Kevin Allman

Sic, sic, sic

Notes from the US presidential campaign trail:

Asked who she'd go out with on a date -- with any celebrity, living or dead -- and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton chose . . . a Republican.

Her fantasy date would be with President Abraham Lincoln, Clinton said in an interview being published in the People magazine hitting newsstands Friday.

The question: "If your husband gave you a pass for one night and you could go on a date with any celeb, alive or dead, who would it be?"

Clinton's answer: "That's such a dangerous question! How about Abraham Lincoln?"

Another surprising tidbit: Despite the 19-hour days she puts in on the trail, she's apparently never heard of the energy drink Red Bull. Asked if she's ever had one, she replied, "No. What is it?"

Clinton, D-N.Y., also equivocates on a few either-or questions: She refused to choose between comedians Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, said she likes both wine and beer, and wouldn't select either "American Idol" or "Dancing With the Stars"; she said her mother -- who lives with the Clintons -- keeps her up to speed on both programs.

She did, however, choose Weight Watchers over the South Beach Diet -- but didn't elaborate on her own eating habits.

Except this didn't appear in People magazine. It appeared on ABC News' website.

ABC News.

I'm coming around to the school of thought that the D.C. media aren't as infuriatingly shallow and insular as they appear to be; they're genuinely sick, sick in the way an alcoholic or a drug abuser knows he or she is sick, but feels powerless to repeat a destructive compulsion.

This year's White House Correspondents' Dinner: now with extra breasts

This weekend brought the annual White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner, where the press gathers to yuk it up with the people they're supposed to be covering. Frank James of the Chicago Tribune provides a wrapup that's as good, or at least as typical, as any. Not that he's deaf to the criticisms of press whoredom:

There's been much talk in recent years of how the White House Correspondents' Association's annual dinner has perhaps outlived its usefulness.

But there's probably something to be said for an event that may be of the world's greatest flesh-and-blood mash-ups. That, for no other reason, probably argues for its continued existence....

Everywhere you turn, there's someone who used to make headlines, is making them now or will be. It's one of the biggest parades of the fabulously wealthy and famous you're ever likely to see. Where else outside Hollywood can you see Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, Martha Stewart, Marcia Cross and the Jonas Brothers gliding by your table?

Yeah.

Anyway, The New York Times now refuses to confuse journalistic ethics with a Comedy Central roast (the paper refuses to buy a table at the charade any longer), and the general reaction at the D.C. lunch table seemed to be: Too good to sit with us? Who the hell does she think SHE is?.

James makes a point of quoting this year's emcee, Craig Ferguson, who faux-twitted the Times in the roomful of twits:

"Oh, the New York Times. The New York Times unfortunately did not buy a table. They felt, I just want to make sure I got this right, they felt this event undercut the credibility of the press. It's funny. You see, I thought that Jayson Blair and Judi Miller took care of that."

(Ferguson got one of his biggest laughs at this point.)

"...Well, let me try this, shut the hell up New York Times, you sanctimonious, whining jerks. Look for my good review there coming up soon. I'm guessing Monday morning. 'He's a star.'

Actually, that wasn't just Ferguson's opinion. He tapped into a sentiment held by journalists in the room who thought the NYT might be missing the ethical forest for the trees on this one. Also, what does that make the rest of us, stenographers for the administration? (I know I'm inviting trouble with that question. As the president might say "Bring it on.")

That sound you hear is Craig Ferguson's sarcasm whizzing right over Frank James' head.

You can enjoy James's stenography -- along with photos of Pamela Anderson, Karl Rove talking to Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas, George Bush standing on a chair ("This got a lot of laughs and applause") and Colin Powell pointing at Jenny McCarthy's chichis -- on the Tribune's website.

AP dictum: "Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal"

Jim Romenesko at Poynter's Medianews posted a morning memo from the Los Angeles assistant bureau chief of the Associated Press:

From: Baker, Frank S.
Sent: Tue 1/8/2008 11:58 AM
To: News - Southern California Editorial Staff
Subject: Britney

All:

Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal. That doesn't mean every rumor makes it on the wire. But it does mean that we want to pay attention to what others are reporting....

Wow, the AP really meant it. Check the date and time stamp on this very important breaking story:

Oops, now Britney's lost her car
1/8/2008, 8:54 p.m. CST
By JOHN ROGERS
The Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) — It was just another night on the town Monday, and then another headline in the tabloids on Tuesday, for Britney Spears after the pop star had her car towed away....

John Rogers, you poor, poor bastard.

Scoopiness

Kudos to Willamette Week for starting out the year with a genuinely worthy cover story: the upcoming mid-term resignation of Portland city councilman Erik Sten. Their website not only has the whole scoop, but a downloadable recording of the interview, and reporter Nigel Jaquiss managed to get the whole thing done so secretly that he caught the rest of the PDX media completely flat-footed.

It's clear in the interview that Sten wanted to shiv The Oregonian, and he did it: the morning edition on the street doesn't carry a word about one of the biggest local political stories of the year, and at the moment the paper's website carries a story containing only a confirmation from Sten's head of staff and a note that the councilman could not be reached for comment. Ouch.

WW and Sten also scooped the Portland Mercury (whose city hall reporter, Amy J. Ruiz, had the good grace and good sense to link to the competition's story on the paper's blog) and the Portland Tribune, which has a few comments from Sten outside his office in City Hall.

Not a good start to the year for The Oregonian -- which is, of course, precisely what Erik Sten and Willamette Week wanted to achieve. In any case, it's nice to see the local media competing for genuine scoops for a change, rather than just bitching at one another. (Not to mention bitching at the bloggers.)

Tappin' toes and toidy bowls: Louisiana Saturday night!

In an apparent attempt to meld the devil-may-care lifestyle of Sen. David Vitter with the insouciant vagabondery of Sen. Larry Craig, it seems that St. Bernard Parish councilman Joey DiFatta has been tappin' a toe or two in the restrooms at Lakeside Mall just outside New Orleans. And he's been detained by the police for doing so not once, but twice.

Christine Harvey's story in tomorrow's Times-Picayune is a thorough accounting of delightful delovely DiFatta's various scrapes with the gendarmerie (including PDFs of the police reports), and surely it can't be a coincidence that the career pol announced today that he was dropping his bid for the Louisiana state senate -- like, now, man.

Kenner police issued a misdemeanor summons to DiFatta in September 1996 in connection with a peeping Tom incident in a men's bathroom at the former Mervyn's department store at The Esplanade mall, according to a Kenner Police Department incident report obtained by The Times-Picayune.

The report states that DiFatta watched a man use the bathroom while peering through a hole in a bathroom stall. The man held DiFatta until police arrived, at which time he was issued the misdemeanor summons and ordered to appear in court.

Oh, Joey. Maison Blanche -- well, the public could forgive. Dillard's -- maybe. But Mervyn's??

But hold! As his spiritual mentor, Sen. Larry Craig, stated: it was all a big mistake, says Mr. DiFatta. And so was the second time!

In the second incident, Jefferson Parish deputies working an undercover detail in a men's bathroom at Dillard's at Lakeside Shopping Center in March 2000 stopped DiFatta after he indicated a desire to engage in sex with an undercover deputy in an adjoining bathroom stall, according to an interoffice memorandum written by Sgt. Keith Conley, one of the deputies involved in the investigation.

The report said DiFatta slid his foot into the deputy's stall and tapped the deputy's foot. In the report, Conley noted that such activity is common among men to indicate a willingness to participate in sex.

The deputy inside the stall, Detective Wayne Couvillion, responded by tapping his foot, and DiFatta reached under the partition and began to rub the deputy's leg, the report states.

The detective asked DiFatta, "What do you want?" according to the report, and he replied, "I want to play with you."

The detective did not want to play with Mr. DiFatta, and you can guess the rest of the story. (Not included in Ms. Harvey's story is this detail from the second police report: "It should be noted that DiFatta was well-familiar and comfortable with the routine and body language involved in this type of activity and did express that he has done this a lot.")

But hold once more! DiFatta is full of explanations, and has crafted a unique one to explain his hasty departure from the political hurlyburly:

DiFatta also noted that the stress from enduring Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath might have gotten the best of him.

The ongoing stress of Hurricane Katrina didn't prevent him from putting up a handsome campaign website, though it may explain why the damn fool hasn't taken it down yet. It's an instructive, but sadly predictable, profile of a very sad man, and many of the particulars will probably seem familiar in this day of toe-tappers and Washington madams. I won't go into his his marital status or his family-values platform (these days, that would be redundantamento), but it didn't take long to come across this nugget:

THE JOEY DIFATTA PLAN FOR LOUISIANA

Create the nation’s strongest Code of Government Ethics to fight political corruption and send a signal to the country that Louisiana will be a different state starting in 2008

Defend our conservative values from attacks by extreme liberal groups

And now, it seems, Mr. DiFatta's plan is...all...tapped...out.

Your Most Trusted Name in News-Flavored Programming

This morning's Kicker blog at the CJR site has an amusing item from Clint Hendler:

What happened after CNN invited author Jake Halpern to discuss “Fame Junkies,” his book on America’s deleterious obsession with celebrity? Halpern tells the story in today’s Wall Street Journal:

[I]t was certainly a delightful irony when, upon my arrival, I was told that my segment had been canceled due to breaking news. "Oh," I said, "What happened?" The technician replied, "Didn't you hear, Britney Spears just lost custody of her kids?"

Ray Richmond on media reaction to his column

Early this morning, Hollywood Reporter columnist Ray Richmond, who is also a contributor to the paper's Past Deadline blog, addressed his controversial column of last Friday, which began:

Merv Griffin was gay. There. Is that plain enough for ya? No gossip, no scandal, no snickering behind the back. Just reality. Why should that be so uncomfortable to contemplate? Why is it so difficult to write? Why are we still so jittery even about raising the issue in purportedly liberal-minded Hollywood, in 2007?

That column was taken off Past Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter's website briefly before being restored a few hours later. Reuters, which provides Richmond's column on its wire service, also struck the column, but chose not to restore it, stating "We have dropped the story from our entertainment news feed as it did not meet our standards for news."

In today's Past Deadline ("Setting the Record Straight [So to Speak] on My Merv Griffin Uproar"), Richmond addresses the dustup:

What I continue to wrestle with is the whole question of how such a gentle, respectful utterance could provoke such a severe and polarizing reaction. I naturally acknowledge that there are two ways of looking at this, and one is that I had no right to override Griffin's personal decision to keep his private life his own business. I opted instead to err on the side of truth and candor, with the idea that disclosing Merv's being gay can't personally impact him after death and -- unless we attach shame to it -- ought not to taint his legacy in any way. I still firmly believe that and would retract nothing I wrote in the column.

I spoke to Richmond this morning by phone.

Q. Reuters said that it dropped your story from its newsfeed because it didn’t meet their standard for news. Have any of your other columns not met their standard for news?

Ray Richmond: No. I believe this is the first. My guess is that they got some kind of heat from some high-up source. Who knows what their reasons were. It’s baffling to me, because suddenly their editorial standards 'evolved' over a few hours. But it underscored the point of the column, which is how discussing these things makes everybody in the media squeamish. The mainstream is baffled as to how to handle it.

Q. Did anyone from Reuters contact you about the column?

No. I’ve never spoken to anyone from Reuters. Ever. Period. I still think this was the same respectful tone I used in my other Griffin columns. I don’t think this suddenly became TMZ territory. Even TMZ isn’t writing about this.

Q. Have you heard from Harvey Levin or anyone at TMZ?

I have not.

Q. Did you or any of your editors talk to Reuters about the column being pulled?

I have no information about my people at the Reporter discussing it with them. They did not contact me; I did not contact them after the fact. I would’ve told them: I believe this meets your standards for news. It remains baffling -- and a bit disturbing -- why it suddenly became unfit.

Q. Were you contacted by Howard Kurtz [of The Washington Post], Tim Rutten [of the Los Angeles Times], Matthew Felling [of CBS News’ Public Eye blog], or any other media reporters?

None of the people you just mentioned, no. The only mainstream, quote-unquote, source that seemed to be on top of this was Editor & Publisher, which is a sister publication of The Hollywood Reporter, and a longtime, respected journalistic trade. I applaud Editor & Publisher for covering this.

Q. So Felling wrote his column without contacting you at all? [On August 21, Felling blogged about the flap on Public Eye in an entry titled "Two Bits About Obits," which began with the words "Who has the right to decide what belongs in an obituary?" which not only mischaracterized an opinion column as an obituary, but went on to misidentify Richmond, who had worked on The Merv Griffin Show, as a "long-time friend" of Griffin's. Felling, the former media director for the Center for Media and Public Affairs, didn't respond to two emailed requests for comment.]

I never received a phone call or email myself.

Mervgate just keeps rollin' on

I had an email exchange over the weekend with Ray Richmond, whose Hollywood Reporter column set off last Friday's brouhaha over the late Merv Griffin. He doesn't want to talk right now, but says he'll address the fallout later this week.

Meanwhile...

- After all the huffing and puffing in the blogosphere, Editor & Publisher did a wrapup of the story that got everything right, properly focusing on the curiously panicky behavior of the media rather than the specifics of Merv Griffin's life.

(Edited to add: Mike Signorile also gets it: "There is a story here that is now bigger than 'Merv was gay' and is very much about strong-arming the media. Will Howie Kurtz and our other intrepid media reporters get on it?")

- No one seems to be focusing at all on the fact that Richmond's blog, Past Deadline, has all the appearance of a personal blog -- but, according to him, it's actually a product of The Hollywood Reporter; they hold the keys and control the content. Wouldn't it be more transparent to put the Reporter's flag at the top of the page and indicate that it's a blog owned by The Hollywood Reporter?

- Nikki Finke reported that The Hollywood Reporter's new editor, Elizabeth Guider, was out of town when all this happened. I understand that she was visiting New Orleans and trying to manage all of this from down there.

- The Los Angeles Times, which I would expect to sink its teeth into an industry dustup like this one, hasn't touched the story. I'll be curious to see if The Washington Post's media critic Howard Kurtz addresses it during his scheduled online chat tomorrow. (Edited 8/20/07 3:27 pm to add: According to the CNN transcript, Kurtz ignored the topic during his regular Sunday morning media-critique show Reliable Sources, which the network describes as "one of television's only regular programs to examine how journalists do their jobs and how the media affect the stories they cover.")

- Seems that by attempting to quash the piece, everyone involved just gave it wider circulation. Nice work. Even at four days old, Richmond's story is still the most emailed story on THR's website:

- Unlike The Hollywood Reporter, Reuters still hasn't restored the column in question, nor has any editor there addressed the questions still outstanding on their ombuds-site:

- Did anyone representing either Merv Griffin or The Hollywood Reporter contact the Reuters news desk and request that it be pulled? Or was this something you decided on your own?

- Have any other Richmond columns not met your standards for news? If so, which ones and why?

- Still haven't read of anyone challenging the facts of Richmond's original column -- just its propriety and taste, running as it did on the day of Griffin's funeral, where he was eulogized by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Richmond said the timing was unintentional.)

- Rereading Dennis McLellan's L.A. Times obituary of Griffin, this sentence jumped out at me:

An entertainer-turned-entrepreneur, who sold Merv Griffin Enterprises to Coca-Cola Co. for $250 million in 1986 and recently was reported to have a net worth of $1.6 billion, Griffin presided over an array of business endeavors.

$1.6 billion? I think everyone knew Griffin was a rich man, but I had no idea. That's a lot of money.

And a lot of power.

Statement from Reuters on why Ray Richmond's column was pulled

It can be found here:

"This was a story from The Hollywood Reporter that ran as part of a Reuters news feed. We have dropped the story from our entertainment news feed as it did not meet our standards for news. GBU Editor"

Questions I left for the editor:

- Did anyone representing either Merv Griffin or The Hollywood Reporter contact the Reuters news desk and request that it be pulled? Or was this something you decided on your own?

- Now that The Hollywood Reporter is standing behind Richmond's original column, will you reinstate it?

- Have any other Richmond columns not met your standards for news? If so, which ones and why?

Statement from Ray Richmond

...on The Hollywood Reporter's reversal and reinstatement of his controversial column and blogpost about the late Merv Griffin:

"I’m heartened and moved that my paper has seen fit to stand behind me and defend me and to understand there was no malicious intent or negativity inherent in this piece. This speaks volumes about the Hollywood Reporter journalistically."