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It turns out the news media had a pretty shameful weekend. A British couple came forward to say that while they were hiding from terrorists at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai, CNN broadcast details of their specific hiding place in the facility, resulting in a fresh search by the gunmen in control of the hotel at the time. The Indian government blacked out local TV after claiming the terrorists were gaining tactical information from the broadcasts. And now David Carr weighs in via the Times with a column about how U.S. newspapers were complicit in whipping shoppers into the frenzy that culminated in a deadly Wal-Mart stampede:
In a day-before story, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution advised readers to leave the children at home, at least the ones not big enough to carry the loot, because they will just slow you down... "we know a few shoppers willing to use four wheels and a child as a weapon..."
An article distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News sounded as if the writers were composing a sonnet for fishing or camping until they got to the punch line: “Nothing rivals the thrill of waking up before the sun, or that sprint through the store for the perfect present.”
...Newsday offered a “Black Friday blueprint,” with store openings listed so shoppers could plot strategy, including noting that at 5 a.m., the Green Acres Wal-Mart would open and customers could expect to buy a 42-inch LCD television for $598. Many continued to pursue that particular bargain even as Mr. Damour lay dying.
Of course, it was just Wednesday that the Times was mythologizing gluttonous consumerism, and not long ago that it literally serenaded the frenzied crowds chomping at the bit for their iPhones. And the holiday edition of high-end-consumption porn rag T Magazine is due in the next week or two, right? It's true that Black Friday is a stupid, fake idea, but media cheerleading of crazed consumerism is here to stay. If an unfolding economic depression wasn't enough to stop rabid consumers from breaking down doors to buy LCD television sets, a single death isn't going to reform desperate newspapers.
Anderson Cooper has to consider it one of the highlights of his career thus far, a thoroughly pleasurable counterbalance to his weeks of depressing Hurricane Katrina coverage back when the CNN anchor was still paying his dues: A flirty interview with champion Olympic swimmer and fellow heartthrob Michael Phelps, complete with shirt removal, medal-fondling, a cozy little nap together and the line, "Mind if I hold one? They're very heavy!" Viewers of Cooper's own AC360 are used to being brought in on this sort of innuendo; it was only a matter of time before the 60 Minutes contributor started beating CBS' larger audience over the head with the "boys make me giggle" routine. So to speak. (Clip after the jump.)
The Associated Press is said to be planning staff cuts. Customers and readers are up in arms over its drift away from hard news. CNN, meanwhile, is fat and happy, and getting moreso by the day, investing in free food, holograms and international staff. So there was probably more than a little jealousy behind AP chief Tom Curley's disdainful swipe at the cable network's plan for a "CNN Wire" to compete with AP.
Speaking before staff, the Times reports, Curley (pictured) said "any number of people" could have launched an AP competitor, not just CNN. He chalked up the network's recent financial success (an estimated $1.1 billion in revenue this year) to the election. And he said he wasn't going to egg the network on with insults, before doing just that:
“The current CNN wire, if you look at it truly is still, and remarkably, abysmally written,” he said. “However, they’re interviewing A.P. people, we know, and that can be transformed. And if you have enough money and you have enough ego and enough desire, you can fix that in a hurry.”
And while you can teach a CNN hack to write better, good luck finding an AP reporter who holds a candle to Anderson Cooper — the anchor and possible CNN Wire columnist — when it comes to emoting on NeNe Leakes' bosom or Lindsay Lohan's family.
For the most part, Rupert Murdoch courts controversy. "He likes to set the house on fire and watch all the fire engines drive maniacally down the road," Michael Wolff writes in a biography of the News Corporation chairman. But he's touchy about his third wife, Wendi Deng, nearly 40 years his junior. He was upset when the Wall Street Journal decided to profile her in 2000. And he is suspected to be behind the spiking of a Fortune contributor's Deng profile for an Australian newspaper chain he partly owned at the time, and the subsequent sanitization of Deng's Wikipedia entry. So Murdoch can't be tickled that Wolff says Deng has him by the short wires, according to the Times' new review of Wolff's Murdoch bio:
What does matter, according to “The Man Who Owns the News,” is his third wife, Wendi Deng, who is 38 years his junior and controls him to the point of reading his e-mail.
(“Let’s recast this story as a triumphal, even uplifting tale of pluck and achievement,” Mr. Wolff writes, about how she came to marry such a powerful older man. “She’s not Becky Sharp, she’s Pip in ‘Great Expectations.’ ”)
That little detail about Deng resonates especially strongly since it reinforces the picture the Journal painted of her in 2000 (original) as a deft and serial manipulator of powerful men:
Her ticket out of China came in 1987, when she met a Los Angeles couple, Jake and Joyce Cherry... Mrs. Cherry says she had grown increasingly suspicious about Ms. Deng's relationship with her husband. Mrs. Cherry recalls discovering a cache of photographs her husband had taken of Ms. Deng in coquettish poses back in his hotel room in Guangzhou. Mr. Cherry confirms he had become infatuated with the young woman...
The Cherrys divorced, and Jake Cherry married Ms.Deng in February 1990. But that union didn't last. Mr. Cherry says that about four months after the wedding, he told Ms. Deng to leave because she had started spending time with a man named David Wolf...
Former colleagues describe Ms. Deng as having been adept at juggling the interests of News Corp.'s various units, which like to operate independently... She is said to have shown no hesitation about walking unannounced into a senior executive's office to discuss the latest Chinese entrepreneur she had met or government official she had contacted...
In early 1998, she first appeared at [Murdoch's] side, acting as his interpreter when he traveled to Shanghai and Beijing. By the summer of 1998, the Star TV staff was buzzing about romance between the pair. After dinner meetings in Hong Kong, they were observed holding hands. In May, Mr. Murdoch had separated from his wife of 31 years, Anna. The split surprised even his closest aides, who say they hadn't seen any sign of a rupture.
Can't wait to see how the book is reviewed in the Post and Journal!
In April, the Times published a 7,600-word story on how major news networks presented as their own military "analysts" former officers who were on the payroll of major defense contractors and who had received talking points in special Pentagon briefings. The networks declined to cover the story and the scandal never caught fire. The newspaper's solution? Recast the story to focus on a single villain, retired General Barry McCaffrey, who NBC News' Brian Williams defended as a "passionate patriot" the last time around.
Wrote BriWion his NBC News blog: "At no time did our analysts, on my watch or to my knowledge, attempt to push a rosy Pentagon agenda before our viewers. I think they are better men than that, and I believe our news division is better than that."
But the Times severely undercut this conclusion by expanding its coverage of McCafferty from two sentences in its prior exposé to the entire focus of its new one, detailing his tight working relationship with many defense contractors that benefited hugely from the policies he advocated on NBC News. Among the embarrassing details:
Sadly, the Times' story still probably won't go anywhere. NBC News may cut off McCafferty quietly in a few months. But in the meantime the financial meltdown and presidential transition will give the networks the perfect excuse to ignore the story.
Did you happen to catch Barack Obama's weekly camboy YouTube this Thanksgiving? Earnest and adorable as ever, the Office of the President Elect was unsubtle in its marketing; the word "new" appeared seven times in its 600-word speech on the economy, including two prominent instances of what appears to be the Obama administration's new catchphrase: "New Beginning." It looks like we have the much-awaited replacement term for "stimulus," "bailout" and "recovery package," all of which are despised by voters.
Packaging can be powerful, as Franklin Roosevelt learned. He included the term "new deal" as a throwaway line in his Democratic convention speech, delivered while he was trying to combine, on the spot, differing texts supplied by different advisers. But reporters immediately seized on the phrase and within a few weeks it was being rendered as the "New Deal," a powerful handle summarizing a vast array of transformative government programs in two words.
Obama seems considerably more confident in the power of branding. He is trying to convince everyone the country will have a "new beginning" with the Defense Secretary from the prior administration, a chief of staff from the administration before last, a Secretary of State who used to live in the White House and two wars and around $2 trillion in economic recovery schemes devised by the prior administration.
It's a monumental challenge, but "New Beginning" isn't a bad start, marketingwise. It certainly beats our proposed slogan, "We are still doomed, forever." Watch it in action in the video below.
Maybe the dude that started busting caps in Toys-R-Us yesterday had a point; like a psychotic, morally reprehensible one, but a point nonetheless. Certainly it's too much to ask that $7 an hour and no health insurance would instill esprit de corps among the workforce. But after I've been turned into a sputtering mass of frustration three times in two days by surly holiday hell, I can see how someone close to the edge might be pushed over by so-called "seasonal help." Maybe moneygrubbing corporations shouldn't unleash untrained hordes of underpaid nitwits on an unsuspecting public looking to buy their yearly allotment of trinkets. The lurid coverage of frenzied bargain hunters trampling a Wal-Mart employee to death and spraying a Toys-R-Us with machine gun fire might be having an effect on the morale of big box store employees!
First—while standing at the counter trying to buy some paper in a completely deserted Staples on Union Square—a chubby salesclerk in a red polo shirt shot me an angry look. "Do you see those arrows?" she asked, pointing to the stickers on the floor behind me. "You have to walk behind the rope, stand on those arrows and wait on line for us to call you." Oh, ha ha, I get it there is no line—you're kidding. "Stand on the arrows. On the arrows!" she repeated for emphasis.
Then I went over to eat at Sea on 2nd Avenue and 5th with my boyfriend. The place was filled with yuppies scarfing down chicken basil and pad thai, and a waiter was nearly impossible to come by. We couldn't get a pair of chopsticks, but that didn't stop the management from hiding an 18% gratuity in fine print on the bill. After my bf almost double tipped for non-existent service he left 10% . We got as far as St. Marks when a shifty-eyed cook scurried scraping, bowing and sighing like he had lost his first-born. "Ahh, ahhh, you eat at Sea?" Yah. "Ahh, there not, ahh, enough money." Beat it pal.
"You can't let people shake you down," my boyfriend said. Then we gave some money to a homeless person.
In keeping up with the Spanx/underwear beat—guys, here is your new foundation garment. It's called Core Precision (heh), reports the London Times, and it makes you look like you have a six-pack. Now dudes will understand what it's like to be a lady wearing a spandex-y waist-cincher, because you really can't let anyone touch or see you undressed at all when wearing it, or they'll find out your terrible secret. So it's like a chastity belt basically. Have fun at the bar!
The Pledge of Allegiance was written by, of course, a Socialist. But the good kind! Francis Bellamy was a late-19th century Baptist Utopian Socialist, not a Stalinist or one of those white kids with dreadlocks. Naturally his Pledge was different from the one we know: it doesn't mention God! Luckily Congress fixed that in 1954, adding the words "under God" right in the middle, disrupting the flow of the whole thing. The Commie-hating clergyman responsible for adding God to our pledge just died!
The Reverend George M. Docherty (pictured above with President Eisenhower) went on a tear in the '50s, talking about how the pledge needed to mention God every chance he got. One day the president showed up! The rest is history.
Docherty delivered a sermon saying the pledge should acknowledge God in 1952 at Washington's New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, just blocks from the White House.
On Feb. 7, 1954, he delivered it again after learning that President Dwight Eisenhower would be at the church.
Congress inserted the words a few months later.
Docherty died this week, on Thanksgiving. It's too bad he won't live to see President Barack Obama add "Allahu Akbar" to the end of his famous pledge.
Have any excess weight? Might you after the holidays? It's getting easier to follow in the increasingly shallow footsteps of Horatio Sanz, the former Saturday Night Live castmember who told New York he'd lost about 100 pounds. "I've been eating better," he told the magazine. And you can too! Publishing bosses are curtailing expense-account lunch options, with one (Random House) going so far as to issue tipping and venue guidelines. If that doesn't cut it you might try, you know, exercise. For motivation, there's always this blog, put out by an Equinox trainer who supposedly "all the Conde [Nast] girls live for," according to one magazine-industry source. Recent more-than-a-little-obsessive entires dealt with cardio workout times (you never need to exceed an hour!) and the entirely natural phenomenon of wanting to sit on your ass rather than working out.
It turns out the latter can be overcome by avoiding the internet!
3. KEEP ON YOUR ROUNTINE - If you don’t have one, get one! Routines are the saviors of the dreaded slump. Even if you’re a zombie keep going through the motions of your life. Try not to put your life on hold… Just keep doing the next right thing, one step at a time – Make your bed, brush your teeth, go to work, go the gym… Always keep #1 in your mind– It will pass...
5. STAY AWAY FROM THE NEGATIVE GOOGLE or THE FACEBOOK STALK – Don’t google your ex- don’t google your significant others ex, don’t see where you stand in your career… Not the time people, nnnoootttt the TIME...
7. STAY AWAY FROM THE BOTTLE – Alcohol is a depressant. You might feel better in the short run but it’s not going to help tomorrow. It will also help you avoid #5, and the horrendously embarrassing drunk dial… YOU know what I’m talking about
President Bush has long assumed, rather idiotically, that his universal unpopularity was just a fluke, and that historians would remember him kindly. The fact is there will almost certainly be revisionists at some future point who will say "he's not so bad" but torture and Katrina and Iraq kind of seal the deal for his future reputation. But, sitting down with, uh, his sister for an oral history interview on the end of his administration, Bush is sanguine and only slightly defensive. How would he like to be remembered? As a guy who "did not sell his soul." The rest of his answer veers off into patently untrue nonsense:
I came to Washington with a set of values, and I'm leaving with the same set of values. And I darn sure wasn't going to sacrifice those values; that I was a President that had to make tough choices and was willing to make them. I surrounded myself with good people. I carefully considered the advice of smart, capable people and made tough decisions.
Right. Sure. You have absolutely no connection to observable reality, do you, Mr. President?
But this is maybe the best quote, nonsense-wise: "THE PRESIDENT: I've been in the Bible every day since I've been the President, and I have been affected by people's prayers a lot."
Great, revealing interview, Doro Bush Koch.
Photo: ANDINA/Carlos Lezama
Bill O'Reilly and Chris Matthews are both famous cable news shouty persons, yes, but beyond that how much do they have in common? Both cling to a Northeastern Working-Class Catholicism that colors their broadcast personae even though they've both been rich and famous long enough to leave most of the lessons behind besides the strict moralism. But Matthews is an old Democrat working for liberal-leaning MSNBC, and O'Reilly is a culture war conservative with GOP in-house propaganda machine Fox. One more thing they share: they're not particularly liked by their peers! Matthews is seen as an overenthusiastic, affection-starved dog, at least if last April's devastating Times Magazine profile is to be believed. O'Reilly is just seen as a dick, if Michael Wolff is to be believed.
Wolff wrote a biography of Fox owner and tyrant Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch has cozied up a bit to Barack Obama and has been focusing, lately, on turning the Wall Street Journal into a serious competitor of the New York Times. So Fox's cartoonish liberal-bashing is a bit embarrassing to him, according to the book.
“It is not just Murdoch (and everybody else at News Corp.’s highest levels) who absolutely despises Bill O’Reilly, the bullying, mean-spirited, and hugely successful evening commentator,” Wolff wrote, “but [Fox News chief executive] Roger Ailes himself who loathes him. Success, however, has cemented everyone to each other."
“The embarrassment can no longer be missed,” Wolff wrote, in another section of the book. “He mumbles even more than usual when called on to justify it. He barely pretends to hide the way he feels about Bill O’Reilly. And while it is not that he would give Fox up—because the money is the money; success trumps all—in the larger sense of who he is, he seems to want to hedge his bets.”
It's all because Murdoch's wife and children are limousine liberals now, and in this new Obama era, we are all out-of-touch cultural elites, aren't we? But O'Reilly, and Fox, still make money, so Murdoch will not be changing anything about them until they stop making money. He is a capitalist, not an ideologue.
Oh, but what was that about Chris Matthews? He is going to run for the Senate! Against maybe Arlen Specter, the ancient Republican?
FiveThirtyEight has been hearing for some time that Matthews is serious about running for the United States Senate, but it took a trip to Georgia among the Georgia-runoff-congregated and well-connected Obama organizer throng to confirm.
According to multiple sources, who confirmed the Tip O'Neill staffer-cum-MSNBC host has negotiated with veteran Obama staffers to enlist in his campaign, Chris Matthews is likely to run for United States Senate in Pennsylvania in 2010. Matthews, 62, would run as a Democrat. Arlen Specter, the aging Republican incumbent, will be 80 if he chooses to run for re-election.
It is Chris' life-long dream to be a Senator, and that is a sad dream, but still. If Specter retires, and his health suggests he might, the Democrats would be fools to hand an easy Democratic seat pickup to a liberal broadcaster with a long history of ignorant sexist comments, but, you know, they're the Democratic Party. They nominated Al Franken to run in Minnesota, didn't they?
[Jim Behrle's Kreepie Kats try to save the holidays from ugly consumption now that no one can afford to buy anything.]
"The purpose of this event is to encourage individuals and families to set aside one hour to conduct and record interviews with those who have been important to their lives." [WowOWow]
We had a fun couple weeks there, congratulating ourselves for Barack Obama's historic, Liberals Save America presidential win, accepting other countries' "we're so proud of you" head nods and whatnot. It seemed like the country was back on track for a second, ready to head out into the world beloved for our bold and inspirational choice. Except, um, as it turns out, it doesn't really matter what the World thinks of us. A small, active faction of folks still hate us intensely and it doesn't matter that European people like US tourists again. Things like the current Mumbai crisis still wretchedly play out on big stages the belie their small, insidious roots.
For a brief second, yes! America was off the shit list, according to random white Europeans polled. (Actual line from that article: "I think this moment has the potential to do for the U.S. what the Olympics did for China: show the world we've changed." Um.) We could stop pretending we were Canadian! It was so great. And then a series of coordinated, supposedly Westerner-targeted attacks on Mumbai, India's financial district came rushing into the news. A hotel and a Jewish center were seized by "Mujahideen" (though no group, Muslim or not, has been declared the perpetrator). Those hideous, all-too-familiar images of bombs and guns and smoke were suddenly back in our faces (I mean, they'd always been there, every day for seven plus years, but now we're forced to look again).
Overall, the death toll could top 200. Among the casualties are, yes, people just like us: A young rabbi from New York was killed with his equally young wife, leaving an orphaned 18-month-year-old. A 13-year-old American girl was killed with her father. People having scrambling through the devastation of hotels and train stations the whole time, trying to find any Americans who may have been injured or worse in the attacks. We learned that some 200 tourists, singled out for having American or British passports, were being held hostage. And suddenly the caution we threw to the rumpy thumpy street party wind late on November 4th seemed to come flying back at us, taunting us with a small, ugly reminder:
It was never the World, and it was never Bush. It was something smaller and more shadowy that despised (read: violently disagreed with) us, and it was a system, a large collection of policies that enraged, not one simpish big-eared man. He stood as powerful avatar for that Big Problem, yes, but removing the spokesman does not end the scandal. (Just ask Scott McClellan.) We've bloody miles to go, we fear. And while it's still OK—don't worry!—to be soul squishingly happy about Obama, let's not forget that it's only a small seed of beginning. There are still plenty of needles in the Hope stack.
We hate to say we told you so, but Australia—Baz Luhrmann's sweepy weepy about his homeland in the 1940's—is not doing so well at the ol' box office. Nikki Finke reports that it's basically tanking, ceding top honors to such unambitious, unartsy fare as the darkening Twilight and this weekend's most likely top dog (and we mean dog), Four Christmases.
That Reese Witherspoon/Vince Vaughn laff riot will likely haul in some $47 million over the 5-day holiday weekend, while the $129 million-budgeted Australia will likely drum up a lowly $18 million, having earned a paltry $2.265 million on its opening day (Wednesday). And, perhaps more embarrassingly, word has it that the slapdash new James Bond film is outpacing Australia... in Australia. Which is grim! Studio Fox heralds Luhrmann's big overseas appeal, naturally (foreigners love weird melodramatic shit!), but this picture had high American Oscar hopes and now... sigh. They appear to have fizzled in just three days. Bad news for Fox, bad news for Jackman, and really bad news for Kidman, who desperately needed a hit.
And, honestly? We're kinda disappointed too. We had high hopes.
So yes, today is Black Friday, the day when big stores roll out big, one-day-only bargains in the hopes of setting a high sales bar for the all-important Holiday Season (Christmas! And, to a much lesser extent, Chanukkah!) Good savings are especially urgent this year, with the economy in the crapper and everyone needing to buy things for as cheap as possible (just short of not buying it at all. That would be ludicrous!) Every year, people line up super, super early in the morning. And in some cases, store employees get trampled to death when the doors open and crazed shoppers try to push their way in. (Un)Fortunately there is no photo documentation of that particular melee, but Getty managed to snap some shots at Macy's in New York City and at a Best Buy electronics store in Los Angeles this morning and the madness is palpable. Click after the jump for a gallery.
Comedy Central curated a list of the Daily Show's top eight Thanksgiving moments, and watching the clips is a bit like pulling out a family photo album to find your boisterous uncle was thinner and less confident than you remembered. Events have allowed the show to feel less desperate and angry these days than in the multiple holiday clips that swipe at the Bush Administration. Katie Couric has put the shame of an M&M-float-disaster coverup behind her. But Rob Corddry's exposé on the farce of pardoned turkeys looks as relevant as ever! It's the first of the four best-of-the-best clips after the jump.
[The pop sensation leaving a taping of The X Factor, Britain's American Idol; image via