Brown of the Beast
The Scrapbook is, frankly, delighted at the tidings that Newsweek, sold recently to 92-year-old billionaire Sidney Harman for one dollar, will be joining forces with the Daily Beast, the website that is Tina Brown’s latest venture—there have been a few missteps along the way—to reproduce the buzz associated with her name during the Reagan administration.
Of course, that was then. And the fabulous world of media sorcery personified by Brown—and her Daddy Warbucks in this episode, Barry Diller—has changed a bit in the past decade. Exhibit A: Her new partner, Newsweek, was scarcely breathing when Harman forked over his buck to assume its debt. And Exhibit B: Her own Daily Beast, a compendium of buzzworthy stories, is still struggling (after two years) not to lose millions, much less turn a profit. Even the New York Times was mystified by this merger of “two properties that have almost nothing in common other than the fact that they both lose lots of money.”
Still, as The Scrapbook acknowledges, it is difficult to keep an old buzzmistress down, and Tina Brown’s introduction last week of the hybrid vehicle—News Beast? Beastweek? Daily Week?—had all the glitz and glamour of a champagne-and-caviar reception featuring Jay McInerney, Bianca Jagger, and Ivan Boesky at Studio 54: “What does this exciting new media marriage mean? It means the Daily Beast’s animal high spirits will now be teamed with a legendary, weekly print magazine . . . ”
Except that, on reflection, The Scrapbook is slightly depressed by the spectacle, too. Tina Brown may be English by birth, but she has the persistence, longevity, and general character of a press agent in a Damon Runyon tale; as long as there are elderly male investors with stars in their eyes, she’ll be generating buzz and making deals on her own behalf until doomsday.
Newsweek, however, does have a venerable history, and, while it has descended into self-parody during the past few years, it is a little disconcerting to see it grasping at the straw of a vanity web project with the jokey name of a mythical newspaper in a satirical novel about the press by -Evelyn Waugh. Alas, Newsweek reminds The Scrapbook these days of Professor Rath (Emil Jannings), the stuffy secondary school teacher in The Blue Angel (1930), who falls for the cabaret singer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) and, in a fit of passionate lunacy, quits his post to marry the object of his lust—and ends up penniless, cuckolded, humiliated, and dead. ♦
A Steiner Show
A note especially for our New England readers. Peter Steiner, whose cartoons enlivened these pages for our first decade, will have a collection of paintings on exhibit at the Hotchkiss Library, 10 Upper Main Street, Sharon, Connecticut, from December 1 to January 31. The opening reception will be Sunday December 5, from 3 to 5 p.m. ♦
Books We Didn’t Finish
Where’s that fact-checker? From page 16 of C. Bradley Thompson and Yaron Brook’s Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea, which comes with a blurb by Glenn Beck:
Who exactly are the neoconservatives, where did they come from, and what do they stand for? . . . Legend has it that neoconservatism was born at Brooklyn College during the late 1930s.
The true legend, of course, is that neoconservatism was born at City College. ♦
Sentences We Almost Didn’t Finish
Scrapbook friend Michael Moynihan of Reason notes that the first paragraph of the Guardian’s review of George W. Bush’s memoir is “pretty much what you would expect”:
This self-serving memoir confirms that George W. Bush is a moronic war-monger who can’t think straight, can’t string two words together and spent his presidency looking for countries to invade, oil to snatch and ways to make the world a more dangerous place.
But reviewer Alastair Campbell, who was Tony Blair’s director of communications, is playing a cruel trick on his readers, for he continues:
[Guardian readers] will nod amen to that. The problem is that none of the above is true. Cue avalanche of Guardian Online vitriol. You see, in Guardianland, as in other parts of the world, one is not supposed to think anything but ill of Bush.
Campbell concludes, instead,
that you don’t get to be U.S. president—twice—by being stupid; that [Bush] is more reflective and self-analytical than the public image suggests—a trait confirmed by his book; that September 11 changed the world in the eyes of most Americans; and that [Bush was not] hellbent on war in Iraq.
The whole review is very much worth your time and attention. It can be found online at www.guardian.co.uk/books. ♦
The Once & Future Minority Leader
A tip of The Scrapbook homburg to Nancy Pelosi, who led her party to a historic defeat on November 2. You might think that House Democrats need a leader like that the way a fish needs a bicycle. House Democrats, however, disagree and elected her on November 17 as their minority leader in the incoming Congress—the same post she held from 2003 to 2007.
In an interview with Deborah Solomon for the New York Times Magazine, the once and future minority leader puts on a brave face. “Why not just step down?” Solomon asks. “Well, don’t forget that I led the party into the strong victories of ’06 and ’08,” says -Pelosi. “And now we are prepared to win again”—which, The Scrapbook believes, is probably what General Custer would have said had he survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Pelosi also has a chip on her shoulder. Perhaps you didn’t realize that she was the first female speaker of the House? “It didn’t get that much play,” she tells Solomon. “And I’m not a publicity seeker, so it was O.K. with me.” (Obviously; you can see how she’s put it behind her.) “Boehner, before the election, they had him on the cover of Newsweek. Now he’s on the cover of Time, and women are coming to me and saying, ‘Is the job less important when a woman holds it?’ ”
Solomon follows up:
I’m sure you were on the cover of Newsweek and Time when you became Madame Speaker. Pelosi: No. No. Solomon: Maybe Tina Brown, the new editor of Newsweek, can put you on the cover now, only four years too late. Pelosi: My point is that when a man holds the job, the press seems to view it as more worthy of that kind of attention. But when a woman—even though it was historic—holds the job, they view it as less important. We have to dispel the notion that it’s not as big a job when a woman has it.
The Scrapbook is holding hands with Pelosi here, metaphorically speaking of course. Unlike Time and Newsweek, we recognized what a historic figure Pelosi was. That’s why, in the coveted Weekly Standard Stress Head collection (available at www.weeklystandardstore.com), you will not find a Speaker Boehner Stress Head. You will, however, find a stress head depicting Pelosi, the only woman to have received that distinction, along with the two most powerful men in the free world, President Obama and Vice President Biden. We would further note, not for any commercial purpose but as a token of our nondiscrimination, that the Pelosi Stress Head, shown here, retails for $9.99—the same price as the Obama and Biden Stress Heads. No 59-cents-on-the-dollar inequity when it comes to the first woman speaker—and, hey, come to think of it, now both the first and second woman to serve as minority leader. ♦
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