Posted on 11/06/2003 7:35:10 PM PST by aculeus
The vans were circling outside Tina Brown's duplex apartment on West 57th Street last Thursday.
"You can always tell when Tina's having a party because they put all their furniture in these vans," explains one regular guest. "At the end of the evening, when everyone's gone home, the vans stop outside her apartment and the furniture gets unloaded on the pavement. Then these flunkies come out and carry it all back in."
It's not just removal vans that have been circling Tina Brown recently. Her debut column in the Washington Post last month was met with uniform ridicule in the paper's newsroom. Seasoned hacks took it in turns to read bits of the column out loud in hoity-toity British accents, taking particular delight in Tina's claim that her "phone exploded" with a call from a "publicity diva".
"This precious, egocentric piece was about the worst and most irrelevant thing I've read in my three years on the job," wrote the Post's ombudsman in a staff memo circulated the following day.
News of the internal reaction soon leaked out and the former magazine diva had to endure another bout of Tina-bashing in the American press. The most damaging piece was by Jack Shafer, a senior editor at the online magazine Slate. "Is there an original way to comment on the badness of Tina Brown's new column?" he wrote.
He interpreted her musings on Manhattan's "buzzocracy" as "a lament about the end of the Tina Brown era" which began with "sleigh rides from the helm of the Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker" and ended in "the ditch". "If you once held the zeitgeist in your fist but now found yourself swimming in status anxiety 24 hours a day, you'd write this badly, too," he concluded. In person, Shafer is hardly less scathing. "Her best chance for career advancement would be if Barbara Walters died and someone at ABC made a really stupid decision," he says, referring to the 72-year-old talk show host who has become America's mother-confessor.
This latest round of negative publicity must be particularly difficult for Tina to endure since she has every reason to feel pleased with herself at the moment.
Following the closure of Talk two years ago, she's been trying to reinvent herself as a pundit and in the past month or so it has begun to look as though she might be succeeding. Not only has she landed a column in the Washington Post, the cable channel CNBC has announced that her quarterly talk show, Topic A With Tina Brown, will be going weekly from Jan 18.
Until her first column appeared, she seemed well-positioned to become a major talking head in the run up to the next Presidential election.
No doubt some of her bad press is attributable to envy. "I think there's a certain group of very smart, very successful, and very difficult blonde women that people just love to kick.
"It's true of Martha Stewart, it's true of Hillary Clinton, it's true of Courteney Love, and it's true of Tina," says Jacob Bernstein, the son of Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein and a columnist on Women's Wear Daily. However, to journalists on The Times, where Tina's column appeared before she moved it to the Washington Post, the reaction to her first American offering has come as no surprise.
"Her column was really of interest to about six people in New York, the six people she happened to have shared a kir royale with the week before. I mean, the players were completely unknown to the people who pick up The Times every day. The thought that the bloke getting on the 7.14 from Sevenoaks to Fenchurch Street would have any idea who Mort Zuckerman is, is just ludicrous." (Zuckerman is the billionaire owner of the New York Daily News.)
Was Tina's departure from The Times less than voluntary? According to her agent, Ed Victor, it was very much her decision to make the move. "She left The Times to go to the Post because she felt that in this amazing election year she wanted to write for an American audience," he says.
Not so, claims a senior editor on The Times, who says the paper decided not to renew her contract. "She does have some talent as a writer but she tries too hard," he adds. "She had these good ideas but she never bothered to develop them into anything more than soundbites. Her columns used to read like a list of taglines on the cover of a magazine."
Not all Washington Post journalists are Tina critics. She has one ally in the form of Lloyd Grove, who until recently was the paper's chief gossip columnist. "Believe me, I used to work for the Post and they've published far worse things than the Tina column," he says. "I've written some of them myself."
Irrespective of Tina's merits as a writer, she isn't likely to be fired any time soon. Not only would it be a loss of face for the person who hired her - Style section editor Eugene Robinson - but she has a strong ally in the form of Bob Woodward, the prominent journalist and author who has risen to the position of assistant managing editor at the Post. And Tina is a past master at stroking the egos of her powerful supporters. In an online discussion on the paper's website following her column's debut, she was asked the question: "Bob Woodward. Hot or not?" Her reply: "Raging, scorching, gotta-jump-into-a-pool hot."
For veteran Tina-watchers, this discussion threw up another gem as well. Someone quoted one of her former employees who said that in the five years that she'd worked for her, first on The New Yorker and then on Talk, the first time she'd seen Tina smile was on her CNBC talkshow. So what of Topic A With Tina Brown? Can that, at least, be considered a success? The first time it was aired, back in April, it managed to attract only 74,000 viewers, but on its second outing it got 204,000, a 176 per cent increase. However, even this has done little to persuade her critics that she has a career in broadcasting ahead of her.
"It's a catastrophe," claims one prominent cultural commentator. "Critically, it's been made nothing but fun of."
The truth is that however hard Tina tries she can't seem to persuade the gatekeepers of media power that she is "hot", to use one of her own favourite yardsticks. Compared to other pundits she is doing quite well, but measured by the standards of her own stellar career she still seems to be on the ground floor. Like many other editors who lost their thrones, she is finding it hard to reinvent herself as a celebrity journalist.
One of the people she'll have to convince if she's going to break through is Michael Wolff, America's most prominent media critic. The author of a forthcoming book called Autumn of the Moguls, he remains sceptical about her ability to pull it off.
"It's not that she hasn't worked hard in the past, but my sense is she's worked at a different level rather than the backbreaking stuff you have to do when you're a content-creator," he says.
Nevertheless, he concedes that there is something admirable about Tina's staunch refusal to give up.
"To some extent there's a spirit of valiance here," he says. "She won't retreat, she won't go home. She's weathering the career storm."
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ROTFL
Seriously, though, would it be supererogatory to maintain that Tina writes better than Maureen Dowd?
I would tend to file that under the heading of "damning with faith praise", myself - you might as well congratulate her for walking upright while you're at it ;)
In which alternate universe?
'Valor' will do, Michael.
Are there any 'writers' left who can write?
:^)
Probably the same one in which Baba WaWaa is "America's mother confesssor."
L
When a grown-up editor [Tina Brown] can actually ask a writer [Andrew Sullivan] about what's "hot" in the questions of eternal life, the fate of the soul, and the meaning of existence, you have to wonder if, deep inside her, that's all she actually sees.
And that empty center was the quintessential vision of her magazine. I say "magazine" in the singular because she only ever really produced one. The formulas at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and Talk were variations on a theme. The core was the cult of celebrity--any celebrity--to sell magazines. From hiring Roseanne to oversee a special issue of The New Yorker to publishing Chelsea Clinton's banal musings about Sept. 11 in Talk, the principle was exactly the same.
Above all, celebrities of any kind were never criticized. Whether it was fawning profiles of Hollywood starlets at Vanity Fair or deferential treatment of the latest "hot" media mogul in The New Yorker, Ms. Brown was fanatical about political safety. When Bill Clinton became president, her first instinct was to hire Sidney Blumenthal, the most pro-Clinton writer on the planet, and one of his first tasks was to wangle her an invite to the inauguration.
That's why her magazines tilted, insofar as they tilted anywhere, to the left--not because Ms. Brown is or was a liberal (her politics, if she has any, remain a complete mystery), but because the people in Hollywood and Manhattan upon whom she relied for money and contacts and favors were all liberals. I was trying to think recently of any article that Tina Brown published that was brave, that took on a powerful individual who could actually do her harm. I came up with nothing.
I will venture that it sucks less.
I have a confession to make. I really like The New Yorker. I have read it off and on since I was in college, long before I realized it was a liberal magazine.
Let me rephrase that. A very liberal magazine.
That said, it remains the case that it consistantly prints the most interesting articles of any magazine I've ever read. They even print things by conservatives once in a while (like every three months, and it's a weekly magazine). And the cartoons. Once in a while they print one that's kind of stupid, but most of the time they are marvels of humor. Sometimes they leave me shaking my head in wonder at how they (their cartoonists) are able to continue to capture that subtle New Yorker humor, the main characteristic of which I would describe as "timelessness." Example: a recent cartoon that showed a teenager getting ready to drive off to college, with Dad leaning in the window and saying "Don't forget to click 'send'".
Since Tina Brown left, the ideological breadth of the articles has expanded, and the ever-present republican-bashing is less heavy-handed and artless.
Oh, yes. The most noticable change is the removal of the little "erotica" items that began to show up when Ms. Brown took over. Those of you who follow The New Yorker will know of what I speak here; those who know the magazine only be reputation probably wouldn't believe it, and the era is over now. While Tina Brown was editrix, The New Yorker began to put these little porno pictures in. Sometimes they were photographs, sometimes drawings. Usually they were very small. Mostly they were nude women, but surprisingly sexual. They were sort of high-brow porno, of a sort that Ms. Brown probably found "edgy" or some such.
Anyway, they are quite gone now, and I am delighted. Well, mostly delighted, anyway.
(steely)
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