Mr. Irresponsible's Bad Advice

"And here's Miles with a nutty story about death from the skies!"

You have to love CNN for its devil-may-care approach to Armageddon. LARGE ASTEROID ZIPS PAST EARTH, The Most Trusted Name In Newstertainment banners a story about a half-mile-wide boulder that just came within 269,000 miles of torching the Earth, melting the polar ice caps and sending what's left of our planetary home into a second Ice Age. The "Everybody mambo!" part is, I guess, implied.

Alas, that kind of tone-deafness is typical of cable news. Maybe the broadcasters need some help. Maybe they need a succinct set of guidelines. Herewith, as a public service, some suggestions:

FORBIDDEN WORDS 2006 (Cable News Edition)

• Chilling
• "What do you think? We want to hear from you."
• Blogosphere
• Dramatic
• "You're in the Situation Room."
• Tragedy
• "Your {insert noun here} headquarters"
• Lockdown
• {Insert noun here} Watch
• Ominous
• Shocking
• Icon
• "Stay tuned for Rita Cosby."
  

Other nominations? Send 'em along.

Oh, and while we're at it...

Maybe we're just cranky around here today, but doesn't it seem a tad lazy, just a wee bit credulous, for Jeremy Lovell of Reuters' London bureau to say that the consulting firm behind a study on the world's most expensive cities "describes itself as the world leader in human resources and related financial advice"? In fact, doesn't it kinda prompt the question: "Hey, Jeremy? How do YOU describe them?" But that would mean putting away the press release and really digging deep by, I don't know, going to their web site or something, and apparently London, in fifth place, is so prohibitively expensive that Web access is limited to Richard Branson and certain members of the Royal Family.

Memo to Reuters: Have interns, by all means. But please don't let them file stories without some oversight.

Thank you.

Look, it's Mick Jagger, and he's like 90. See you in late 2008.

Maybe it's the heat, but Mr. Irresponsible for some reason feels compelled to pass along this item by his typist and flunky. It's "cross-posted" from The Huffington Post, whatever that means.

If yesterday's Arts & Leisure snoozer on Ozzfest felt a little familiar to you, congratulations -- your memory is better than The New York Times's. A little digging in the archives reveals that The Gray Lady has done this story no fewer than four times in the last ten years:

Iron Man Slows, And So Does The Industry  (June 2006)
Rock's Bad Boys Grow Up But Not Old (September 2002)
Grandfatherly Rockers Smooth Out The Wrinkles (February 2002)
Second Acts for Aging Rockers (February 1996)*

I don't know what it is about this story that makes the Times go all twitchy every 30 months, on average. Is it the unsurprising notion that rock stars actually age, rather than blink out of existence at 30? (FLASH: MUSICIANS SUBJECT TO LAWS OF PHYSICS... DEVELOPING) Whatever the draw is, they just can't seem to resist it, like an aging rocker who periodically reconnects with a groupie who was once young, when he (the rocker) was himself young, which -- hey, look at that! -- he no longer is.  For that matter, they also seem to find irresistible the use of shopworn formulations like "rocker" and "rock's bad boys," the latter referring to -- Three guesses? Anybody? Bingo: The Rolling Stones! -- but that's for another day. In another two and a half years, presumably.

*Sorry, the pieces themselves are behind the Times's steel-reinforced pay wall, like an aging rocker condemned to live out his days in the well-guarded fortress of the gated community where he now dwells, ironically, because he used to talk about everybody being free and stuff, and man, is that ironic or what?

Stop The Presses, and Bring Me Some Fajitas

Mr. Irresponsible knows something about the therapeutic value of a really good snit. But Steve Lopez of the LA Times, who is the very model of a modern Metro columnist, elevates the thing to an art, and to something more -- an actual, no-foolin' public service. How? By sitting down to lunch with Cruz Bustamante, who is running for California Insurance Commissoner largely on a promise to drop 50 pounds as a symbol of personal and governmental probity, and waving cheese-laden entrees under his nose until he almost cries. A dieter who can't resist a plateful of taquitos, Lopez reasons, may not exactly be a pillar of strength when the industry he's charged with regulating presents the due bill for a big pile of campaign donations. (If this seems like trivializing the race, keep in mind that it was Bustamente's silly idea to put his diet front and center.) To his credit, Bustamante doesn't crack. But Lopez has another little test in mind for him.

The piece is a virtuoso exhibition of the cheeky spite that big-city newspaper columnists used to excel in, back when there were big-city newspapers. Read it and weep for a lost era.

(N.B.: As part of an ongoing effort to make accessing its Web content as difficult as possible, because, you know, newspapers are doing so well these days, the LAT will require you to log in to read the piece. That's good thinking!)

I can't believe that awful thing you printed about me. What did you say your circulation is?

Gosh, what would advice columnists do without pop stars and flavor-of-the-week starlets? Left to our own devices, we'd have to come up with purely theoretical examples of bad behavior.  And those always pale next to the gossamer glowiness of a case study like Lindsay Lohan, who is reported by AP to be "appalled" at a Vanity Fair cover story in which she admits to a bout with bulimia.

The Vanity Fair cover story has become a sort of pseudo-confessional in which people like Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie pretend to exorcise their personal demons, or at least those personal demons that pass the scrutiny of high-priced flacks and handlers. It is to print what the day-after stint on Jay Leno's couch is to television -- fake catharsis and real publicity in one grand, symbiotic sweep of cynical self-interest. So it seems a tad squirrelly of Lohan to claim now that the magazine misrepresented her words. (For the record, VF "stands by its story," a formulation that in other times was used to shore up journalism like Woodstein's reporting on Watergate and the New York Times' publication of the Pentagon Papers. Times, it seems worth noting, have changed.) More than that, though, it seems like a violation of the seamy deal that underlies these stories, the implicit contract that trades a tightly-controlled simulacrum of emotional nakedness for a free ride on the nation's newsstands and morning TV shows. Put simply: You can't have it both ways, honey. You can't pimp your problems to the glossies and then claim to be shocked, shocked when they put them on the street. And so to today's manners lesson: When you make your deal with the Devil, own it. It's unattractive to turn up at the Devil's doorstep a few days later claiming that you didn't know he was the Dark Ruler of, like, the whole underworld.

Still, Lohan and her team may not have completely lost their minds. When they decided to disavow the bulimia part of the story, they at least did it in a way that's consistent with the cash economy of Hollywood fame. They issued a statement to that well-known bulwark of truth and rigor, Teen People. The beat goes on.

Reuters to Maktoum: You're Dead, You Dope

Say, here's one of those slight shifts in the Zeitgeist you can miss if you're not paying attention: Dying is no longer the worst thing that can happen to you. The new worst thing that can happen to you is dying and having it covered by Reuters.

Consider the wire service's sendoff to Sheikh Maktoum bin Rashid al-Maktoum of Dubai, who died earlier today:

Brains Behind Dubai Becomes Ruler After Brother Dies

At which a reasonably sympathetic reader can only shudder: Yow, tough room. Keep in mind that Maktoum, the piece's putative subject and until Wednesday the maximum ruler of, like, a whole country, is the one simply tagged as "Brother." This is more or less the posthumous equivalent of being billed as "Man #2" on "CSI." The editors, meanwhile, just go all twittery over the dreamy smile of Maktoum's younger successor, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, whom they breathlessly ID as not only the smartest kid in the room but a "world renowned racehorse breeder" besides. What, did they run out of room before they could get to "Mideast Ballroom Dancing Champion" and "Six-Time Winner of the Dubai Hilton Omar Sharif Lookalike Contest"? The new boss is described in the lede as "the man who transformed Dubai from a dusty Gulf city into a glitzy metropolis"; the unfortunate late Maktoum is filed away as "his elder brother." You can practically hear the Reuters staff brushing their palms clean in a dismissive "All done" gesture, then resting their swoony heads in their hands as they gaze adoringly on the new guy's head shot. ("To all the fellas and gals at Reuters... Thanx for the leg up! SWAK, Rashi".)

Mr. Irresponsible knows nothing about Dubai except that it's been called "the Foxwoods Casino of the UAE," and it seems to have a semi-official policy of sheltering disgraced pop stars. It may even be true that the late Maktoum was a placeholder in a well-cut burnous, while his younger brother really is all that and a bag of pita chips. But I hope when I go, I get better from Reuters than "Advice Columnist Dies; Replaced By Smarter, Funnier, Better-Looking Computer."

The New Nots... Not

Long ago, in a previous life, Mr. Irresponsible was a feature writer for one of the big newsweeklies. (Note: When I say "a previous life" I'm talking about an earlier time in my actual current life. It's not a reference to some patchouli-soaked hallucination of a long-past existence in which I was a woman named Shahara or a small sunburned boy tilling the fields of Mesopotamia. I feel the need to clarify this because the mail this weblog gets is already quite weird enough, thank you.) In that capacity I learned to fear Tuesday mornings, for the following reasons: Monday was the day when sleepy, hacky wire-service reporters would rouse themselves from the torpor of the weekend to file their second-laziest stories of the week (the laziest appearing late on Friday or over the weekend). And Tuesday was the day when feature editors would wake up realizing they had two hours to cook up a slate of suggestions for that morning's editorial meetings, and would in a panic comb the wires looking for trends. A word about trends: As defined by the mainstream press, a trend is any set of two or more vaguely similar stories moving on the AP or Reuters wire in one 24-hour period, regardless of whether they are moored in observable reality or, much more likely, filed offhand as a sort of limbering-up for the actual work to come, the way ballplayers play pepper in the infield before the game. (See above.) So as a magazine writer on a Tuesday morning your job is clear: Sink the trend story you are inevitably about to be assigned. Bad-mouth it, start a whispering campaign against it, undermine it in ways both big and small. Then go out to lunch. Then spend the rest of the week avoiding your editor's eye.

All this is by way of saying: Man, am I glad I'm not a newsweekly feature writer today, because if I were, I'd be hunkered down trying to avoid writing a three-column meditation on what somebody up the food chain would probably have dubbed "The New Nots." The second I saw these three non-starters lined up on the AP entertainment wire like Manny, Moe and Jack, grinning their idiot grins and beckoning with their empty eyes, I knew some editor somewhere was ginning up a trend story:

Klein Doesn't Blame Cruise For Breakup
Chesney Doesn't Regret Zellwegger Marriage
Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson Not Dating

Stories like these raise questions in the normal mind, chief among them: Hey, who cares? But in the mind of the magazine editor, trained to troll for thready connections in the vastness of the Zeitgeist the way a Great White circles lazily, patiently, waiting for the tip of a flipper in the waters above, the mere fact of proximity renders these three dumbass non-stories something somehow larger than themselves: A trend. If I were still working those fields (and had been unable to plant the requisite seeds of doubt in my editor's mind) I'd be drafting something like this right about now:

Across Hollywood last week, from The Ivy to The Grill, the cream of young show business was exhibiting the latest in PR fashion: The artfully-crafted denial, the story that says "No" and yet "Yes" at the same time. Call them "The New Nots"...

I could go on. Once upon a time, I did. But I've been lifted up and borne away from all that, and you can be too. The next time you open a magazine and spot a story that you know in your heart has been cobbled together from the odd breakaway pieces of a pop culture that's ever more disposable, the next time you see in the opening paragraph the words Call it...  or Observers have dubbed it... or They are not alone... -- Do yourself a favor. Do as Mr. Irresponsible did all those years ago. Say to yourself, as I did to my editors on so many Tuesday mornings like this one: "You don't really want to do that, do you?" Then take yourself to lunch.

This Just In: Actual Emotion Breaks Out on CNN! Mass Confusion Ensues!

Jack Cafferty is a beautiful thing in the age of cable news -- a crank, a grouch, a guy whose beans are permanently steamed. CNN has never quite known how to position the grumpy Cafferty in its constellation of twinkly-eyed feel-gooders, and has doomed him to live out his contract uselessly unleashing his ire on randomly-selected stories of the day: "Should battered spouses be allowed to carry guns? Email caffertyfile at CNN.com." (The anchor who responds to viewer emails is more or less the TV news equivalent of the desperate lounge singer who moves into the audience and starts shaking the patrons' hands.)

Yesterday, though, Cafferty found some prey he could really get his incisors into -- the network itself. Returning to the studio after two hours' wall-to-wall coverage of the BTK sentencing, the net went to its current poster boy, the drama-hyping Wolf Blitzer ("You are. IN... thesituationroom"), and then to Cafferty, who is nobody's idea of a poster boy for anything except possibly spleen. And splenetic he was, and gloriously so. "We ought to be ashamed of ourselves" for turning hours of network air over to the proceedings, he sputtered at Blitzer. Blitzer's instincts are second to no one's when it comes to pimping a dramatic story, and he tried to get Cafferty to admit that at least the BTK spectacle was one that viewers have an interest in. This is precisely the sort of responsibility-evading argument that has always justified coverage of questionable news by outlets that ought to know better. Cafferty, who spent more than 30 years in local news before joining CNN and has seen his share of this sort of thing, wasn't biting:

That's got nothing to do with anything, Wolf, as far as I'm concerned. This is a ghoulish exercise on the part of the news media and if ratings are the reason, then I'll say it again, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves.... It's nonsense. It doesn't belong on television. Nobody needs to watch this stuff. All it does is inspire other nut cases out there that maybe they can get themselves famous by doing this kind of -- it's terrible and I don't care how many people were watching.

You could practically see Blitzer's world collapsing like a flan in the sun. ("Thinking: Independent. Attitude: Angry. Must... throw to commercial.") It's probably wishful thinking to say that I felt a tremor in the Force at that moment, a crack in the edifice of strained jokes and gooey fake empathy that defines cable news at this unfortunate moment. Maybe it was just the tonic sight of somebody with actual news instincts expressing true frustration and outrage. Not the kind you gin up for ratings over something sensational like the performance of the Aruban police; the kind you feel innately about something close to your heart, like the plummeting standards of your troubled profession.  Viewers may differ on the appropriateness of Cafferty biting the hand that feeds him on the air that gives him an outlet. Nobody who saw it can claim it wasn't bracingly sincere.

Jen to Brad: My Publicist Isn't Angry, She's Just Very Disappointed (In Your Publicist)

Mr. Irresponsible took a few days off last week, if by "off" you mean "holed up with my lawyers plotting revenge on my enemies," while Debbie held the fort here at Irresponsible World HQ. (If by "held the fort" you mean "put her Chuck Taylor high tops up on my desk and ate donuts, and don't try to deny it because there are crumbs in my paper clip tray.") And when I got back and checked the Web, what did I find? One more example of how media and celebrities collude in an awful conspiracy to expunge the remaining traces of decorum from our public life.

Here's a CBS.com story about Jennifer Aniston "breaking her silence on her break-up with Brad Pitt." But wait, before we get into the dish let's pause a second to admire its provenance. In a dazzling example of the echo-chamber effect so often seen in stories like this, the silence-breaking doesn't actually originate with CBS.com, because CBS.com exists largely to repurpose content from the broadcast network, and man, would Mr. Irresponsible like five minutes in a quiet alley with the guy who came up with the word "repurpose." So the Aniston interview took place on CBS's air, right? No, of course not; what are you, new in town? Aniston talked to Vanity Fair, CBS's "The Early Show" did a segment on the article, and a precis of that is what ended up on the web site. And if that isn't a triple-play from Hell, then I don't know baseball.

Okay, now we get to look at what Aniston actually said. "She said she still loves Brad very much," according to VF via "The Early Show" by way of CBS.com, as parsed by People editor and "Early Show" contributor Jess Cagle. (Still with me?) Cagle goes on to opine that "I don't think [Aniston's remarks are] a plea for sympathy." No, of course not, because that would be cheap and showy; this is a good honest plea for publicity, which is totally different. Aniston also thinks Pitt is "missing a sensitivity chip" for appearing in a photo spread that showed him playing house with Angelina Jolie. (This just in: Fading TV star confirms celebs actually robots!) The story continues:

In addition to those photos, Aniston expressed shock over the ones that appeared in tabloid magazines of Pitt and Jolie, and her adopted son Maddox in Africa. Why the surprise, considering all the rumors about the affair? As in so many marriages where this happens, there is an element of denial, Cagle says....

Cagle apparently had time to slip out and get a degree in psychology between segments. So he's got that going for him, which is nice.

It goes on like this for quite a while, but honestly, after a paragraph or two I started to get that bees-living-in-my-head feeling and had to take a break and do something mindless, like vacuuming the donut crumbs from my paper clip tray. And when my vision had cleared I thought: Here we see the unfair balance of power that exists between celebrities and normal people. If you or I go through a divorce we handle the aftermath in the traditional way -- we whisper spiteful half-truths about our exes to friends in the checkout line. There's an appropriateness to that. It's one-to-one. Celebrities, however, have a metaphorical bullhorn in the willing shills and lackeys of the press. (Hmmm. Note to self: Get a bullhorn.) Not only will somebody from Vanity Fair come to Aniston's house and collect her grievances as if they were the precious droppings of a rare and exotic bird, he will then bear them away to be published and broadcast and Web-enabled literally all over the world in a dizzying cycle of endlessly-reciprocating vituperation.

Is there no more proportionality in the world? Does everybody in this seedy little ménage à trois absolutely have to get a spread in Vanity Fair out of it? When my own divorce was finalized some sixteen years ago I didn't take to the public prints to deliver artful little knife-blows to my ex; I did what a man does, which is to say I drank a volume of Captain Morgan's equal to the displacement of my own body every 12 hours for two weeks. Then I got up and went back to work, pausing only to pick an extremely ill-advised bar fight with a guy who turned out to be one of the early practitioners of what would now be called "Ultimate Fighting." Do you see what I'm saying? Where is that kind of dignity today?

In The Doldrums With The Fourth Estate

This started out as a post about how we've become a nation of biddies, the most sniffy and censorious and irony-impaired gaggle of yahoos ever to breathe air. It was prompted by a wire story citing "genuine outrage" by "some veterans and members of Congress" over a gimmick on the "Wedding Crashers" web site allowing people to download and print out phony paper Purple Hearts. (The titular characters are two oafs who use various means, including fake medals, to score chicks at wedding receptions.) This seemed like a perfect opportunity to fulminate against  the climate of creeping humorlessness in which we seem to live. And honestly, I was all set to tee off.  I mean, I had the ball in my sights and I was waggling my hips and checking my grip and squinting down-course to take range. I was already framing an argument, something along the lines of "Tell me specifically how this dumb joke materially denigrates the real contributions of American vets." I was also toying with the notion of wondering exactly how dopey you have to be to wear a paper military medal at all, let alone try to pass it off as real. And I was going to bring it home with a gratuitous screed about how thoroughly "Wedding Crashers" fell apart in its last three-fifths, and bastinado the filmmakers for trying to give the oafs some heart, of all things, which is as Kryptonite to true funny. I mean, I was ready to go. I was set to break for lunch. Then I read the story. Then I read it again.

And you know what? As best I can tell, the "some veterans" expressing "genuine outrage" over the thing seem to number in the low single digits, or approximately one: Hershel Gober, a former deputy secretary of Veterans Affairs and himself a Purple Heart winner. At that, his unsettlement seems to be fairly mild. "I have no problem with spoofs," Gober told Scripps Howard. "But we're trying to protect the medals." To which a reasonable person can only respond: Um, okay. Thinking I must have missed something, I combed the wires for other stories on the subject, turning up only an AP dispatch which cited an FBI agent who enforces federal laws against the illicit trafficking of Medals of Honor -- a guy who's conscientiously performing the duties for which he gets paid, in other words -- and a Vietnam vet who runs a web site devoted to medal recipients.

So here's a puzzler. Is it possible that somebody would be cynical enough to trade on the popularity of a hit movie, enlisting a couple of drowsy, hyperbolically-inclined wire reporters in the dog days of summer -- Aw hell, it's too hot to do any reporting today -- in the service of, let's say, a self-aggrandizing attempt to pad a resume and gather some column inches? Who would do such a thing? Bingo: A member of the United States Congress! In this case, it's Rep. John T. Salazar of Colorado, whose fingerprints are all over the wire stories. Salazar is, as it happens, the sponsor of legislation aimed at curtailing the illegal procurement or display of military medals. "With the recent release of the popular movie 'Wedding Crashers', Hollywood has stumbled upon the serious problem of phony medal recipients," Salazar's office said in a press release quoted in the Scripps story. To which a reasonable person can only respond: It has?

Look: Earning medals is no cakewalk. In some cases the price is tremendously high, and people who've paid it deserve respect and thanks, and people who haven't and claim they have, well, it doesn't take an act of Congress to know they should be pummeled with sticks. This isn't what's sticking in Mr. Irresponsible's craw today. It's the unending lazy-ass credulousness of some of my colleagues in the press. So let me address this to the low-level journodrones who got stuck in the office on a steamy Friday when that release from DC came in, and didn't have the sense or the nerve to push back when their aging, running-on-fumes editors got that crazy "I smell a trend" look in their bloodshot eyes: Fellas, I know it's hot. I know you're sleepy. We're all sleepy. But the next time you get an assignment to gin up a trend story from a press release, try to find more than three people -- that's three people total in two stories -- to bolster your theory that there's something widespread going on. (You might have to quit downloading porn and MP3s long enough to make some phone calls. It's a pretty basic technique, and if you're stuck I can show you how it works.) And when you're done -- ah ah ah, when you're done, mister -- then maybe we'll get to go outside and play hackey sack for a while. All right, run along now and file your stories. Mr. Irresponsible's late for lunch, and you wouldn't want him to get cranky.