabloid.”

At least I thought I was joking. Today, however, I note that gossip has gone mainstream: in today’s Times, Caryn James devotes an entire article to analyzing the ups and downs of movie star Angelina Jolie’s popularity during the past few months.

Before she set a toe on the red carpet at the Golden Globes last week, Angelina Jolie’s carefully molded image as humanitarian and mom was already showing some cracks. The Internet had been flooded with reports, picked up from European interviews, that she had called her biological daughter “a blob” with less personality than her two adopted kids, and had criticized Madonna’s adoption of a baby boy from Malawi. Women’s Wear Daily reported she was being difficult about designs from St. John, the staid company whose ads she appears in and whose conservatively elegant gown she wore to the Globes.

By the time she reached the end of a haughty, humorless walk down that red carpet on Brad Pitt’s arm, the Good Angelina image had crumbled to dust.

There are sure to be squeals of distress from media critics, who will cluck about how the Times has clearly lost its way. What has gotten into them? Since when do Times readers care about movie star gossip?

Let me pre-empt them. The gossip is a) fun and b) instructive in a world where the manufacture of images—be they of movie stars or of political stars—is important to understand. Caryn James says this outright [emphasis mine]:

Once famous as a tattooed wild woman, Ms. Jolie has soared to the saintly realm and plummeted again in record time. Madonna, her only rival in shape-shifting, has maintained the devoted wife and mother image for more than six years now, despite her recent adventures in adoption. Good Angelina didn’t even last two. That shattered image, a lesson in the limits of spin, is the product of a lethal combination: a public that never bought into the reformed persona and a star who may have bought into it too much.

The backlash had been building all along, and not simply because, while married to Billy Bob Thornton, she wore a vial of his blood around her neck. (No fair blaming the press for her vampirish image.)

At least that’s how I’d answer the critics if I had to defend James’s piece. Indeed, I’d write a lot more in general about the celebrity-manufacturing aspect of politics and of all public life. Celebrities have enormous power to grab and hold the attention of the public, and thus to persuade the public; it is only fair that they—the real people behind the public images, that is—be subject to scrutiny.

This applies, of course, to media stars such as Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Hassan Nasrallah much more than it does to, say, the Jolie-Pitts. But the star-making machinery behind both kinds of celebrities operates on the same principles. You can read all about the celebrity-making machinery in sociologist Joshua Gamson’s Claims to Fame and also in Rein et al’s High Visibility.

Or you can read Caryn James and extrapolate a bit. But there’s a lot more to this. As the mood strikes, I’ll write about it.

The NYT’s Sharon Waxman is panting at the possibility that Judith Regan’s lawsuit of NewsCorp for her “wrongful termination” from HarperCollins might expose the skeletons in the closet of the New York publishing world:

At least that’s what Regan’s lawyer seems to be threatening, if I read Waxman correctly:

Ms. Regan, whose lively personal life is already well-worn fodder for tabloid gossip, will find lawyers poring over every off-color remark she may have made, Mr. O’Donnell said. Former colleagues have already emerged to confirm that she was reprimanded in the past for making an anti-Semitic remark at work.

Mr. O’Donnell said: “She will open herself up to every scurrilous allegation. She will not enjoy one minute of this litigation. They’ll hire a bulldog, and it’ll be a bloodletting.”

Meanwhile HarperCollins, which owns ReganBooks, would probably face uncomfortable questions about why it tolerated Ms. Regan for so long if the company found her behavior so objectionable.

And executives would also have to submit to a detailed examination of their decision-making process in the Simpson project, a book titled “If I Did It” and a television interview conducted by Ms. Regan, which unleashed such a cascade of public outrage that both were canceled.

“Everything that went on will get into evidence,” [Regan's lawyer] Fields promised. “What really happened with that interview, what Jane Friedman,” the president of HarperCollins and Ms. Regan’s former boss, “is really like.”

Fields promised? Should he be threatening HarperCollins through the good offices of the NYT? Is there an editor in the house?

…is cynicism.

“Would everybody stop being so naive? Of course I got paid,” [O.J.] Simpson said with a laugh.

Read all about it here.

In case you’re interested, Simpson claims the Regan project (her idea) was not a confession:

In the radio interview, the former football star was asked point-blank if he killed the pair.

“Absolutely not, and I maintained my innocence from day one,” he replied, adding a little later: “No matter what everybody wants to say, I didn’t do it.”

As for the “If I Did It” title, he added: “That was their title. That’s what they came up with. I didn’t pitch anything. I don’t make book deals.”

As for that other survivor, Judith Regan, Newsweek implies her power is on the wane.

 But Regan’s meddlesome-free days are almost certainly over. Her projects will come under intense scrutiny, and the loose “organizational structure” under which she operated will likely change, according to News Corp. insiders who didn’t want to be identified discussing the embarrassing episode’s fallout.

Newsweek is really stretching it—why would an “organizational structure” change (whatever that means) result in a loss of power for Regan, who reportedly brings in over $100 million a year for HarperCollins and NewsCorp?

The story behind the story of the gross OJ book and interview has captured the attention of the New York media crowd, which means the gift will keep on giving for a while. (That’s because New York is a small town and everyone loves to hate Judith Regan—even more than Rupert Murdoch—and people smell blood in the water.)

Today as yesterday, Eat the Press has great links and an excellent analysis, which kinda sorta fits in with what I was saying yesterday about Americans being Puritans and all (as opposed to their British Cousins who are used to this sort of thing in the press):

[Murdoch], NewsCorp and Regan Books all massively miscalculated the how the revulsion/irresistible-train-wreck-schlock-appeal factors would balance out, but he certainly didn’t miscalculate how to turn this lemon into, if not lemonade, then at least an opprotunity to prove that he and his properties were moral, decent, and would take American morals over profits any day. (Rupe doesn’t often get the chance to prove that.)

Well, it sure worked for Sara Nelson, editor in chief of the trade magazine Publishers Weekly and she was ready to forgive and forget immediately upon Murdoch’s pulling the book.

Why did “senior management”—which presumably includes Regan and Harper CEO Jane Friedman—pull the book? Obviously, public opinion played a huge part, as did booksellers’ squeamishness about handling the book, the outrage of media pundits (including Foxies Bill O’Reilly and Geraldo Rivera), and the refusal of many Fox-owned stations to air the Regan-Simpson interview. But make no mistake: this was obviously, also, a business decision: when the public and good portions of the media turn on you, you’d better hope that advertising isn’t your bread and butter. Will the latest turn of events put a crimp in outrageous publisher Regan’s style? Some wags suggested (or hoped) it might, but I sincerely doubt it: Judith Regan has proven to be professionally and, if her recent statements are to be believed, personally extremely resilient. Like another Re(a)gan, she’s the Teflon executive; you can bet she’ll go right on publishing edgy, controversial books—just not this one.

All this, I think, is good news for the publishing business, and for books in general: it proves that there are limits to what a publisher is willing to do to sell books; and it proves that people care about what those books promote or evoke

Michael Cader at PublishersLunch (subscription only) notes that this is not the end of the road, though:

The Gang that Couldn’t Exploit Straight

The lack of any manager truly in charge of Project OJ at HarperCollins, Fox, or News Corp. and the company’s unwillingness to fully disclose the details of the process that got them into this mess is providing a steady stream of oxygen to an eager press corps.

The Observer identifies the person who actually wrote Simpson’s book: “Pablo Fenjves, a former co-worker of Ms. Regan’s at The National Enquirer who was also a witness for the prosecution in Mr. Simpson’s criminal trial.” And they describe part of the process in which Judith Regan tried to enlist network partners outside of Fox. The article says Regan initiated the Simpson book in April (though not explained, they say “it would be a book by O. J. Simpson in which he would not not confess to the 1994 murders”) and started shopping the TV interview four months later.

The LAT confirms in a different way that the planned Simpson television interviews were a late call from Fox executives.

Cader concludes thus:

Even without leaked material, there seems to be a steady supply of News Corp, Fox and HarperCollins “executives” ready to speak anonymously, while waiting for the company to lay everything out.

Sure sounds like it, doesn’t it?

On Reliable Sources this past Sunday (five days ago) Howard Kurtz asked his colleague Candy Crowley if the media wasn’t looking forward to having someone else to bash (Democrats instead of the usual Republicans) for a change. (She was noncommittal, though she finally agreed that the press loves a good story.) The next day, he followed it up with a piece in the Washington Post, for those who hadn’t seen his program. (I wrote about it here.)

A mere three days later (yesterday), in the wake of the humiliating hammering Nancy Pelosi received at the hands of her caucus, who voted for their choice for Majority Leader over her “choice,” Digby wrote:

Man are these catty little MSNBC snots enjoying their full-on Demo bitch fest. They are partying like it’s 1999. Norah O’Donnell, Lawrence O’Donnell, Mary Ann Akers and some other person I don’t know have just spent half an hour discussing the fact that Nancy Pelosi ruined her own honeymoon and now it is really quesionable whether she can lead. Meanwhile, the dirty netroots and Howard Dean must have done something wrong because James Carville is hanging out all the Democratic dirty laundry (while his wife cackles with glee, no doubt) and he wouldn’t do that unless there was something to it.

After a thorough discussion of how hapless the Democratic nerds have already proven to be, Mary Ann Akers whispers that reporters all over town are “loving” this story. …

The spite girls are back in town.

Well, yeah. But this time they have another girl in their sights. Bill Clinton may soon discover that he got off easy.

That’s infotainment!

I must be living in a bubble, ’cause O. J.’s “confession,” which is causing such worries in the book trade and such hand-wringing on the editorial pages elicits a mere shrug from the Cool Kids.

Here’s Brian Doherty at Hit and Run:

This New York Daily News story covers the basics of booksellers’ impotent rage, Judith Regan’s beaten-girlfriend-motivated, totally public-service-based desire to publish the girlfriend-slashing confessions/fantasies of OJ, and the interesting detail that she sold it as a pig in a poke to many booksellers, who were apparently relatively eager to purchase “Untitled by Anonymous” when it comes from ReganBooks (owned by Rupert Murdoch, for what it’s worth.)

That’s a pretty interesting take: he doesn’t even pretend to pay lip service to the families of the victims.

This is one cruel culture we’re living in. No wonder infotainment rules: it’s the new bread-and-circuses.

This morning I said that everyone who works in the media is interested in his/her career much more than in his/her audience. Clever, successful, edgy, reprehensible Judith Regan—responsible for allowing O. J. Simpson to throw his steaming piles of blood-soaked feces into the maws of the spectators at the New Circus Maximus—doesn’t call that into question so much as underscore the extraordinary tension that can exist between those two poles.***

Michael Cader of PublishersMarketplace (and PublishersLunch) gives all the inside scoop, with links, as he does the parsing [subscription only].

If You Can Believe It
Judith Regan’s bizarre 2,200-word statement should be read in full rather than through newspaper excerpts. The gist, as you probably know, is that she’s publishing the book because her ex-husband abused her. That and: “I made the decision to publish this book, and to sit face to face with the killer, because I wanted him, and the men who broke my heart and your hearts, to tell the truth, to confess their sins, to do penance and to amend their lives.”

If She Really Wanted to Get the Message Out
Why did Regan’s statement go semi-exclusively first to the Drudge Report, and then run exclusively in full in today’s Murdoch Post to help sell papers?
Drudge
Post

If He Confessed
Regan acknowledges that Simpson doesn’t say he committed the murders, and the hypothetical positioning of the text could be read as a denial rather than admission. Rather, she’s relying on ex-CIA agent Phil Houston, who says, “When killers confess, the way they often do it is by creating a hypothetical.”

If He Wrote It
I wonder how many of those killers hire “an uncredited ghostwriter” (NYT) to write their hypothetical confessions for them?

Simpson didn’t write the book.

He didn’t sign the contract for the book.

He didn’t own the rights to the book.

We really don’t know how the book came about and who is responsible for it. Former Simpson attorney F. Lee Bailey tells Newsweek, “In essence, people pushed He adds: “So supposedly they came up with a book that says, ‘I’m innocent because if I had done it, I would have done it this way’.”

If She Meant It
“What I wanted was closure, not money,” says Regan.

Great. So why isn’t the publisher giving all the proceeds to charity or the victimized families? You won’t find that in her statement.

Regan says: “What I do know is I didn’t pay him. I contracted through a third party who owns the rights, and I was told the money would go to his children.” Translation: she doesn’t actually know where the money is going.

If She Didn’t Report to Someone Else
Of course maybe Regan doesn’t have the authority to give the net receipts to charity or the victims. This isn’t just about Judith. Officially, she reports to Jane Friedman. (And if she doesn’t, now is the time to make clear to whom she does report.) Regan is part of HarperCollins, which finances, sells, and collects the receipts for the book. As the Boston Globe editorial page says today, “this supposed tell-all degrades the publishing business and calls into question the integrity of everyone responsible for putting it into print.”

So who is responsible? And where is Jane? So far Friedman and HarperCollins have declined requests to comment publicly. But Friedman has the power to do the closest thing left to making this right.

If They Sell It
Some booksellers have been clear that they won’t interfere with customers’ choice, but they don’t want any part of these proceeds either. Vroman’s of Pasadena announced yesterday that it “has chosen not to profit from this title and will therefore be donating all proceeds from its sale to The Nicole Brown Foundation.” That was easy.

Nancy Olson of Quail Ridge Books & Music tells Shelf Awareness she’ll give all proceeds to “a nonprofit here that shelters battered women and children” and Green Apple Books in San Francisco tells them they will do the same.

More FYIs
Wal-mart issued a statement saying they will carry the book to satisfy customer’s perceived interest. While the publisher has not announced a first printing, we’re told the initial planned cap of a 300,000-copy laydown was exceeded, perhaps by as much as another 100,000 copies. These numbers are essentially confirmed by Harper Canada CEO David Kent in the Toronto Star.

———
*** Although it’s being argued that Regan is only giving the audience what it wants and that the book will be a runaway bestseller. Which is probably true. Panem et circensis and all that.

She is also making news—the very best way to garner publicity for herself and her enterprise (the book business, which, these days, only generates big sales when it makes a big splash).

Clever, that.
Disgusting. But it works.

update: to read much more about this subject—and about the book biz—be sure to check out GalleyCat.

Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller is worried about the long arm of government reaching into the realm of journalism—rightly so: she spent 85 days in jail on principle (so she said, and so, I believe, she did).

Miller said “no one can deny lives haven’t changed since 9/11″ and that national security is a concern, but the federal government has used that fear to justify eavesdropping on phone conversations and tapping into e-mails without warrants and classifying information that once was available to the public.

“More than 15 million documents were classified last year,” she said, explaining that translates into 125 documents a minute. “It’s intimidation by classification.”

And American citizens are paying for it, she said, to the tune of $7.2 billion in fiscal year 2004.

How can an electorate be free and informed if it is denied information? Miller asked. Without a free press, such stories as the torture of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, warrantless wiretapping and CIA prisons in Eastern Europe wouldn’t have been reported, she said.

She also worries—rightly so—that other reporters and their news organizations aren’t quite as upstanding:

Miller said the American media, however, give the federal government reason to doubt its motives and competence each time it is discovered that an article is plagiarized or gossip is reported as fact.

True enough, as far as it goes. So she goes further—and fingers not the honchos at her former paper, who published national-security information that is useful to America’s enemies, but bloggers:

The blurring of entertainment and news and the relaxing of journalistic standards can be seen in online bloggers who are critical of people without giving them an opportunity to respond or who don’t post corrections when they learn that what they have posted is wrong, she said.

“I’m worried about bloggers,” she said. “(A post) starts as a rumor and within 24 hours it’s repeated as fact.”

Ms. Miller, meet the 21st century. And while you’re at it, remember that your old friend Norman Mailer coined exactly the word to describe this phenomenon (in 1973): factoid.

Factoid can refer to a spurious (unverified, incorrect, or invented) “fact” intended to create or prolong public exposure or to manipulate public opinion. It appears in the Oxford English Dictionary ^[1] as “something which becomes accepted as fact, although it may not be true”, namely a speculation or an assumption, The term was coined by Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe.^[2] Mailer described a factoid as “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper”, and created the word by combining the word “fact” and the ending “-oid” to mean “like a fact”.^[3]

Few would have anticipated that spreading factoids (i.e.—lies) would become the primary means of entertaining the public during grim times, but there you have it.

Deal with it.

From Stephen Holden’s review of the new film The Queen [Elizabeth II], starring Helen Mirren:

In writing the character of the queen, Mr. Morgan said, he thought of his own mother, of the same generation and similar in her essential beliefs. “To do a hatchet job would have felt like matricide,” he said.

“My mother is uncomplaining, stoic, never sees a doctor, would be in incredible pain and never mention it, thinks aspirin is decadent, walks around turning the lights off and wears clothes that are 30 years old,” he said. Such an attitude contrasts with the “narcissism and intole