Why journalism's in trouble (#842 in a series)

"Bush plays grabass!" declared the original TMZ.com headline accompanying this paparazzo video of "Desperate Housewives" star Teri Hatcher exchanging kindnesses with the 82-year-old former president. (That was later changed to "Teri Hatcher Likes Bush," but TMZ stood, uh, behind its story.)

UPDATE 8-29-07: Flynet's lawyers demanded I take down the 1x2 detail of a photo showing Hatcher and Bush. Here are the images Flynet's mouth-breathers took.

Sorry to disappoint, but even with TMZ's helpful spotlight on Herbert Walker's hand, it's pretty clear that neither is that a grab nor is it her ass.

But you can't write a headline for "Bush 41 delivers two slaps to the small of Teri Hatcher's back," I guess.

What is it with journalists on the celebrity beat these days? Is everyone so desperate to pop through the clutter that they have to make a mountain out of every molehill?

Take the New York Magazine/Jack Welch/Jeff Zucker dustup from earlier this week.  Welch, the former GE chief and popularizer of Six Sigma — the management theory that, I'm told, says that to keep everyone focused on meeting key objectives, you feed a certain number of employees every year to wild animals — supposedly told New York in an interview that if he were still running the company, NBC Universal honcho Zucker would be gone by now.

That article appeared over the weekend, and then on Monday, whaddya know, Zucker ascended to the chairmancy of NBC, succeeding Welch's man Bob Wright.  And so, to keep from appearing like the grumpy megamillionaire who was raining on Zucker's parade, Welch issued a statement clarifying his quote and adding that the reporter's question was "not appropriate" and was "subject to misinterpretation."

For once, Welch has nothing to half-apologize for. Anyone reading the New York piece — and one assumes this would have included the magazine’s editorial leadership — can see that the reporter is playing the gotcha game with Welch, perhaps out of some unconscious desire to punish the Welches for demanding that they be interviewed together.

This sort of thing happens all the time. What doesn't happen all the time is (a) the reporter doesn't ask a followup to clarify if Welch just said what she thought Welch just said, because she knows that will be instant buzzkill, and (b) the editors don't then trumpet their "scoop" on the cover of the Magazine with the out-of-control headline:

JACK WELCH TO JEFF ZUCKER:
YOU’RE FIRED!
(WELL, THAT’S WHAT HE WOULD HAVE DONE)

Notice how the reporter's question becomes, through a colossal bit of inferential gymnastics, Welch's answer. Why? My guess is that many New York media insiders have been wondering for years how it was Zucker kept his job despite a less-than-stellar performance running NBC. This, then, serves as a tiny morsel of on-the-record confirmation that people inside GE felt the same way. It’s sort of like what Joey Skaggs, the professional flim-flammer, was trying to do with his "computer simulation finds O.J. guilty" hoax — make people feel good that they finally knew "the truth," regardless of the facts.

What stories like these should be doing, instead, is setting off our Joey Skaggs B.S. Detector watches.

Hey, I'd heard the rumors about Zucker, too. Even printed them in this blog (as rumors, of course). But I didn't try to pass off a bogus three-word "verification" of same as headline news.

I'm afraid that shenanigans like these just make journalists' jobs harder, by ensuring that public figures become even more inaccessible to reporters (and yes, I get that Welch’s PR people were engaged in serious pushback before this incident). And in turn, journalism may well become more outlaw, relying more on unattributed gossip (like this Radar story on "straight-up horndog" Charlie Rose) and whoopsie-daisy video like TMZ's that prove nothing other than the fact that Internet grabass is a very easy game to play.

Comments

[Mark Jeffries]

The "Bush Plays Grabass" headline's still on tmz.com's video--as if they think that most people aren't going to click though to it. (And it's so inconspicuous that they have to add a circle and a sound effect to point it out.)

[jimmy]

Too bad Saddam's no longer available for comment on this one.

[jimmy]

Clarification: I figure Saddam watched a lot of Desperate Houswives in his last days, along with Powerpuff girls, having nothing else to do in his spare time. In any case, his response would have been something like this:
"I have evidence from TMZ.com inteligence sources that George H.W. Bush plays games of grabass-truction with Terri Hatcher. If only I had succeeded in killing him first. Wait a minute, that was just a back slap? These online movies take too long to download!"