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 Caveat lector 15 March 2000 Our current howler: A time when less was more
Back in November, the celebrity press corps was utterly shocked at the news. Katharine Seelye blurted it out, right there in her opening paragraph:
Seelye played off exciting news with her hilarious "top dog" remark. According to Michael Duffy and Karen Tumulty in Time, Naomi Wolf was Al Gore's "secret guru!" And, according to the two scribes' "sources," Wolf had told Gore to become an "Alpha male!" The "mad genius" was also telling him about "shirt-and-tie combinations," according to the magazine's sources. (And she had "bonded" with Gore's daughter, Karenna.) And Time had gasped at Wolf's "expensive advice"—her salary was $15,000 a month! Seelye saved the number for paragraph four. Ceci Connolly put it right in her opening:
The press corps went on to have weeks of fun with Wolf, a Rhodes Scholar and best-selling author. But all over the press was a sense of shock at that salary Crazy Gore had been paying! Everyone knew just how nutty it was. Richard Cohen sounded off in the Post:
To Cohen, the amount was "astounding." The next day, Maureen Dowd chipped in with her musings:
Purring coolly over gender, Dowd improved Seelye's "top dog" remark. Soon the Think-Alike Crew were all out in force, copying off each other's papers. The whole retro bunch had that funny quip down—you know, about Gore paying-a-woman-to-make-him-a-man? Maggie Gallagher, addressing Gore, slid smarmily into the gutter:
Gallagher, spewing smutty sex jokes, mentioned the 15 grand also. Finally, at the end of the month, Marc Fisher showed how angry the scribes had become. You know—just thinking about all that dough?
Whoa! That was pretty tough stuff! We've said it before and we'll say it again—when copy-cat scribes all repeat the same tales, they compete to tell them most wildly. By month's end, Fisher was in a crackpot fury, reciting the Memorized Press Corps Official Opinion for roughly the ten thousandth time. The pundits had become a bit overwrought. (Trust us—we've just scratched the surface.) But at least we'd come to know one thing—$15,000 a month is too much!! The press corps had bellowed, declaimed and complained about money like that for "controversial advisers." Something about the mere thought of that dough had just touched a real nerve with the corps. And then, alas, on February 8, Jim Drinkard mentioned another adviser. He wrote a brief piece about Saint John McCain's controversial adviser in South Carolina, Richard Quinn. Quinn is the editor of Southern Partisan, a journal with controversial racial views. As we read through Drinkard's intriguing report, this passage, you'll recall, caught our eye (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 2/9/00):
Say what? At the time, we noted that Wolf's fifteen grand was less than Quinn's twenty thousand. And Wolf, we note, was based in Manhattan; Quinn lives in South Carolina. Adjusting for basic cost of living, Quinn was getting far more than Wolf. Readers, do you have any idea how many moon pies you can purchase for $20,000? Any-hoo, we settled back and quietly waited for the storm that was sure to follow. Surely the pundits who railed at Gore's Folly would be that much more upset about Quinn. Wolf was controversial? Quinn was controversial! Wolf was overpaid? Quinn was paid more! But from that day to this, we haven't seen a word about the salary McCain paid Quinn. The cheap little phonies who make up our press corps knew enough not to mention this topic. Funny, ain't it, that on the Straight Talk Express, the press corps acted out such a standard? That Richard Cohen, "astounded" last fall, just kept ridin' without saying a word? Stuffing doughnuts into his face, the pundit expounded about his sainted McCain. Apparently, "straight talk" is fun to watch, but not something scribes want to do. We always tell our impressionable young analysts: Stay away from that ol' Double Standard. It's the easiest claim of all to make, and the hardest of all claims to prove. But sometimes unmistakable fact patterns fall in your lap, and they show the relentless bad faith of the press corps. Don't worry—they'll conjure a way to explain it all, to show why Wolf and Quinn aren't the same. But you will surely know better, dear friends; and in the bald double standard the press corps displayed—with pundits remembering to look far away way—we memorialize a year of primary coverage, and look ahead to the general election.
Drinkard gets it right: The only "astounding" thing about Naomi Wolf was the press corps' embarrassing coverage. The Wolf coverage was the largest press corps debacle we didn't get around to covering fully last year. The corps' copy-cat instincts were on full display, and at times the retro-smut was simply breath-taking. Wolf is much smarter and more accomplished than the pundits and scribes, and they were eager to punish her for it. (Promiscuities is a fabulous book. That the author of that book could be ridiculed by Dowd is an emblem of a world gone astray.) Note to the irate Fisher, by the way: we have copies here of Wolf's three books. Hard cover of Beauty Myth? No picture of Wolf. Paperback of Promiscuities? No picture of Wolf. By the way, is there something wrong with authors having pictures on books? If Wolf opposes obsessive beauty culture, does that mean she's not allowed to look nice? Apparently yes—when the lynch mob is runnin', common sense is quickly shown to the door. One journalist we do want to commend is USA Today's Jim Drinkard. We have no way of knowing, of course. But we can't help guessing he mentioned Quinn's salary because he remembered the flap about Wolf. For ourselves, we couldn't care less what Quinn was paid; we think campaigns should concern things that matter. But then, we didn't spend a solid month yelling and screaming about Wolf's salary, either. In November, the press corps disgraced itself with its smarmy comments on Wolf—then in February, with its rank double standard. |