Andrew Sullivan: Some Like It Hot (Tina Brown was the Bill Clinton of journalism)

Opinion Journal ^ | 01/24/2002 | Andrew Sullivan

[Pokey78]

Many people in the magazine business have their Tina stories. Here's mine. At some point in the Tina Brown era at The New Yorker, I got a call from her asking me to write a piece about "religion." After routine flattery, she got to the point. "We have a fabulous issue coming up on religion, and Dick Avedon is photographing several religious figures and icons, and I wondered whether you could do an accompanying essay," she asked in her clipped, breathless tone. "About what?" I asked. "Religion is a pretty big topic." "Oh, that would be up to you," Ms. Brown replied. "Anything that's hot right now in religion. Anything hot."

[Pokey78]

Ping for the ASPL.

[alcuin]

Good post.

[Hildy]

Brilliant.

[Hagrid]

WOW!! Great article! Tina Brown would have published it if it weren't about her.

[TroutStalker]

Deserves a good bump here.

[Friedrich Hayek]

Her mindset came direct from a British elite that, by the 1980s, had stopped believing in anything much, an elite worldview that, in place of God, relied on the demigods of fashion, hipness, irony, design and gossip.

Another terrific article by Sullivan.

On the English comedy series Absolutely Fabulous, Patsy works at a Fashion Mag whose editor is a spot-on rip-off of Tina Brown. She's a chain-smoking, champagne-swilling harridan who is always on the look out for the next "hot" celebrity. It is this soul-less elite that AbFab satirizes so brilliantly.

[BunnySlippers]

I'm snagging this for later ...

[ambrose]

nxfxgnfg

[AntiScumbag]

never seemed to have a view of her own, a politics, a guiding principle, a cause

word association

tina brown

vacuous

good riddance, and here's hoping that all potential future funders of her idiocy will remain pertrified of her now amply demonstrated ability to burn capital and lose money at ferocious rates and keep both hands firmly on their tightly closed wallets

[NYCVirago]

In case you haven't seen this...

[WaterDragon]

Wow!

Thanks, Pokey. Glad I got to read this. Sullivan is very, very good.

[PJ-Comix]

On the English comedy series Absolutely Fabulous, Patsy works at a Fashion Mag whose editor is a spot-on rip-off of Tina Brown. She's a chain-smoking, champagne-swilling harridan who is always on the look out for the next "hot" celebrity. It is this soul-less elite that AbFab satirizes so brilliantly.

Any chance this series will air in the USA?

[danneskjold]

Any chance this series will air in the USA?

Actually, it's shown on Comedy Central

[Bush2000]

Thanks. Notice how the epitaphs are already starting to be written for her publishing career...

[Revolting cat!]

Sullivan writes any more articles like this one and he won't eat lunch in this town again, to quote another infamous (and now all dead,) industry rebel. Brilliant, incisive. Sullivan rocks!

[Happygal]

Ab Fab is brilliant! And Joanna Lumley is excellent as Patsy! :-) You gotta see it!

[monkey]

The result was that many writers saw their work paid for and never published, because the magazine, like an airplane, had been overbooked, or because the story fell victim to the latest must-run piece attuned to the nanosecond of the culture.

When the NY was a good mag (and probably still), they had contracts with many of the top literary writers. The NY had first dibs on any story they wrote; if you read an article by Singer, Marquez, or Updike in Harper's or Atlantic, it meant the NY had passed on it.

They had amazing standards; Charles Addams couldn't submit any more Addams family-style cartoons after the TV show, and mystical stories were reportedly submitted by JD Salinger and rejected.

But they started to lose money, and when the big jerk hired Tina Brown, they became a terrible shell of a magazine, Joe Louis as a greeter in Las Vegas, and they still lost money.

[RottiBiz]

Sullivan bump!

Very insightful article.

[WaterDragon]

Sullivan has a new column (replying to Krugman) up at his (impossible for me to get into) site. When you have time, would you post it at FR? I cannot tell you how grateful I am when you do post those articles.