CNN's Tucker Carlson on NPR, digging himself deeper with regards to his promise to eat his shoe if Hillary Clinton's book sold well:
Tucker Carlson on April 28th: "If they make $8 million on that book, I will eat my shoes,"
Now from June 5: "(if it) does sell more than a million copies, I'll eat my shoes here on 'Crossfire.' "
And from June 11: "If she sells a million copies of this book, I'll eat my shoes and my tie. I will."
From NPR: "Well, Mr Carlson may have to gnaw his Hush Puppies now that whose book is a hit? Hillary. Let's check the scoreboard: Hillary Clinton's Living History has sold more than 600,000 copies as of last week; Simon and Shuster has announced a seventh printing. And it will debut on the New York Times' bestseller list this Sunday at number one. Tucker Carlson joins us now on the phone from his home in Washington DC... so... feeling hungry, Tucker?"
TC: Actually I'm feeling foolish. Wouldn't you be? This is why we need a
five second delay on our show
PS: Dude, you said it three times...
TC: Yeah I know, I know I did...but once you say it once, you gotta sorta
back yourself up and be a man about it.
PS: Are you going to do it?
TC: No no no, I'm going to have Wingtip Etouff e. There's no question about it. I'm not going to try to weasel out with a cake in the shape of a loafer. I'm going to suck it up and do it. I'm going to do what Al Gore did, I'm going to contest it and then I'm going to face the facts.
PS: You're not gonna try to get it thrown to the supreme court?
TC: I am not. I have no Bill Daley working on my behalf. I'm going to look
it square in the face and eat it.
PS: What about the tie?
TC: I don't think I'm gonna do the tie. The tie was almost a parenthetical
promise. So, I'm gonna hope people forget that.
WAIT WAIT PANELIST CHARLIE PIERCE: It all depends what the meaning of the
word eat is.
TC: That's exactly right.
Wait, wait [NPR]

Observer editor Peter Kaplan insists that his newspaper ("the paper of record for the power elite") isn't "snarky"the word he "hates most." Denial is an ugly thing. Dear Observer: It's okay that you're snarky. It's natural (when talking about The Media). Everyone does it. Really! You're not going to hell and it won't make you go blind or... *sigh*... [Ed.If the Observer isn't snarky, then why am I reading it? Should I stop? The Observer minus snark = just another disposable headline on Romenesko.]
Peachy journalism [WaPo]

Blogger Paul Frankenstein notes that the Post's summary of The Incredible Hulk looks remarkably like IMDB's (Internet Movie DataBase) summary. The Post: "Bana plays a scientist whose genetic experiment to create superhuman beings bound for Mars goes wrong, and he gains the ability to mutate into a superstrong being. The same experiment transforms three escaped convicts into supermutants, and only the scientist's alter ego, the Hulk, can stop them." IMDB: "A scientist's genetic experiment to create super-human colonialists bound for Mars goes wrong and he gains the ability to mutate into a super-strong being. The same experiment tranforms three escaped convicts into hideous super-mutants and only the scientist's alter ego, the Hulk, can stop them."
Hulk takes bulk out of box office [Paul Frankenstein]

Dave Barry explains how Jayson Blair situations happen at newspapers: "First, the REPORTER gathers information by interviewing PEOPLE and trying to write down what they say, getting approximately 35 percent of it right. The REPORTER then writes a STORY, which goes to an EDITOR, who bitterly resents the REPORTER because the REPORTER gets to go outside sometimes, whereas the EDITOR is stuck in the building eating NEWSPAPER CAFETERIA ''FOOD'' that was originally developed by construction-industry researchers as a substitute for PLYWOOD. The EDITOR, following journalism tradition, decides that the REPORTER has put the real point of the story in the 14th paragraph, which the EDITOR then attempts to move using the ''cut and paste command,'' which results in the story disappearing into ANOTHER DIMENSION, partly because the EDITOR, like most journalists, has the mechanical aptitude of a RUTABAGA, but also because the NEW COMPUTER SYSTEM has a few ''bugs'' as a result of being installed by a low-bid VENDOR whose information-technology experience consists of servicing WHACK-A-MOLE GAMES." This may be the most accurate explanation yet.
Right or wrong, we're journalists [Miami Herald]

Neal Pollack summarizes East of Eden so you don't actually have to read it: "Eden, the novel's heroine, is a low-level editorial assistant at Gloss, a fashion magazine for the 'medium-breasted contemporary woman' owned by the Candy Nast media empire. Her boss, Emma Winter, the toast of Manhattan, is a sharp-tongued ballbreaker with a penchant for extinguishing cigarettes in her subordinates' eyes. Eden plots to kill her, or at least to write tender short stories for The New Yorker. While Eden's at work, her boyfriend, Chris Fray, struggles with with the twin demons of ego and heroin addiction and doesn't give a fuck what anyone thinks about him, especially not all the assholes who put less meaning into their whole novels than he does into one sentence." It's official: Neal has been completely Gawkerized. Soon he'll probably be doing interviews with Kurt Andersen and selling out to some big publishing house.
East of Oprah [Neal Pollack]

The play "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People"based on Toby Young's book of the same titlecoming to New York. (The book is a tell-all about Young's experiences working at Vanity Fair under editor Graydon Carter.) The Post reports that the company behind the play is having trouble casting it because it's a one-man show and the actor will be required to impersonate Anna Wintour, Tina Brown, and Graydon Carter. Young says actors fear they'll be blacklisted socially and professionally if they take it. Oh, puh-lease. The melodrama! It's not that controversial. And Vanity Fair does not control Hollywood. Philip Seymour Hoffman's career isn't going to be ruined because he mimics Graydon Carter.
To be or not to be [Post]

Folio's Simon Dumenco argues that Jayson Blair is a product of the magazine world because the glossies specialize in producing rock-star reporters and the newspaper editors (NYT editor Howell Raines especially) are trying to inject similar elements"drama! glamour! style! narrative!"into their tired old broadsheets. He also points out that magazines Jayson Blair the facts all the time in the name of service journalism. ("Busybodies who dream up "trend pieces" [more and more women are dating younger guys! more and more women are dating older guys!], commission writers to prove their suppositions, and then mangle the copy that's been turned in to slavishly reflect the "reality" that was divined in the original assignment memo.) Women's magazines are the worst. I'd do a more specific critique, but that would require actually having to read them, and I just can't bring myself.
Frankenblair: son of the glossies [Folio]

Speaking of summaries, the WaPo's Peter Carlson has an essay on why editors love lists (i.e., "The 45 Best Bars," "378 Celeb Shockers," "The 8 Hottest Moments a Couple Can Have"...) One explanation: they're just lazy, or they assume readers are lazy, or both. He then compiles a list of bad lists. ("'33 Things You Should Know About Busta Rhymes' and '33 Things You Should Know about Missy Elliot' and '33 Things You Should Know About Metallica' [Blender, various recent months]. Instead of writing profiles, the folks at Blender, the Maxim-spawned music mag, just collect 33 random facts about a celebrity. Hey, guys, if you can't write maybe you should leave journalism and seek honest work.") I, of course, blame service journalism.
Lists, from naughty to nice [WaPo]

Normally, I'd be inclined to applaud NY Mag anytime they put something besides two insipid little scoops of sorbet on the cover but I can't get over the headline on this week's issue: "Dominick Dunne's War with the Kennedys: Inside the Feud Between Bobby Kennedy Jr. and America's Most Famous Journalist." Aside from the fact that it looks like a story that would have been (and probably was) written in 1987America's Most Famous Journalist? MOST famous? Is that a copyediting mistake? (And the Kennedys? ZZZZZzzzzzzzz....)
Trading places [NY Mag]

The WSJ's Matthew Rose reports that Greg Packer, a 39-year-old highway maintenance worker from Long Island has made a second career of getting quoted in newspapers and filmed on television news reports as the proverbial "man on the street." He intentionally positions himself close to the press at public events and jumps to the front of the line. (And I thought I was a shameless media whore!) This guy has gotten better media placement than half the flacks in New York. Maybe he's in the wrong industry.
Long Island man sows his platitudes widely [WSJ]

In the July issue of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter has taken it upon himself to fight the Bloomberg administration's smoking ban via editor's letter. (You may remember this anti-smoking ban editor's letter as it also appeared in February and December, and would have likely appeared in between were it not so rudely interrupted by the war in Iraq and brief uncontrollable outbursts of 1920s Hollywood nostalgia.) "With the enormous financial and service problems the city faces," Carter writes, "and with the tourists staying away in droves because of terrorism and SARS...why does [Bloomberg] squander valuable political currency by pushing a law banning smoking in all bars and restaurants?...New York likes leaders, not hall monitors."

Dear Readers:

Because I know you've missed thema gratuitous spotting of Vogue editor Anna Wintour: "Walking East towards 6th Avenue on 43rd Street this morning, I noticed a woman ahead of me with blonde streaks in her bob, a pair of big black
sunglasses in one hand and a cell phone in the other, and wondered to myself why I can now spot Anna Wintour with her back turned half way down the block, and if there wasn't something more productive the brain cells responsible for that could be doing, like soaking up alcohol and dying. Then, suddenly, nothing particularly interesting proceeded to happen. I can report only that the editor of Vogue takes very, very small steps, and as a result moves rather slowly. The sort of person you wouldn't want to be stuck behind on the stairs down to the subway when the train's arriving, not that that's likely to ever come up.

This Suge Knight/Radar prank raises an interesting question. What's more dangerous: reporting on hip-hop or war reporting in conflict zones? Which is more likely to put you in physical danger?

From the NY Times' Jayson Blair correction page: Blair steals quotes from another interview with the editor in chief of a media insider website. Said media insider website either doesn't pick up on it or ignores it. Here's a disturbing thought: Inside could have potentially broken the Jayson Blair story. "In this article about the declining fortunes of online magazines, Mr. Blair quoted Michael Hirschorn, then editor in chief of Inside.com, a Web site, since closed, for news media and entertainment industry professionals. Mr. Hirschorn said in a recent interview that although the quotations were accurate, they came from an interview conducted about five months earlier for an article with a different premise: on Internet companies that were working. That article never appeared. When approached by Mr. Blair in early March for another article, Mr. Hirschorn said, he declined to be interviewed, because by that point his company, like many other new-media firms, was struggling."
Jayson Blair corrections [NYT]

Ex-Stuff editor Greg Gutfeld, while standing in line to sign a release to eat at Rocco DiSpirito's restaurant/reality TV set last night (for which I'd normally mock him mercilessly, but I was standing in line as well), corrects yesterday's statement that he was responsible for sending Radar editor Maer Roshan a letter stained with human excrement and signed "Suge Knight." Stuff ran a "correction" taking credit for the prank. "It was a joke," said Gutfeld. (The correction, not the... nevermind.)

Speaking of Radar, Black Table has an interview with editor Maer Roshan about the second issue, which is out now. "I have always tended to rely on and promote younger writers rather than old, established ones," he says. "Not only because they're often hungrier and morehard working, but also because they tend to be a lot cuter." (Priorities!) In other news, Maer reports that the threatening letter stained with human excrement and signed "Suge Knight" that he received after listing Knight as a "Monster" in the first issue was, not surprisingly, the work of ex-Stuff Editor Greg Gutfeld. Gutfeld is reportedly grounded for a month with no TV privileges.
On a wing and a Maer, Radar puts out an underhyped second issue [Black Table]

For anyone still interested in the tail-end of the New York Times affair, Jim Romenesko's coverage is, as always, exhaustive.
Schanberg, Cotts, Mnookin, Smith [Romenesko]
Intern, Shafer, Clinton, Blair [Romenesko]

Mark Goldblatt, the author, takes the New York Times to task for its spiteful reviews of The Devil Wears Prada. For those on another planet, or across the river, that's Lauren Weisberger lightly fictionalized account of work as assistant to Anna Wintour of Vogue. Goldblatt attacks Kate Betts, one reviewer, for glossing over her connection with the powerful Wintour: Betts was her prot g . And then the Times followed up with a demolition by Janet Maslin, all for a book that neither reviewer thought worth reading. "To say that the Times lacked good faith in reviewing The Devil Wears Prada understates the utterly unconscionable, and downright vindictive, way the paper went after the thing."
Mark Goldblatt on The Devil Wears Prada [National Review]

Well, that did Raines a lot of good: Clinton argued against firing Times' editor Raines, sources say [New York Daily News]