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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Vanity Fair critic and new blogger James Wolcott sinks his fangs into the plush hindquarters of Fox, CNN and the media elite.
Sep 28, 2004 | The blogs terrorizing Dan Rather and CBS the past couple of weeks represent only a small part of the Internet media devoted to criticizing other media, particularly TV and print journalists. Whether they realize it or not, many of these armchair mediaphiles have been heavily influenced by James Wolcott, whose cultural criticism appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's and Esquire before settling in Vanity Fair, where he is the culture critic. Well before all that, he had a memorable stint as TV critic for the Village Voice.
Wolcott's cultural observations and deft vivisections are on fine display in his new book, "Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants," in which he identifies the insidious form of agenda-driven conservative pundit that increasingly dominates the news business, mapping out their yapping universe. Nobody gets a pass; even seemingly minor players like Fox News contributor/columnist Cal Thomas, who "raised a dyed eyebrow at Howard Dean, a Congregationalist, for having a Jewish wife," suffer from a sharp, swift yank of the leash.
Now Wolcott has joined the online masses, launching his own blog last month, which he updates daily on a range of topics, from "America's Next Top Model" to the Republican Convention and CNN's chronic inability to prove that Wolf Blitzer is real. ("After months of being buffeted by accusations and speculation, CNN subjected Blitzer to a series of forensic tests over the weekend and determined that his beard is a polyfiber synthetic and his lack of affect was attributable to a defective chip insecurely fitted into his fliptop head.")
Salon recently sat down with Wolcott to discuss his blog, his book and the confusing state of the 21st century American media.
"Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants: The Looting of the News in a Time of Terror"
By James Wolcott
Miramax
336 pages
Essays
Is your blog connected to Vanity Fair?
Well, they helped set it up. I don't know if we're going to migrate it to the Vanity Fair site or if there will be a place you can link from the Vanity Fair site, sort of like what Kevin Drum does at the Washington Monthly. I guess they're probably going to do it that way, but it's sort of up in the air. I'm not sure. We thought, well, why don't we get something started that can stand alone and then see what happens.
Many consider you the preeminent media critic in the country, and you certainly have one of the most influential audiences a writer could dream of, at Vanity Fair. But criticism has really taken off online, because of blogs, because of newspapers going online, and it all winds up on Romenesko. Now, that has a fraction of your Vanity Fair audience, and yet reaches a lot of the professionals and media machers who, conversely, may miss your column because it's not online. Is the blog a way to reach that audience, the one that is most obsessed with the media?
Well, it probably will, although I didn't think of it that way. It wasn't intentional. It was more about what I'd be able to write about, the weird little subjects that I'd like to be able to ricochet off. I have a lot of interests that you can't get into print, you know, just because they won't sustain a 3,000-word piece. Now, of course, people say, you shouldn't be bothering with that, you should be getting your major work done. But every writer knows the experience of -- you do a big, long piece, you wait for some sort of feedback, and then [pause] the deafening silence that follows. Then other pieces, you get huge feedback on. The great thing about doing a blog is that the feedback is there, you know it immediately, you can almost measure it immediately.
