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.
TheEgyptian Sandmonkey is even snarkier than Gawker:
You know, when he first showed up in the political scene, everybody in the democratic party called him the second coming of Bill Clinton. I guess they never knew how accurate they really were. Boy was I surprised. Mr. My dad worked in a windmill and I have a dead so and a cancer stricken wife is phony baloney. Who knew? …
Our boy cheated on his cancer-stricken wife. No wonder he was talking about two Americas, he was sleeping in two bedrooms, one in each America. But before you feel bad for his wife, please take a minute and chill. Don’t think she is a victim. Ok, so she has cancer, that makes her a cancer victim, but come on, u get the idea. She knew of the affair in 2006, and still supported his running for office in 2008, …
Alas, too bad, I always liked Edwards (I like my politicians the way I like my lawyers- scummy, fake, manipulative and pretty. Hallo, I did endorse Obama, people. That should tell you something) and the nice little image of the American dream realized that he and his wife have presented to us so well. No longer will women lament how they never got a man this decent, who is attractive, young-looking and a millionaire, and yet won’t cheat on his old fat wife. They once again got their fantasy shattered and will continue to believe that we are all the same. Thanks John, you dick, for ruining even that for us. Now go chase an ambulance, you will need the money, having a new-born baby to raise that you probably hate now and everything. Enjoy.
[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.]:
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!”)
You can’t make this stuff up. Really:
Possible Nazi Theme of Grand Prix Boss’s Orgy Draws Calls to Quit
Few scandals in recent years have provoked as much anger and dismay across Europe as the saga of Max Mosley, the overseer of grand prix motor racing who made tabloid news last weekend in a front-page exposé and accompanying Web video showing him in a sadomasochistic orgy with five supposed prostitutes in a London sex “dungeon.”
But beyond the licentiousness of the episode, it was the suggestion of Nazi undertones in the role-playing during the session in a basement in London’s fashionable Chelsea district that led to demands for Mr. Mosley’s resignation as president of the Paris-based Federation Internationale de l’Automobile.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, they say, and they would be right [e.a.]:
Family history has added to the notoriety: Mr. Mosley, 67, is the younger son of Britain’s 1930s fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, and the society beauty Diana Mitford, whose secret wedding in Berlin in October 1936 was held at the home of the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and included Hitler as a guest of honor.
Naturally, automakers are distancing themselves from this nasty episode and this nasty man. But he isn’t having any of it [e.a.]:
Mr. Mosley, undaunted, tried to turn the tables on BMW and Daimler Benz, which manufactures Mercedes-Benz cars, with a statement that raised the specter of the two companies’ own role during the Nazi era. … His statement held to his insistence that fault lay with the way in which his actions had been reported by The News of The World, and not with the actions themselves.
And the NYT’s John F. Burns ends with the kicker:
If he recognized the irony in the son of the man who led Britain’s “blackshirts” in reproving German companies for their wartime past, Mr. Mosley did not show it.
Perhaps those commentators were right after all when they said that 9/11 signaled the end of irony.
Or perhaps 9/11 will prove to be the beginning of an era when people will once again understand irony, and satire, the weapon of resistance par excellence. One can always hope.
Scandals sure aren’t what they used to be.
Imus will be back on the air soon:
. And Larry King will be devoting the whole hour tonight to his return, reports TVNewser.
Then of course there’s the O.J. book that got Judith Regan canned from HarperCollins and that was published by someone else, to great success.
Meanwhile, James Frey got a new agent for his new career as a (legitimate) fiction writer.
And today we hear that Larry Craig has been fooling around behind his wife’s back for a while now.
Have we become scandal-proof as a nation?
After I came back home to the States from vacation, I was surprised to see so little media coverage of Al Gore’s Nobel Prize, which had been awarded a couple of days before. Did I miss something? This year alone, the guy got an Oscar, wrote a huge bestseller, and won the Nobel Peace Prize and there’s no draft-Gore movement? Then my vacation buzz wore off and I got busy and forgot about it.
Now Tom Maguire floats an intriguing theory about the mystery candidate who is the subject of Ron Rosenbaum’s journalistic-ethical dilemma. (It’s worth reading the post and the comments, especially those that Rosenbaum replied to, and his final reply.)
But here’s Maguire:
Blog speculators are focusing on Hillary and Huma or Bill and a woman. But I don’t think anyone has mentioned Al Gore, mainly because he is not a declared candidate. But so what? Bettors have him trailing only Hillary and Obama in the Dem field; and yet, the “Will he or won’t he” stories following his Nobel Prize disappeared almost immediately two weeks ago. Is he really staying out of the simply because he thinks he can do more to save the planet and a private citizen wielding a Peace Prize? Maybe!
Hmmm. Interesting. But I’m also intrigued by the picture Rosenbaum paints of what he calls “journalistic insiderism.”
Mickey Kaus (who said a couple of days ago that he didn’t know the rumor Rosenbaum was talking about) recently mentioned a related phenomenon: “the CW buzz in Mark Halperin’s “Gang of 500.”
Not too many folks seem as troubled as Rosenbaum by the ethical dilemma. Jonah Goldberg is getting a lot of theories via e-mail.
And now Kaus has come up with a theory about that [emphasis in the original]
Rosenbaum’s post seems to be functioning as a sort of depth charge that threatens to bring all the various rumored scandals about all the candidates to the surface.
Bring ‘em on!
