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Even though we haven't quite found MF Global's $1.2 billion that went missing, Vanity Fair did find out he and his wife Sharon were talking about a château they were about to buy in the South of France. The preview of the February issue's Corzine exposé is up online--complete with cocktail party anecdotes from their 1 percent-sounding acquaintances. If you ask us, this haughty "Not Cap Ferrat" insult is the best (and worst) part: “It’s not in Cap Ferrat,” one person recalls Elghanayan saying, perhaps to mitigate the extravagance. “To buy any decent château is at least a couple of...

R.I.P. Christopher Hitchens December 15, 2011 11:51 P.M. By Daniel Foster     Vanity Fair reports that Christopher Hitchens has passed away. Often frustrating, usually provocative, always brilliant. He added to the culture, and the conversation. I’m sure I join many in hoping he is in for a glorious, glorious surprise.

Per copyright restrictions and FR posting guidelines, can't display the article. So, here's a link: http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2010/12/graydon-201012

A panel full of liberals on Wednesday's Good Morning America attacked the "angry, white" Tea Partiers and lauded the historical importance of Jon Stewart. Daily Beast editor Tina Brown gushed over the liberal comedian as " the only trusted branch of government." Previewing the comic's rally on Washington this Saturday, the former Vanity Fair editor hyperbolically enthused, "You know, I mean, in the end, Stewart and Colbert, really are like the Huntley and Brinkley of today in the sense that people really, really trust them."

Vanity Fair’s attacked conservative men with its latest political satire: a soft-core pornographic, borderline homosexual and obviously photoshopped “Official 2010-2011 Republican Beefcake Calendar.” Humorous perhaps, but also an attack on those candidates and certainly not the magazine’s first jab at Republicans and conservatives.

Vanity Fair's Michael Joseph Gross and I went back and forth this morning in part about what strikes me as an improbableanecdote involving Palin's musing on a campaign-trail wedding for her daughter. I found it improbable because a McCain aide told me -- and told Dave Weigel at the time -- that he'd floated the idea on a lark and leaked it to the Sunday Times, but that it was little more than a joke. Gross responded that we had different sources, and that his was firsthand. Now Scott Conroy, a Palin embed and co-author of the critical, reported book...

Michael Joseph Gross has now admitted that he made an “error” in regard to his slimy hit piece in Vanity Fair that he wrote about Sarah Palin. He falsely reported that Sarah somehow disregarded her child at an event, when he knew the child was mine, and I took him from the Governor who was holding him right up until she was walking on stage. He did not apologize to Sarah Palin, to me, or to either of our children, for the record. He also has not retracted the other 99 lies in the piece. At least not yet. He...

Spending $3,000 of campaign funds on underwear . . . a mean tipper . . . Vanity Fair dishes the dirt The October issue of Vanity Fair has just published an explosive profile of Sarah Palin. We've picked the highlights . . . She managed to spend $3,000 on underwear "The number and range of items purchased for the entire Palin family – more than 400 in total – is mind-boggling. For Sarah, the campaign bought roughly $3,000 [£1,940] worth of underwear (including many Spanx girdles)." Angels protect her "When Palin thanks prayer warriors for keeping her covered, she is...

Radio interview with Dr. Gina Loudon. Dr. Loudon was the woman who busted Michael Gross for his lies in the hit piece that was published in Vanity Fair. At the 18:50 mark in the podcast (grand total it's about thirty minutes long), she brings up that Michael Gross visited Joe McGinniss in Alaska. McGinniss if you'll recall is the creep who rented the house next door to the Palin's in order to spy on them. I highly recommend giving this a listen

Who's up for another Newsweek take on Sarah Palin? Newsweek’s latest effort to unravel the mystery that is Sarah Palin is about what readers have come to expect. NEWSWEEK WONDERS: WHY DON’T THE HIT PIECES WORK ANYMORE? ANSWER: MORE AMERICANS TRUST SARAH PALIN THAN TRUST NEWSWEEK Newsweek has an article on its website on Sarah Palin titled Why No Amount of Reporting Can Hurt Sarah Palin. The article is extremely informative–only not in the way intended by its author, Ravi Somaiya. The headline is mostly correct even as the rest of the piece fails. Michael Joseph Gross’s stories, headlined “Sarah...

The mother of that child, conservative activist Gina Loudon, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that she told Gross during the rally that the child in the stroller was her son, not Palin’s. She said she tried to make it clear because the two children look a lot alike. “I told him that. And he ignored it,” Loudon said. “It’s not even like he didn’t fact check – he just ignored facts.” Gross said in a written statement sent to The Associated Press that he was mistaken. “Trig was with his mother the next day in Wichita (Kan.), but the child...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) - A writer for Vanity Fair has acknowledged a case of mistaken identity in an unflattering article about Sarah Palin in the magazine's October issue. Reporter Michael Joseph Gross describes Palin's youngest son, Trig, being pushed in a stroller by his older sister, Piper, before a rally in May in the Kansas City suburb of Independence. snip "Trig was with his mother the next day in Wichita (Kan.), but the child in Independence was someone else, and I regret the error," he said.

Remember Vanity Fair (you know–the stale, old magazine that no one buys unless they are on the cover or they are wishing they were, like Joy Behar)? The recent hit piece on Sarah Palin by Michael Joseph Gross reveals that they must be as desperate as the rest of the MSM for sales/ratings, because they have lost all credibility, if they ever had any. Reading his tripe was excruciating. Some 90% of the hard accusations are attributed to anonymous “sources.” This is billed as a profile piece, not exactly Watergate. You have to do better than attributing everything to an...

As we discussed here yesterday Vanity Fair published a badly sourced attack piece on Governor Palin. But the piece is even worse than first thought. As Politico's Ben Smith discovered, the Vanity Fair piece contained yet another lie passed off as "journalism." Smith highlighted the part of the VF piece that led the reader to think that the Palins used son Trig as a political prop at the rally held in Kansas City. Smith excerpted this section of the VF piece... Read the rest at Publiusforum.com...

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin slammed reporters who write about her using anonymous sources Thursday, calling them “impotent” and “whack.” The 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee made the remarks in an appearance on Sean Hannity’s WABC radio show. In response to a question about an upcoming trip to Iowa on Septmber 17, Palin singled out a piece in CQ Politics which reported that Palin had asked for an opportunity to speak in the Hawkeye state, instead of being invited to speak. “I did see a headline on CQ Politics and they’re way whack, saying that I asked for an opportunity...

Ben Smith (Journ-o-lister) has been flooding the zone on the problems with Michael Gross's dishy profile of Sarah Palin in Vanity Fair. I've talked to some Alaskan sources of mine and Gross's who are deeply unhappy with how the story turned out. Shannyn Moore, a radio and TV host in Anchorage, gave me permission to quote the e-mail she sent to Gross complaining about how he handled the material and sources. (In the story, Moore is portrayed rather cartoonishly, smoking and talking on her cell phone while driving, but there are people portrayed far more harshly.) Mr. Michael Gross, You...

Michael Joseph Gross of Vanity Fair is the kind of journalist you’ve come to expect these days. He’s the kind of journalist that tabloid reporters look at with disdain. The kind of reporter producing work that even TMZ photogs would consider beneath them. He’s the kind of journalist you’d expect to find rooting through one’s garbage for some deep, dark secret to expose to the world. His recent hit piece on Sarah Palin follows the same theme, entitled, “Sarah Palin the Sound and the Fury.” In this piece, Gross goes on a mind-numbingly long diatribe about Palin’s secretive, dark, backstage...

Yesterday, Vanity Fair released yet another long hatchet job piece about Sarah Palin. But what this piece has generated — well, besides incredulity that a magazine of Vanity Fair’s caliber would run a character assassination piece almost entirely based on anonymous sources — is a bipartisan backlash. Not against Palin, but against Vanity Fair. Politico’s Ben Smith has already debunked two of the stories told in the piece. Clara Jeffery, editor of Mother Jones, tweeted that she was “annoyed by [Palin] being called to task things normal for any male pol. Like using cute kids as props.” Later, in response...

The Vanity Fair hit piece about Governor Palin has gotten a lot of play. I'm almost speechless at how absolutely disgusting this article is. I understand now why a friend warned I would need to be prayed up before reading it and said she had trouble sleeping after she read it. Michael Joseph Gross depicted the Governor as a vengeful individual who creates fear in the people of Alaska, a mother who is not as loving as she appears, a religious fanatic who somehow doubles as a fake Christian, a bad wife, a horrible tipper, an angry woman--basically a complete...

It's not looking good for Vanity Fair when CNN's Peter Hamby has joined liberals such as Ben Smith, Dave Weigel, race-baiter Charles Blow, and Kirsten Powers in denouncing the Vanity Fair hit piece. Hamby tweets: @benpolitico is right re: VF article. I was w/ Palin for entire VP bid. never got a hint that she "lashed out at the slightest provocation" Meaning

The former Alaska governor is insulated from the media in a way that other politicians can only dream about. Vanity Fair has released not one, but two damning articles investigating the woman and the brand that is Sarah Palin. But even the magazine admits that the reporting will not damage a woman whose credibility seems "incidental," it says, to fact. Michael Joseph Gross's stories, headlined "Sarah Palin: the Sound and the Fury" and "Sarah Palin's Shopping Spree: Yes, There's More ..." are filled with the kind of detail that sets the political press frothing (with outrage or glee, depending on...

Two years after entering the nation’s klieg lights Sarah Palin is the subject of a detailed and sometimes scathing profile in next month’s Vanity Fair. The portrait that emerges is one of a willful, often-paranoid, sometimes vengeful woman with a terrible temper and a knack for folksy soundbites, who knows her strengths, saw her moment in the spotlight and has grabbed onto it with both hands. Or as Vanity Fair’s Michael Joseph Gross puts it “anywhere you peel back the skin of Sarah Palin’s life, a sad and moldering strangeness lies beneath.”

(CNN) - Two days after Sarah Palin fired up a large crowd at Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally in Washington, a newly released survey suggests a clear majority of Americans don't think the former vice presidential nominee has the right credentials to be president. According to the new survey from Vanity Fair and CBS News' 60 Minutes, only 1 in 4 of all adults thinks Palin is qualified to be commander-in-chief while 60 percent say she is not.

According to the preview offered by Vanity Fair: [Todd] Purdum spends a day inside the West Wing and talks to Obama’s top aides, who tell him about the challenges of playing the Beltway game, ugly as it has become, even as their boss insists they find a way to transcend it. “There’s a relentlessness to this that’s unlike anything else, especially when you come into office in a time of crisis,” says Obama senior adviser David Axelrod. “We did not exactly ease into the tub. The world is so much smaller, and events reverberate much more quickly, and one person...

Oliver Stone's latest attack on American capitalism - "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" is finally hitting theaters April, 2010, twenty-three years after its predecessor. According to Michael Lewis, who interviewed the moviemaker for his latest Vanity Fair piece, Stone's biggest problem with the sequel was making a movie based on helplessly diabolical bankers, actually watchable. Lewis wrote that Stone - an ardent left-wing ideologue, friendly acquaintance to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, and director of "W" and "Platoon" - felt an obligation to reverse the societal damage and unintended consequences of the first installment. "As a vehicle of change ......

Vanity Fair stands by a controversial story that reported rumors of an affair between Bill Clinton and actress Gina Gershon, according to TMZ.com. In a statement to the celebrity Web site, Beth Kseniak, a spokeswoman for the magazine, said: "Todd Purdum's article does not indicate that former President Bill Clinton had an improper relationship with Gina Gershon. The story merely examines the concerns of some of Clinton's aides about reports of his behavior. We don't believe that any correction is warranted." The Vanity Fair article released this week suggests Clinton is out of control and “seeing a lot of women...

The 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair Poll (Give Ronald Reagan a vote)  Webcast: 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair PollCali Carlin and Michael Hogan Present the Latest Results

If Fidel Castro and Sean Penn are in the same room, which one do you think hates America more? Such a question doesn't seem to concern Vanity Fair who according to the website TMZ has hired Penn to write an article about how Barack Obama and his administration have impacted Cuba.

VANITY Fair yesterday took some of the deepest staff cuts at Condé Nast, but Editor Graydon Carter didn't deliver the bad news himself. Although Carter was said to have been at his restaurant, The Monkey Bar, Wednesday night, he was a no show in the office yesterday because he had jetted off on a vacation yesterday morning. Vanity Fair's layoffs were said to be in the double-digit range, and hit as high as senior editors and as low as fact checkers, and were deep, in part, because Carter largely ignored the edict to chop 5 percent late last year. Additional...

One would hope that Mr Carter will at least feel a little guilty about his own role in helping to bring about this tsunami. His lack of leadership and failure to be willing to adapt to a changed environment are now on public display. How ironic that this should happen to a man so ready to use his magazine as a platform to demonise and demean Governor Palin and to characterise her as an empty headed ingénue whose organisational skills were limited to rearranging the contents of her wardrobe.

News reports that Sarah Palin is planning a separate Christian version of her forthcoming memoir, Going Rogue, are false, according to her publisher, HarperCollins. The reports were so widely circulated that they appear to have caused confusion at Zondervan, a Christian publisher owned by HarperCollins, where the director of publicity said yesterday that a special Christian edition of the book had been planned but was scrapped because of the expedited timetable for the book's release. Reports about a special Christian edition of Palin's memoir included a long Vanity Fair profile on Palin last summer, which said that her memoir was...

Usually the leftist media can be counted upon to unite, seize upon an anti_Palin meme and run with it. That liberal solidarity, however, has all but vaporized in the wake of Levi Johnston's latest round of charges against Sarah Palin and her family, as promoted by Vanity Fair magazine. The first cracks in liberal media wall appeared when only CBS of the big three alphabet television networks bought into the myth Vanity Fair's editor Graydon Carter had hoped to spread to take down Palin, as NewsBusters' Kyle Drennen reported: "Teasing an upcoming segment on Thursday’s CBS Early Show about new...

The magazine Vanity Fair opted to open up the fall season featuring another groundbreaking interview with Levi Johnston, a young man whose previous claims to fame included a decisive slap shot in hockey, the ability to navigate a snow machine over rough terrain, and sufficient spermatozoa to impregnate the daughter of a vice presidential candidate. The punditocracy and their associated acolytes across the web immediately fell into predictable patterns of applause and outrage. You may recall that during the Battle of Ought Eight, Levi was held up — albeit somewhat reluctantly — as a hero of traditional American values. Rather...

Levi Johnston, not content with just a GQ spread, heads to Condé Nast sibling Vanity Fair to offer a first person account: "Me and Mrs. Palin." The magazine posted a couple excerpts early this morning, including Johnston's account of how Palin considered keeping Bristol's pregnancy a secret. Sarah told me she had a great idea: we would keep it a secret — nobody would know that Bristol was pregnant. She told me that once Bristol had the baby she and Todd would adopt him. That way, she said, Bristol and I didn’t have to worry about anything. Sarah kept mentioning...

If there's one thing about liberals, it's that they're predictably predictable. In their eyes, it is more than acceptable to mock Sarah Palin and her family, using descriptions that range from rude to crude. When President Bush was in office, he was the focus of daily ridicule from left-wing journalists and bloggers. However, no one better make fun of Barack Obama or the thought police will express "outrage" and brand you a racist. That's exactly what is happening now as a poster of Obama in "Joker" makeup is popping up on walls and city streets. My question to the lefties:...

Make some room, Brad and Angelina — heads of state are now elbowing out Hollywood glitterati as cutting-edge fashion plates. Barack and Michelle Obama look as good in the White House as movie stars do on the red carpet, which put them both on Vanity Fair’s coveted International Best-Dressed List, announced Tuesday on TODAY. President Obama finds himself in heady company among the sartorial splendor of Brad Pitt, Anne Hathaway, TODAY’s Tiki Barber ... and his own wife Michelle, who made the list for the third year in a row...

Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum joined Chuck Todd, filling in for Chris Matthews on Hardball, to discuss his recent article on Sarah Palin.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 4, 2009 On July 3rd, 2009, Governor Sarah Palin announced her intent to resign her gubernatorial duties and transfer the powers of Governor to Lt. Governor Sean Parnell. Almost immediately afterwards, several unscrupulous people have asserted false and defamatory allegations that the “real” reasons for Governor Palin’s resignation stem from an alleged criminal investigation pertaining to the construction of the Wasilla Sports Complex. This canard was first floated by Democrat operatives in September 2008 during the national campaign and followed up by sympathetic Democratic writers.1. It was easily rebutted then as one of many fabrications about...

The latest issue of Vanity Fair isn't even on newsstands yet and it's already making headlines for a not-so-politely titled article, "It Came from Wasilla," about Gov. Sarah Palin. William Kristol at the Weekly Standard is calling it a "hit piece," taking writer Todd Purdum to task for his "dubious claims." A blogger at the Atlantic writes that the article "paints a gruesome picture" of the governor. Politico's Jonathan Martin mulls the "political fallout from the very tough piece."

Rather than a blow to a career, Todd Purdum’s piece is a spectacular tribute to a force of nature built for another national race. The excuse for the Republican circular firing squad of the holiday weekend is that Weekly Standard editor and party brainiac Bill Kristol claims that pugnacious McCain campaign enforcer Steve Schmidt has been caught gossiping to Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum about Sarah Palin’s rambling and incoherent vice presidential campaign last fall. Purdum, writing with a polite disdain, does flatter Palin as “the sexiest and riskiest brand in the Republican Party,” before he goes on to mention unnamed...

It appears the Vainly Unfair magazine hit piece, the product of a collaboration between Obama-supporting liberal editor Todd Purdum and a few traitors within the McCain campaign organization, is backfiring. In the uproar that has arisen in the wake of the smear job, some former McCain staffers are standing up to defend their 2008 vice presidential candidate, and, unlike the anonymous anti-Palin leakers quoted in the politically-motivated article, those speaking out in favor of Sarah Palin aren't afraid to let their names be known: "She's a fine person, with unique and unteachable political skills," said Mark Salter, a senior adviser...

To summarize baseball legend Reggie Jackson: nobody boos a nobody. That is definitely true in the case of Governor Sarah Palin. I don’t think I am going out on a limb here when I speculate that individuals who repeatedly attack her anonymously view her as a threat. And that includes members of the media hell-bent tearing down young Republican up-and-comers as well as some in Governor Palin’s own party — a party desperately in need of redefining — who are motivated, for whatever reason, to try and crush their rivals. The most recent and grossly unfair attack came from Vanity...

After enduring months of derision within Republican circles for her role as the party's 2008 vice presidential nominee and her uneven performance as a national figure this year, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is experiencing something of a rebound among the D.C. chattering class in the 48 hours since the release of a very tough profile on her in Vanity Fair magazine. In the wake of that piece -- a 9,800 word opus penned by Todd Purdum -- a number of operatives who worked closely with Palin during the 2008 campaign have reached out to the Fix to defend the governor....

On the same day Republicans surrendered a symbolically significant seat in the Senate, the Sarah Palin wars erupted again inside the party. Leaks followed by trash-talking followed by recriminations. The latest Palin flare-up began in Vanity Fair with a lengthy article by Todd S. Purdum examining the Alaska governor's past and her potential future. The controversy migrated instantly to the Web and the blogs -- it was, in fact, made for the viral communication that dominates today's politics -- and became even more intense, nasty and personal. The Palin controversy highlights personal enmities and strategic disagreements among Republicans. The victory...

The worst thing is that it gives this long, tedious, very poorly written hatchet job publicity it doesn't deserve. At about 9000 words, it's almost a chapter in a book. The piece is full of unsupported accusations, digs by unnamed sources, as well as leaps made frankly out of the clear blue sky. The first paragraph is a sign of things to come. Despite her disastrous performance in the 2008 election, Sarah Palin is still the sexiest brand in Republican politics, with a lucrative book contract for her story. But what Alaska’s charismatic governor wants the public to know about...

The publication of a Vanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin appears to have opened old wounds in the McCain campaign. At issue is a question that was never resolved following McCain’s loss in November: Who in the McCain campaign was secretly trashing Sarah Palin to the press? (snip) .... What follows is the email exchange with Bill Kristol that Schmidt rooted out, where Scheunemann speculates that the source of the “Diva” leak was Nicolle Wallace’s husband. Read from the bottom up: ——- Original Message ——- From: Randy Scheunemann To: William Kristol Sent: Sat Oct 25 19:44:44 2008 Subject: Re: who...

A new Vanity Fair article on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has re-ignited animosities among feuding high-profile Republican advisers who worked on Arizona Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. The in-depth profile, which describes Palin as the "sexiest and the riskiest brand in the Republican Party," raises questions about McCain's decision to pick the Alaska governor as his running mate and her "disastrous" performance in the 2008 campaign -- sparking a vicious back-and-forth between former advisers to the GOP ticket. "Perhaps most painful, how could John McCain, one of the cagiest survivors in contemporary politics...ever have picked a person whose utter...

A hard-hitting piece on Sarah Palin in the new Vanity Fair has touched off a blistering exchange of insults among high-profile Republicans over last year’s GOP ticket – tearing open fresh wounds about leaks surrounding Palin and revealing for the first time some of the internal wars that paralyzed the campaign in its final days. Rival factions close to the McCain campaign have been feuding since last fall over Palin , usually waging the battle in the shadows with anonymous quotes. Now, however, some of the most well-known names in Republican politics are going on-the-record with personal attacks and blame-casting....

Yesterday, Andrew Sullivan blasted the MSM for failing to get the details on Trig Palin's birth. He concluded his post with "I believed then and I believe now that the MSM is too concerened with their own reputations and too deferent to power to even ask the questions. Which is another betrayal of their core purpose. And why they are dying. And deserve to." "Too concerned with their own reputations"? Really!? Wow. I haven't noticed the MSM displaying a lot of concern with their reputation as they fawn and slobber over every move Obama makes. That doesn't do much, in...

A hard-hitting piece on Sarah Palin in the new Vanity Fair has touched off a blistering exchange of insults among high-profile Republicans over last year’s GOP ticket – tearing open fresh wounds about leaks surrounding Palin and revealing for the first time some of the internal wars that paralyzed the campaign in its final days. Rival factions close to the McCain campaign have been feuding since last fall over Palin, usually waging the battle in the shadows with anonymous quotes. Now, however, some of the most well-known names in Republican politics are going on-the-record with personal attacks and blame-casting. William...