Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:44:28 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Tina Brown :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Tina+Brown istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/dreamworks-drama-shows-hollywoods-soft-side/24479/ Thu, 15 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST There was something heartwarming about the sale of DreamWorks studio for an irrationally exuberant $1.6 billion to Viacom's Paramount Pictures this week instead of to its longtime suitor, General Electric's NBC Universal. It proved all over again that even if Hollywood looks these days as if it's overrun with corporate suits and marketing drones, it's still activated by emotion and perception. Who cares if, in the long term, NBC Universal's chairman and CEO, Bob Wright, turns out to have been... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/news-delivery-via-the-electronic-petri-dish/24150/ Thu, 8 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST JOE GILLIS (William Holden): You're Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big. NORMA DESMOND (Gloria Swanson): I am big. It's the pictures that got small. - "Sunset Boulevard," 1950 There's nothing inherently wrong with ABC's anointing Elizabeth Vargas and Bob Woodruff as the new anchor couple of "World News Tonight." It's just another Norma Desmond moment. This time, it's the networks that got small. The two of them look as if they were spawned in the same electronic... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/calendar/woodward-in-the-woodshed/23787/ Thu, 1 Dec 2005 00:00:00 EST The press life seems to have turned into one long, cannibalistic feast, a fratricidal Thanksgiving dinner minus the giving of thanks. No sooner have we finished dining out on roast Judith Miller with stuffing than we are ready for a nice big slice of Bob Woodward pie. Now that everyone's a moralist, all mistakes are outrages. It's born of the desperation of Big Journalism's realization that it has lost control. Mainstream press and broadcast outlets are trapped in the pincer assaults of the... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/confessions-of-a-british-ambassador/23193/ Thu, 17 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST LONDON - There's a new catch phrase in London: Are you a skier? It has nothing to do with winter sports. The phrase is a quasi-acronym for Are You Spending the Kids' Inheritance? In the age of celebrity culture and instant news, cash is not the only fast currency. Former pillars of the establishment are shorting their reputations, too. Sir Christopher Meyer, who was Britain's ambassador to America during the run-up to the Iraq war, has clearly decided to cash in his gravitas chips. London... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/rough-times-for-tough-women/22810/ Thu, 10 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST It's been an unsettling few months for women of a certain age. Between the flameouts of Judith Miller and Harriet Miers, the frantic re-entry of Martha Stewart, and the sight of a former CBS News producer, Mary Mapes, shaking her gory locks on ABC's "Good Morning America," everywhere you turn there's a power woman either in extremis or declaring she's indestructible, which is usually the same thing. Remember that ludicrous memo that went out from the White House last week, calling on... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/with-camilla-charles-comes-into-his-own/22499/ Thu, 3 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST Most people don't have to wait until the age of 56 to come into their own, but you can't help feeling that the Prince of Wales has finally caught up with the zeitgeist. Or maybe it's the zeitgeist that's caught up with him. Most of it is because of Camilla, of course. Science tells us that marriage is good for the physical and mental health of the male of the species, and Charles, after decades of well-populated loneliness, has lost the overcast look of a man who always expects it to rain... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/calendar/mystique-surrounding-fitzgerald/22117/ Thu, 27 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EST It's one of the ironies of our media culture that the mystique of Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame case, grew to mythic size simply by virtue of Mr. Fitzgerald keeping his mouth shut until he has something to say. Manhattan press circles have been so excited by Mr. Fitzgerald's silence right up to the eve of the grand jury's term tomorrow they've forgotten his casting as a First Amendment assassin and turned him into a cross between Philip Marlowe and The Shadow... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/post-blair-witch-hunt-project/21755/ Thu, 20 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EST The age of the blogosphere has produced a new genre of mainstream journalism: fake transparency. The New York Times has become its foremost practitioner. The paper of record has been arraigned for arrogance so many times in the last three years that it has forgotten how useful arrogance can be. The Gulliver of West 43rd Street has gotten so spooked that now it preemptively lies down, affixes bonds to its wrists and ankles, and invites the Lilliputians of cyberspace to walk all over it. After... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/calendar/sisterly-support-stops-at-door-of-ms-miers/21433/ Thu, 13 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EST The healthiest aspect of the Harriet Miers nomination is that women haven't rallied to her cause. Ten years ago, there would have been a lot of reflexive solidarity about keeping the Sandra Day O'Connor spot on the Supreme Court from reverting to male type. But every woman lawyer I've spoken to in the past week skips right past the sisterly support into a rant about Ms. Miers's meager qualifications or her abject obeisance to power. The good news is that for women, it seems, Ms. Miers's... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/calendar/sadly-dc-is-devoid-of-tell-alls/21066/ Thu, 6 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EST You would think one of the side effects of the president's slide from Top Gun would be an eruption of disloyal memoirs. Since the outbursts of Treasury Secretary O'Neill and terrorism tsar Richard Clarke, there's been a lack of literary lava out of Washington's Mount Vesuvius. Karen Hughes's memoir was as purpose-driven as her pantsuit. Ari Fleischer's was about as revealing as one of his briefings. ("After the press conference was over," he confides, "I joined the president in the residence... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/planet-clinton/20370/ Thu, 22 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST The big surprise of President Clinton's Global Initiative Conference at the Sheraton Hotel in New York last weekend was how strangely calming it was. You would expect to emerge begging for mercy from a three-day talkathon on the world's most intractable problems emceed by history's most garrulous president - especially if you were a survivor of one of his book tour gigs. To be sure, Mr. Clinton, the big intellectual show-off, had never been less than brilliant on his feet, but he never knew... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/is-murdoch-shifting-his-politics/20025/ Thu, 15 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST Could the post-Katrina mood swing take the heat off the bellicose Fox News brand? Its competitors keep scanning its ratings - in vain at the moment - for signs that Rupert Murdoch's cable station will wilt along with President Bush's poll numbers. At New York gatherings, one much-masticated indicator of a possible zeitgeist shift is that even though Fox still leads the pack, CNN's increases during Katrina were greater in percentage terms than Fox's. Transatlantic Murdoch watchers can tell you... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/after-katrina-a-scent-of-insurrection/19709/ Thu, 8 Sep 2005 00:00:00 EST Even though it is so familiar in our imaginations, it is still a wonderful moment in the upcoming Discovery documentary "The Flight That Fought Back" when the doomed passengers on Flight 93 seize the food cart and race it down the aisle toward the cockpit like a battering ram, united in courage and rage. During the preview at the Bryant Park Hotel in Manhattan, you could feel the exhalation of tension in the audience, the wish fulfillment, the satisfaction at the virility of the gesture. New... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/we-are-all-scientologists-now/16374/ Thu, 30 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST Bono looked very much at home on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday talking about Third World debt. So much so that the future path for Sunday morning talk shows became blindingly obvious: Dispense with politicians altogether. They have passed their sell-by date. They don't smell so good. There was more credibility in Bono's earnest simplifications of the African aid issue than in Donald Rumsfeld blowing off Senator Hagel's assertion that the White House is "completely disconnected from reality."... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/side-effects-of-the-truth-about-hillary/15988/ Thu, 23 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST Maybe it's a secret fantasy of girl-on-girl action that makes Edward Klein obsess about Senator Clinton's supposed lesbian ethos in his new book "The Truth About Hillary." It's hard to know what else he has to draw on. Yelling "lesbian" at powerful heterosexual women has always been the pathetic projection of the menaced male, but it's especially baffling in Mr. Klein's case. As the former editor of the New York Times Magazine, with some best sellers behind him, Mr. Klein used to be a... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/kofi-annan-and-the-citys-power-brokers/15560/ Thu, 16 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST Spare a thought, in all his troubles, for Kofi Annan's official social life. At dinner every night the poor guy has to sit next to not just an endless round of U.N. ambassadors, visiting foreign ministers, and 57 varieties of dignitaries, but their wives. Global small talk can be a global drag. I sampled a whiff of Mr. Annan's world for the second time in two weeks at a dinner in Manhattan for the Turkish prime minister, where I was placed between a genially incomprehensible Turkish cabinet... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/novel-use-for-neverland/15192/ Thu, 9 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST Russell Crowe's rumble in the Mercer Hotel in New York this week suggests a possible new use for Neverland after the Michael Jackson verdict is rendered. It could be refitted as a rehabilitation facility for stars, CEOs, and ersatz billionaires afflicted with the classic symptoms of Narcissistic Celebrity Disorder. There are rehab centers for every kind of substance abuse, but none for the galloping threat of NCD. Early warning signs of this dread malady include climbing on TV studio couches... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/ups-downs-of-them/14806/ Thu, 2 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EST There's no such thing as a perfectly truthful memoir. Anyway, who would want one? Much of the interest in reading personal history is decoding what's real about a remembered life from the author's baggage of partial understanding or simmering resentment or wishful thinking. Francine du Plessix Gray's fascinating new memoir "Them" - about her beautiful mother, the Russian-born fashion icon Tatiana Yakovleva du Plessix, and her supremely elegant stepfather, Alexander Liberman, the artist and... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/game-of-marketing-fake-realities/14471/ Thu, 26 May 2005 00:00:00 EST As Tom Cruise's promotional campaign for his "romance" with baby-faced starlet Katie Holmes shifts into high gear, it's running into a brand-new p.r. problem: No one believes it's for real. Or, no one is prepared to pretend to believe it's for real. Maybe there's been some alarming secret studio poll that proves scientifically (or Scientologically?) that Mr. Cruise's weirdness/asexuality rating is at an all-time high. But with a new movie to promote (the impending Steven Spielberg monster "War... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/crashing-of-major-reputations/14116/ Thu, 19 May 2005 00:00:00 EST The Newsweek imbroglio, coming on the heels of the plagiarism epidemic in newspapers and the CBS National Guard fiasco, is another sharp sciatica in the press psyche, but unlike those other reputation-wreckers, this one comes with a body count. For once our feelings seem to be unrelieved by Schadenfreude. At Newsweek, there was no swaggering megalomaniac editor who deserved a comeuppance, no celebrity anchor with vanities to unmask. Newsweek's editor, Mark Whitaker, errs on the earnest side... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/views-of-blair-from-2-sides-of-the-pond/13399/ Thu, 5 May 2005 00:00:00 EST Until this week, Brits I spoke to in London seemed more excited about the reunion of Cream at Royal Albert Hall than about the election that will decide whether Prime Minister Blair and Labor get a mandate for another five years. Being told every day that Mr. Blair would win a big majority cast the national mood into one of surly indifference. It all suddenly changed when leaked memos on Iraq seemed to confirm that Mr. Blair had promised President Bush he would go to war to depose Saddam... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/home/big-brand-stars-being-sucked-dry/13014/ Thu, 28 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EST Now that every celebrity has become a human home page, we are assailed by their brand extension at every turn. Each time Martha Stewart announces another new deal it makes me want to slip quietly away and take a nap. In addition to pretending to no longer run her magazine, television, and merchandising empire, she has now committed to a 24-hour channel with Sirius radio, a daily NBC-TV cooking show, and a spin-off of "The Apprentice." Not content with this frenzy of rebirth, she has stirred up... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/papal-matters-excitement-letdown/12621/ Thu, 21 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EST "Secular and the City" is a weird show to be in at the moment. For those of us who came to Manhattan precisely because you're guaranteed never to meet anyone who has read the "Left Behind" series, America's much-celebrated spiritual revival can have its trying moments. The papal marathon of the past three weeks, though, had the paradoxical effect of making the non-born-againers among us feel a little less left out. The European production values of the Roman Catholic Church upstaged anything... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/women-in-their-50s-come-of-age/12262/ Thu, 14 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EST At the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel luncheon celebrating the Matrix Awards for New York Women in Communications Monday, there was something so glorious about the confident roll of Oprah's behind in its tight couture suit as she powered up to the podium to present an award to Amy Gross, the editor in chief of O, the Oprah Magazine. "When I interviewed Amy," the queen of all media declared, "I knew right away she was a real woman, not an aging female." All the estrogen in the packed room seemed to... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/parker-bowles-would-make-a-fine-queen/11884/ Thu, 7 Apr 2005 00:00:00 EST LONDON - According to the Daily Mirror, when Charles learned that the pope's funeral had been scheduled for the same day as his wedding to Camilla Parker Bowles, he wailed, "Why me?" Bad luck has always followed Charles like one of his mum's corgis. But even this deeply pessimistic man could not have foreseen the litany of cock-ups and cosmic disasters that have turned his wedding to Camilla into a doggie bag full of doggie doo. It's as if the queen's displeasure, which can't be publicly... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/news-and-reality/11489/ Thu, 31 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST Doesn't it seem like a hundred years ago that the Ashley Smith/"Purpose Driven Life" hurricane hit? Actually, that pre-Easter salvation epiphany of Brian Nichols in Ms. Smith's Atlanta apartment had us by the throat only a couple of weeks ago. Then the Terri Schiavo opinion-train came thundering down the track. It's become downright harrowing to live in the crucible of these hourly Passion plays. The endlessly repeated tape loop of Terri's gaping mouth has become as ubiquitous as Starbucks, but... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/rice-blooms-in-her-new-position/10746/ Thu, 17 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST All the hype about Secretary of State Rice's new rock-star persona is just because politics has lost its fizz. White House correspondents are bored. The newly self-infatuated bloggers are bored. There is no juice in the Social Security debate. Hence the sudden daft flurry of stories about a possible Hillary/Condi matchup in 2008. In this Eros-deprived administration, it gives the Sunday morning news guys something to fantasize about: two girls going at it. For sure, it's great to see how Ms... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/lunacy-on-trial/10409/ Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST The strange thing about the Michael Jackson trial is that the supporting actors are more interesting than the star. The weirdness of the King of Pop is so overexposed that no new revelation can shock. Either Mr. Jackson is a complete lunatic who slept with young boys and didn't fondle them or he's a complete lunatic who slept with young boys and did. Better to fixate instead on pass-through characters, like the French-born cooks at Neverland featured in Martin Bashir's "Primetime Live" report... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/for-a-pr-boost-serve-time-not-canapes/10055/ Thu, 3 Mar 2005 00:00:00 EST The Jail Thing is working so well for Martha Stewart it may become the p.r. strategy of choice for other public figures who have run afoul of the image police. Jennifer Lopez didn't have to go to all the trouble of designing a new fashion line, toiling over a new album, and rebounding into a doleful marriage to Marc Anthony. She should just have stood up in court and said, "Your Honor, I committed the crime of being on the cover of US magazine with Ben Affleck 100 times too often. My lips were... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/powerful-men-and-their-manners/9695/ Thu, 24 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST In the wake of the Larry Summers debacle at Harvard University, perhaps it's time for a study of the missing social gene in men. It's amazing how many executive disasters are caused by the way otherwise smart males crash around in the thickets of interpersonal relations. There were so many blunders of tone in the first Bush term that Condi Rice in her Jackie O pearls was required to go and suck up to wounded European leaders in advance of the presidential visit. By the end of this week, Mr... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/bad-marriage-refugees-tie-the-windsor-knot/9414/ Thu, 17 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST Has the ghost of Princess Diana been banished at last? You could almost believe it last week in the touchingly dowdy engagement pictures of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. Around dazzling Diana, the hangdog prince never looked as he does now - quietly confident, casually self-assured, displaying a serene, kingly brio before the cameras. We may never know whether it was Charles or Diana who broke their marriage vows first. The version of the run-up to the royal divorce offered by her... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/when-talk-was-deep/9054/ Thu, 10 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST It was probably appropriate that half the guests at a Manhattan screening of the new documentary "Inside Deep Throat" Monday night thought they'd come to watch a movie about Watergate. The other half, of course, knew they were there to look back on the days when porn legend Linda Lovelace and her co-star Harry Reems were making oral history together. What both those 1970s melodramas, the political and the sexual, had in common was the brooding presence of President Nixon. Without his... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/clintons-permanent-campaign/8721/ Thu, 3 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST Don't faint, Senator Clinton, you're all we've got! There was a tiny ripple of panic among downstate Democrats when the junior senator from New York uncharacteristically swooned on the road in Buffalo on Monday. After all, whom else do New Yorkers have to make them feel a part of the action? It's probably more rewarding to be an out-of-power Sunni now than it is to have been a supporter of Senator Kerry in the last election. At least in Iraq they seem to mean it when they say they'll build a... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/taste-and-the-trumps/8367/ Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST The wedding of Donald Trump to the Slovenian bombshell Melania Knauss last Saturday in Palm Beach raised some totally unexpected questions: Is good taste the new vulgarity? Is self-restraint the new self-indulgence? Is modesty the new bombast? Among Mr. and (now) Mrs. Trump's 350 or so guests there was more than a hint of chagrin that the whole affair was carried off with such comparative (specifically, as compared to previous Trumperies) non-over-the-topness. Let's face it: for a small... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/first-lady-has-eyes-on-her-boy/8005/ Thu, 20 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST On Barbara Walters' ABC "20/20" interview last Friday with George W. and Laura Bush, the first lady remarked that in the second term she wants to focus on adolescent boys. "I feel like over the last several decades we've neglected boys a little bit," Mrs. Bush explained sweetly as she and daughter Barbara toured the renovated White House (including taking in the new look of the Lincoln bedroom, where she paused to tell Barbara how much she empathized with Mary Todd Lincoln, who went quietly... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/whos-really-to-blame-at-cbs/7677/ Thu, 13 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST A lot of people at CBS News are angry that Dan Rather didn't get more blame in the independent panel's 224-page chronicle of decision disasters in the notorious "60 Minutes Wednesday" on President Bush's Air National Guard service. It might have been better for Mr. Rather's reputation if he had. As it is, the network's star journalist, the craggy news guy with all those Emmys under his belt, comes off in the report as an empty trench coat. Consider the facts. He didn't meet or talk to the... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/great-disney-debate/7309/ Thu, 6 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST Is it really too late for a comeback for Michael Ovitz? James B. Stewart's article in this week's New Yorker, packed with piquant new details, and Dominic Dunne's flavorsome diary of the Disney trial in the upcoming February Vanity Fair actually managed to make me feel some sympathy for Mr. Ovitz. You would think the ousted president of Disney, who has been in free fall for the last eight years, has eaten enough crow by now. Except for Al Goldstein, the former publisher of Screw, who wound up... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/2004year-of-the-scandal/6728/ Thu, 23 Dec 2004 00:00:00 EST The year 2004 was the year when malfeasance discovered niche marketing. There was something for everybody on the rap sheet. Sports fans had Kobe Bryant. Music fans had Michael Jackson. Park Avenue had Martha Stewart. Boardrooms had Conrad Black. Hollywood had Michael Eisner, Michael Ovitz, and the shareholders of Disney facing off in Delaware over Ovitz's $140 million payoff. For cable TV, the Peterson trial was the clear winner. This year the case was beaten to death on "Larry King Live" no... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/national/kerik-was-disaster-in-waiting/6361/ Thu, 16 Dec 2004 00:00:00 EST It turns out that all that Capitol Hill huffing and puffing for three weeks about how our mighty intelligence agencies should share information was irrelevant. They have no information to share, whether it's about Iran, Iraq - or Bernard Kerik. For New Yorkers the Kerik saga is a nice moment of New York one-upmanship at Washington's expense. To know that the former police commissioner and current partner in Mayor Giuliani's post-9/11 money machine was a disaster waiting to happen, you didn't... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/nbc-resurrects-the-ghost-of-diana/5695/ Thu, 2 Dec 2004 00:00:00 EST Every time Princess Diana's ghost returns for another haunting, as it did this week on NBC's "Dateline," our perceptions of her change. The only thing that stays the same is the revolving cast of clapped-out courtiers, posh lowlifes, and fleabag turncoats who continue to cash in on her memory. Most of them haven't turned out too well. The caddish Major James Hewitt, he who kissed and told, was arrested last July on suspicion of cocaine possession and a firearms negligence charge. Last week a... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/new-york-loses-its-grip-as-a-political-hotspot/5059/ Thu, 18 Nov 2004 00:00:00 EST New Yorkers are feeling a severe case of heat withdrawal. They were used to being the red-hot center of American news and opinion. Suddenly they're flyover country, relics from a dying tribe, seedy and unloved. They are as forlorn as those fiery partisan books that once pulsed with an angry beat on the best-seller list and now linger on the remainder tables in Barnes & Noble. The psychiatrist Brooks Morgan says that Senator Kerry's defeat, coming on the heels of the Yankees' collapse in the... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/democrats-feel-agony-of-defeat/4304/ Thu, 4 Nov 2004 00:00:00 EST In the next four years Democrats will look back on the heady afternoon of November 2, 2004, with the kind of nostalgia they used to reserve for their honeymoons. It was the buoyant, sunny afternoon of the new Kerry administration and it felt as light and airy as it must for the women of Afghanistan when they first throw off their burkas. The clarity of the Democrats' victory was what made it so serene. President Kerry, secure in his surge, could immediately afford do that thing we have been... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/farewell-election-madness/3963/ Thu, 28 Oct 2004 00:00:00 EST People tell each other they can't wait for the election to be over, but in the last days the suspense has become its own addiction. The big finish will be bigger than the last episode of "Friends," bigger than the finale of "The Apprentice," bigger than Mr. Big - bigger than whether he and Carrie would get back together. Graydon Carter famously said after 9/11 that the new era meant the "end of irony." The end of apathy is what we got instead. Once torpor returns we'll miss the rush. We may be... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/loose-lips-sink-campaigns/3583/ Thu, 21 Oct 2004 00:00:00 EST In the end, this election is probably not going to turn on something important. The October surprise, the grand, explosive news finish everyone talks about, is less likely to close the deal for one or other of the candidates than some dopey, misappropriated sound bite that cuts through to the undecided airheads and green lights commitment. The Mary Cheney flap brought this home with a vengeance, as the latest Wall Street Journal poll showed Senator Kerry slipping in four battleground states... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/democrats-inferiority-complex/3236/ Thu, 14 Oct 2004 00:00:00 EST Election tension is worse in New York now that Senator Kerry seems to have a chance of winning. It was almost easier when his was a sort of Children's Crusade with no one actually believing he would make it to Jerusalem. Forget about the wise men who conjure up portentous parallel moments in the nation's history like war president William McKinley's rout of William Jennings Bryan in 1900. If President Bush isn't reelected (or if he isn't redefeated, to use the preferred local term) New Yorkers... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/vice-president-holds-down-republican-fort/2858/ Thu, 7 Oct 2004 00:00:00 EST It was the giant armadillo versus the baby cougar. The split screen wreaked its havoc again on the Cheney/Edwards debate Tuesday night. If you'd been listening on the radio, Senator Edwards would have won by a pencil, but in a 90-minute, two-shot the gravitas gap was a problem. Vice President Cheney's bullet head and nuanced basso anchored his thoughts to his words and filled out the frame of the screen, while beside him Mr. Edwards bobbed like a tethered balloon. All that gulping at that damn... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/mr-closer-give-us-closure/2495/ Thu, 30 Sep 2004 00:00:00 EST On the eve of the debates people are so on edge in New York that every gathering has become like a visit to the dentist. In this town of Democrats, Karl Rove's real or imagined brilliance has got people dangerously psyched out. Someone in a group always produces some new vulnerability of Senator Kerry's to drill down on, some fresh tactical error to palpitate about. An expectation reversal has been going on that's strange to find among a candidate's own supporters. Even without the goring... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/nervous-breakdown-of-the-press/2186/ Thu, 23 Sep 2004 00:00:00 EST Is the press having a nervous breakdown? The Dan Rather affair looks like yet another giant freak-out in the patient's collapse. For Mr. Rather and CBS, all the conflicting tensions that torture journalists and producers day and night came together. The broiling partisan heat, the pressure to get out of third place with a scoop, the hot breath of cable news, the race to beat all the hacks and scribes who keep nibbling away at the story (your story, the story you've spent five years trying to... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/this-time-kitty-kelleys-under-fire/1788/ Thu, 16 Sep 2004 00:00:00 EST Matt Lauer's opening one-on-one with Kitty Kelley on the "Today" show this week was an example of a new genre of TV journalism: the interview as Hell's Angels initiation ceremony. After being smacked around, stomped on, and having her leathers urinated on from a great height by Mr. Lauer, Ms. Kelley was then welcomed back for two consecutive mornings to plug her new doorstopper, "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty." The head of NBC News, Neal Shapiro, had gamely resisted pressure by... TINA BROWN http://www.nysun.com/on-the-town/its-campaign-time-and-bushs-getting-lucky/1502/ Thu, 9 Sep 2004 00:00:00 EST Does President Bush have winner's luck? Just as Senator Kerry launches his fall offensive with Cannonball Carville and other Clinton vets on board, the wonder boy himself goes under the knife. One of the best campaigners in political history is suddenly benched. President Reagan's passing was another celestial freebie for Mr. Bush. By the time the clouds of eulogy had parted, the raging Abu Ghraib prison scandal was off the front pages, never to recapture the same intensity of focus again. The...