Sense and Sensibility

It’s Diane v. Katie: Snore….

Now that it no longer matters, women are taking over the nightly news.Diane Sawyer joined the Holy Trinity of network news anchors on Monday, taking the ABC anchor desk over from the retiring Charles Gibson. She joins Katie Couric, the ultimate morning gal whose move to The CBS Nightly News in 2006 was a riveting television moment of self-immolation.

 

Since that “jump the shark” moment, Couric has dog-paddled her way back to some respectability. Her Sarah Palin interview was among the most news-making moments of the last presidential campaign, revealing that Palin could not recall a single newspaper or book that she had read. (In a twist of irony so ridiculous as to be sublime, Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” is now at the top of The New York Times Bestseller lists.)

Television loves a cat fight and media critics (most of them male) have clucked over the Sawyer-Couric rematch as being somewhere between Tanya and Nancy and Alexis and Krystal. Nobody really wanted to see the avuncular Gibson take on the dapper Brian Williams in a mud-wrestling match, but evidently the Betty and Veronica myth dies hard. Let the girls have at it.

The irony of all of this is that 33 years after Barbara Walters first took to the nightly news anchor desk with the surly Harry Reasoner, the evening news is less newsworthy than ever. On a good night, the best you can hope for is a little Tabasco sauce on Brian Williams’ tie.

Most people today are too busy wrenching off their own ties or slipping out of their low-heeled pumps to even consider turning on the tube at 6:30 p.m.. Many of those are lucky enough to have enough time to pre-heat the oven. Because the news is everywhere [--] scrolling across your cell phone like an Indiglo caterpillar, blathering away at you in the doctor’s office and the gas pump, the evening news has devolved from “must-see” TV to a “maybe-if-I-have-a-second” afterthought.

Most of us get our news from local TV, which is to real news what Salisbury Steak is to Angus Porterhouse. In 1980, nearly 52 million Americans watched the nightly news. Today, the evening news leader, NBC, is lucky to grab a hair under 10 million.

Never mind that health care costs are on track to eat up 20 percent of your income or that kids in suburban D.C. think the only thing better than an Alexandria townhouse is a tent in Helmand Province, what “Today Show” audiences want to know is: will David Goldman have his little boy back in the U.S. of A. for Christmas?

For advertisers, the big bucks are in the morning shows, which have become such a vehicle for pumping products they’re only a 1-800 number away from infomercials. The only topic the morning shows seem to like better than virtual catalog shopping is missing children.

Here’s a typical morning’s headlines on the “Today” show’s web page: “Sarah Jessica Parker ’shocked’ at Hugh Grant’s nails” and “Missing Mom’s husband acts ‘abnormal.’”

 

 

 

The pedigreed Sawyer (Cornell, Georgetown) initially seemed like she was slumming it on “GMA,” like a night-club chanteuse expected to lead round-robin sing-a-longs at pre-K, but she was a real gamer. She and co-host Robin Roberts seemed to have genuine chemistry, an authenticity in stark relief to the forced chumminess of the “Today Show,” where they’d like us to believe that Meredith Vieira and Ann Curry go off and have pedicures together.

Nothing has been the same on morning television since Couric left. She had the empathy, sincerity and, alas, perkiness that all of us should have at 7 in the morning. But her charm has not translated well to the evening news, where she seems like the chirpy sorority gal forced to button down and get serious for her first job at a law firm. Sawyer has always seemed a natural for evening, with a poise and dignity finely calibrated to the seriousness of the task. Her overdue capture of the anchor chair is symptomatic of a news business still male-dominated.

While media critics have been licking their chops over the Diane v. Katie matchup, the real story is that the nightly news is Williams’ to lose. Couric’s CBS lurks hopelessly in the cellar with scarcely a spider hole of hope. NBC leads the nightly newscasts by nearly a million viewers. It is king of the evenings just as it has been king of the morning, deserving or not.

If Sawyer can muster the audience to topple Williams from his throne, that will be news only in the sense of The Wall Street Journal besting USA Today in the circulation wars. When the world has stopped paying attention, any victory is pyrrhic at best.

c. Republican American, 2009.

 

Curb Your Enthusiasm, Viewers

Danny before; Danny after

Being the biggest loser, is, of course, a winning formula both for the leviathans who compete to reduce their portly physiques, and for NBC, which gains in ratings nearly what contestants lose in pounds.

But there is a manipulative stench about the sad sack narrative of “The Biggest Loser” that should give dieters pause. Yes, it’s a wretched thing that these people have walled themselves in through their own gluttony, but surely there is more to these people than their girth.

The program presents them as oafish slugs who can’t get through a few push-ups without begging for a Yoo-Hoo. Once transformed, their emaciation produces a kind of mania that prompts them into ludicrous convictions. “Anybody can do it,” a rabbit-eyed Cahill told “Today Show” viewers a bit too ecstatically. Well, if anybody could do it, Danny, then anybody would<$> do it and we would not have a country in which obesity-related diseases are threatening to derail the already tottering health-care system.

And that’s only one of “The Biggest Loser’s” dangers: It makes the implausible seem not only probable, but swift, dramatic and life-changing.

The bigger problem is that losing the equivalent of a college football linebacker in a shade over six months is dangerous, probably temporary and potentially deadly. “I’m waiting for the first person to have a heart attack,” Dr. Charles Burant, of the University of Michigan Health System told the New York Times.

Ryan C. Benson, who lost 122 pounds on the program in 2005, is now approaching his 330-pound starting weight. He, like a few other contestants, has spoken publicly about the fasting and dehydrating techniques that left him urinating blood. Other contestants, like Alaska’s Kai Hibbard, who lost 118 pounds in the series’ third season, told the Anchorage Daily News how she forced herself to vomit and swallowed laxatives to lose weight, only to gain most of it back. Eric Chopin, who lost 214 of his 404 pounds in 2006, has also gained nearly 122 of those pounds back.

Others maintain their weight loss by exercising four hours a day or limiting their intake to Jell-O and leafy green vegetables.

Unsurprisingly, most of us don’t have the four to six hours that most of these contestants spend in the gym. We also don’t have draconian trainers who alternately cajole, humiliate and embolden us.

Still, we love to buy into the fantasy. So never mind that Oprah Winfrey, one of the world’s richest women with a battalion of chefs, trainers, doctors and experts, can’t get her weight under control. It will be different for us.

But when you’re dealing with a population, 64 percent of which is overweight or obese, you have to start by telling the truth. And the truth is that the best weight loss is a slow, steady, painful lifestyle shift in which exercise is a non-negotiable component. As Dr. Harvey Simon, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, told the Los Angeles Times, “People who set unrealistic goals often end up seeking solace in the pantry, thus becoming the biggest losers of all.”

Tiger Woods, Cassius and the Mice That Roared

Few contortions are as delicious to watch as the American media trying to be virtuous and bawdy at the same time.

Lots of eggheads and nutty professors have inveighed against the fertile hunt for Tiger dung, but their admonitions were almost as futile as they were ridiculous. No blogger worth his Google hits is going to back down on a story that gets more sordid by the nanosecond. And we are at a lamentable point in journalistic history when the high-minded can no longer ignore the titillation of the low.

That cat has been out of the bag since the O.J. Simpson trial. 

But ever since Tiger Woods drove his Cadillac Escalade into a fire hydrant, news hounds have been pruriently sniffing about Tiger’s private cage, all the while jawing about the public’s right to know versus the individual’s right to privacy. It’s not even a fair fight. This Tiger tale is so frisky, you would have to be comatose not to have your sleaze impulse kick in.

Mr. and Mrs. Woods

The principled among us would insist the Tiger Woods story is a private skirmish to be sneered at and summarily dismissed as the personal donnybrook of a public couple. The problem with that principled stand is that it ignores cultural shifts over the past 100 years that have turned celebrities, athletes and politicians into avatars of morality. It hasn’t been the wisest calibration in human history, but it is undeniable.

In the absence of celestial deities like Pan or Venus, we’ve got Eliot Spitzer and Tom Cruise, Mark Sanford and Tiger Woods. They are not, thankfully, immortal, but they are ubiquitous enough to be moral and cultural touchstones. And yes, with apologies to Cassius, the fault “is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Still, dismantling this pantheon gets harder by the day.

Eliot Spitzer

How hard? Well, so hard that Ashley Dupre, Spitzer’s pricey call girl, was giving morality lessons in the pages of the New York Post that actually made a strange kind of sense: “Here you have all these girls accepting gifts, money, trips from Tiger in exchange for sex [--] all the while knowing he is married,” she said. “And now they all can’t wait to tell their stories in exchange for even more money from the tabloids? And I was the hooker? At least I kept my mouth shut.”

Yes, it’s always good to consult a professional.

When these heartwarming fables were rent asunder by caddish behavior so loathsome as to be cliché, you could almost feel the dejection from women, in particular, who wanted to believe the myth.

Fame follows success but it also loves a good story. The public affection Kobe Bryant felt before the fall wasn’t just because he could dunk better than anybody else in the NBA; it was because of his storybook romance with his (eventually wronged) wife.

So, too, with John Edwards. It wasn’t just the megawatt smile, $400 haircut, 102-acre estate and, oh, yeah, a few well-articulated talking points; it was because he was perceived as a man who stood by his woman in the most agonizing of times [--] through the death of a child and his wife’s breast cancer treatment.

And that, of course, is the problem, isn’t it? We want to believe the myth.

And why shouldn’t we? This is a country in which nearly half of all marriages fail. With such lousy odds, who can blame us for believing that a tall, handsome professional golfer could marry a beautiful Nordic princess, produce two children and live happily ever after?And yet Tiger Woods, who had seemed one-dimensional to the point of asceticism, turns out to be (surprise!) just as priapic as all those other jocks. Lots of women, if you believe their reports, have had a little Tiger in their tank and are only happy to roar about their exploits.

This only goes to prove what your mother told you that a woman who would cheat with a married man is probably not the sort with whom one should entrust state secrets.

For women, the Tiger revelations smacked of the whole Christie Brinkley divorce again. If a woman as stunning as Elin Nordegren Woods could not keep her Tiger on a leash, what could the rest of us hope for? Consider: American women spend $9 billion a year on cosmetics. In 2004, nearly 12 million surgical and nonsurgical beauty procedures were performed in the United States [--] including 290,343 eyelid jobs, 166,187 nose jobs, 478,251 liposuctions and 334,052 breast augmentations. The price tag? More than $14 billion. That’s how desperate American women are to stay young, pretty and trim [--] like Elin Nordegren.

For men, most of whom could only dream of capturing a sylph like Nordegren, Tiger’s trysts put him somewhere between the luckiest guy on earth or an ungrateful schmuck who doesn’t realize what he’s got until he’s lost it.

Lorrie’ Moore’s Delayed Punch is a Doozie

“A Gate At The Stairs,” Lorrie Moore (Knopf, $25.95)

Fans of Lorrie Moore have been waiting for a new book from this masterful, ironic writer. It has been 11 years since her last collection and 15 since Moore produced a novel. Her new novel, “A Gate At The Stairs” does not disappoint [Dash] but it does take a while to work its insidious potency.

Moore is a wry and clever cultural critic. She is a genius with word games and puns, which flit through her fiction like fireflies. Her characters are sardonic, self-aware, if a bit chastened by life. If they expect, they do not expect too much and their derision blunts their emotion until something so real upends their cheeky apathy.

“A Gate At The Stairs” starts off with what appears to be a plot from a Lifetime movie: a young college student named Tassie Keltjin from a Midwest potato farm takes a job as a nanny for a rich, slightly neurotic woman named Sarah Brink and her polished-if-distant husband. The nanny job is predicated on certain conditions, including a demand to accompany the couple to the adoption agency from which they will adopt their new child.

This is the first of Sarah’s many intrusions into Tassie’s relatively narrow life. Had Tassie been less of a pun-maven, less playful or verbally adroit, she might have been more alert to the perils of the high-maintenance, elitist Sarah. Something is amiss with Sarah and her edgy, oh-so-politically correct family. If Tassie were not so involved in her own circumspect life, she might have been more prepared for the catastrophic blow that ensues. This is a book that saunters about with the guileless but slightly guarded narrative of a college sophomore. When the inevitable horror comes, it does so with a carelessness and banality that is harrowing. All of tragedy is understandable —until it is not. This is a creepily built up book by Moore, and one of her best.

The Catholic Church’s Martyrdom Problem

Pity the cardinals of the Catholic Church in America. They are being whipped from pillar to post by the media for looking like  imperious, obfuscating enablers in the pedophilia crisis. Poor Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York is decrying the New York Times for refusing to publish his exegesis on pedophilia. See http://blog.archny.org/?p=42.

If the archbishop’s only response to the pedophilia scandal is to say ‘Well, others do it, too,’ he should thank the New York Times for saving him from making a fool of himself.
I don’t enjoy reading this repulsive stories, but I need to read them and the church needs to listen to them to regain any hope of credibility with the flock. It is repentance that is needed, not finger pointing, and hauling out the Statistical Abstract to demonstrate how vile other professions are puts Catholic priests on the same moral altar as bus drivers. They are not. They are not supposed to have any sexual contact, at all, let alone with little boys. The latest in this charade is a comment made by a letter-writer in today’s Republican-American (http://www.rep-am.com/letters/) that “The Catholic Church… has a homosexual problem,” although whether this is better, or worse is unclear. Evidently, there is a school of thought that believes that the errant priests were merely sex-deprived gays, deserving of our pity rather than our contempt.

When that kind of addle-brained bigotry is used as a defense, all hope for understanding is lost. 

 Whether there was one predatory priest or 2,000 or is immaterial. Priests are supposed to be models of virtue for us not models of villainy.