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Showing posts from January, 2010

Goodnight, And Good Luck, Jay Leno

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Watching Jay Leno interviewed by Oprah , he cut a more sympathetic figure — people often do, even or especially when interrogated, which the Queen of talk did not. But Winfrey asked nearly all the right questions and got Leno to the precipice a couple of times, making the contours of the recent late night skirmish clearer and perhaps also, despite himself, his own motives. Leno has enjoyed unique success but laudably remains a blue-collar guy, a lot like the younger one who left Massachusetts in a beat-up car, listening to James Taylor and wondering if anyone would hear from him again . And he probably really is the hardest working man in show business, spending something like 200 days on the road doing stand-up and revealing to Oprah that he lives on what he makes without his NBC salary — an astonishing fact given his expensive car hobby, to say the least. In my psychobabble view I liken Leno to Regis Philbin, a genuine child of the Great Depression who has to work, always work, alway

John Edwards, Worst Person in the World

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It's rare for someone in the moral cesspool that is often public life to be as utterly shameless as John Edwards, so I feel compelled to write a few things down to keep track of it all. Let's see: You have an adulterous affair with a woman, from the office, who is younger than your dying wife, whose incurable cancer is a matter of public record. You apparently have unprotected sex with this woman. A child is born, and you deny paternity so she will read all about that in a few years. You not only pointedly lie about all this but you convince or force other people step up to publicly support your lie. You say you will take a paternity test you cannot be compelled to take and have no intention of taking because you know it will expose your lie, a litigator's trick that is slimy even by litigator standards. All this is going on as you try to get elected president of the United States. Disclosure of your sins during the campaign or after your election would stigmatize your

Journalist, Editor, Ombudsman Deborah Howell Dies At 68

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Deborah Howell, a pioneering journalist who served in the sadly shrinking ranks of newspaper ombuds during a three-year tenure at the Washington Post, died in a road accident while vacationing in New Zealand . Howell, 68, worked for both Minneapolis newspapers, ran one of them as it won two Pulitzer Prizes, and then became the Washington bureau chief for the Newhouse Newspaper Group and editor of Newhouse News Service — where her staff also won a Pulitzer. (Newshouse News is owned by Advance Publications, which is also the parent company of Condé Nast Digital, my employer). "I don't think I've ever met anyone with as much passion for news and as much creativity and as much of a feeling for what it takes to be a great editor," Steve Newhouse said in an interview with Minneapolis Public Radio . We never met, but I knew of Deborah Howell professionally; when she wrote an amusingly scathing piece about a WaPo opinion column which argued that women may actually be weaker a