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Monday, Oct 13, 2008
The real meaning of the Blumenthal-Hitchens flap; on-the-air job tryouts on Barbara Walters' 'The View'
Feb 9, 1999 | If you thought there'd be no bombshells from the videotaped Senate depositions this weekend, try this one: Sidney Blumenthal has friends! After Christopher Hitchens delivered an affidavit attesting that Blumenthal, contrary to his testimony, had told him at a March lunch that Monica Lewinsky was, in fact, a "stalker," Blumenthal confidants and dinner guests denounced Hitchens for being the turd in the Washington-media aperitif. The account by Lloyd Grove in Monday's Washington Post wonderfully illuminates the rank incestuousness of networking in elite journalism today. Look at the various persons offering (mostly negative) opinions of Hitchens' lunch-and-telling: "A friend of both Hitchens and Blumenthal"; the "executive editor and vice president of Grove/Atlantic Press ... (who) had dinner with the Blumenthals Saturday night"; "another friend, an author and magazine journalist who asked not to be named ... [and] the author's wife, an investigative journalist." "I think it is such a pity," commented the latter, "that I'll never be able to speak with Christopher again or have him in my house".
Here's the delicious irony: Sidney Blumenthal, premier theorist of right-wing conspiracy, may leave as his greatest legacy the public reminder that he himself is part of a claustrophobic media-government sewing circle whose interconnections put the Scaife network to shame -- an inbred nightmare community where every pseudopod of the elite-opinion amoeba dines, drinks, goes to bed and marries with another. Early discussion has centered on whether Hitchens' act violated the journalistic tradition of not naming anonymous sources, notwithstanding the fact that Blumenthal's lawyer grandly welcomed anyone with this sort of information to come forward, which -- if Hitchens is telling the truth -- was a sleazy attempt to take advantage of colleagues' honor by making them complicit in a lie through their silence. But it only proves the cluelessness of this Washington power circle if they think the public is going to give them a standing ovation for defending the sanctity of comfy cabalistic gossip sessions at the Washington Occidental. By violating journalism's most sacred principle -- the rule of lunch -- Hitchens may ultimately hurt the bottom line of Jean-Louis Palladin establishments, but if he encourages Washington journalists to befriend and marry people who don't have Cabinet officials on speed-dial, the readers and the human gene pool of tomorrow will thank him.
The women who would be Debbie
When Debbie Matenopoulos, the much-spoofed voice of the younger generation on Barbara Walters' "The View," suddenly vaporized (or, as an ABC publicist put it, left voluntarily to "pursue other opportunities") last month, the producers of the daytime chat show decided to hold a televised job fair -- a live Gen-Xpo in which four young would-be Walterettes auditioned for two days each for the post of youth spokesmodel.
On-air groveling is hardly new on talk shows -- "Tonight Show" guests must still take care not to trip on Jay Leno's kneeprints -- but bringing a string of candidates to essentially interview for the job live is much rarer. And it's a typically sharp move for the most of-the-moment chatfest of daytime TV. "The View," an engrossing, funny round table of "women of different generations, backgrounds and views," has been called a lot of things (among them a female Rat Pack), but this parade of résumé-toting twentysupplicants shows that "The View" is above all the first talk show for the age of fetishizing work.
The traditional morning chat show was conceived as a surrogate living room, sans Legos on the carpet, for kid-shackled suburban women. "The View," launched in 1997, knows how its viewer has changed: She may be telecommuting or working part time, on maternity leave or stuck with a sick child (all situations, by the way, reflected in the commercials: cold and stomach remedies to "get kids better faster"; adult medicines to get you back to work pronto). She gets all the home she cares for in her own damn house. She wants a surrogate office.
And there's the genius of "The View." Here, the coffee table is replaced by a dinner table, as in an employee break room, and the hosts around it look like the family that we give the most QT now: our co-workers. "The View" panel is the kind of race- and age-integrated group we find only on the job, all familiar white-collar types: the leonine chief executive (Walters), on vacation every other day; the wisecracking second banana (comedian Joy Behar); the earnest office mom (journalist Meredith Vieira); the warm and self-promoting diva (attorney Star Jones); and, of course, the ghost (Matenopoulos) -- the young achiever who quietly vanished one day and who no one talks about anymore. Rather than give us fake intimacy, "The View" gives us fake fake intimacy, a simulation of workplace didja see the Post this morning jawboning over institutional java, as Vieira tosses out hot-button headline questions (Does Chelsea deserve privacy? Is oral sex really sex?) for the same off-the-cuff analysis you find so endearing in Patty from Accounting (It's always the children who suffer!).
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