The Glossies: The Birth of Frankenblair
Simon Dumenco
Folio:, Jun 17 2003
Look, I really didn't want to have to do this. Honestly, the last thing I wanted to do was join in on the punditology-run-amok regarding Frankenblair and Howellgate and the ongoing meltdown at The New York Times.
Really, I've heard enough. We've all heard enough.
So forgive me. Because I have my own theory about Frankenblair and who, or what, really created him. Beyond, obviously, former Times executive editor Howell Raines.
The magazine industry created Jayson Blair.
Yeah, Blair has always been a newspaperman, from college on out, but the warped value system he, and at least one of his bosses, subscribed to has its gnarled roots in the world of glossies.
That "star system" at The Times that fast-tracked the unworthy, in-over-his-head Blair (not to mention the supposedly overworked, too-busy-to-report-for-himself Rick Bragg), People keep acting like Raines invented it. Newspapers have always had stars (columnists, usually), but it's the magazine world that really turbocharged the concept of the star writer, the star reporter. From Hunter S. Thompson at Rolling Stone in the '70s, to Dominick Dunne at Vanity Fair in the '90s, a lot of glossies have focused much of their energy on engaging in the peculiar alchemy of gilding brand-name bylines. Larger-than-life icons who tell a truth truer than the truth. Literary risk-takers, reportorial thrill-seekers who elevate all of us in the print-media business and, frankly, show us a way out. (Because, of course, media-making is, at its core, drudgery: deeply anal-retentive piecework.) Guys (yes, they're usually male) who can get six- or seven-figure book contracts, get shot by paparazzi, and get on TV.
Blair was groping around in the dark for the magic lever that would turbocharge his career and vault him out of the tedium of reporting. (About 90 seconds after he started covering the D.C. sniper case last fall, he was thinking about how he could leverage his work into a book deal.)
Raines?a guy who'd found his own magic lever, a way to elevate himself above his inherited job description (inky, earnest steward of the Old Gray Lady),showed Blair the way.
The magazine way. It's simple: In the newspaper world, if you think like a magazine editor, if you think like a magazine writer?drama! glamour! style! narrative!?you get ahead. Newspapers everywhere are desperately trying to be magazines-but-for-the-glossy-stock.
I mean, how obvious was it that Raines always had Tina Brown envy? When her Talk magazine folded, it rated not one but two front-page Times stories in less than a week. And the debut of Tina's weird, quarterly CNBC talk show somehow merited a big Section A story? Gimme a break. Meanwhile, back in the world of actual magazines, reality?and reporting?are exceedingly fluid things.
Magazines print made-up stuff all the time. Or, perhaps more accurately, they cheerfully submit to being duped. Most of the celebrity coverage that dominates many national magazines now is total crap?and everyone in the magazine industry knows it! The short, gossipy items are either speculation (so-and-so looks like she's gained 5 pounds, so she's definitely pregnant), or they're publicist-promulgated bullshit ("quotes" actually written by publicists?Celebrity X says she "can't live without such-and-such handbag!"?to return favors to schwag-supplying publicists who work for luxury-goods labels). Best-case scenario, celebrity coverage involves profoundly incomplete, carefully stage-managed "reporting." (A two-hour lunch, a quick scan of existing clips, a few calls to obsequious friends of the celebrity in question, and voilà?you've got a 3,000-word profile.)
And don't even get me started on what passes for "service journalism" at some of the biggest, most successful magazines. At many glossies, the Jayson Blairs are not the reporters, but the editors. Busybodies who dream up "trend pieces" (more and more women are dating younger guys! more and more women are dating older guys!), commission writers to prove their suppositions, and then mangle the copy that's been turned in to slavishly reflect the "reality" that was divined in the original assignment memo. Talk to anyone who's written for certain big-name women's magazines, and you'll hear horror stories of quote-piping and fact-mangling.
Furthermore, reality has become such a mushy concept at many magazines that art directors have begun to routinely go far beyond "cleaning up" skin tone in cover images. (British GQ recently digitally shaved a few dozen pounds off of Kate Winslet; Redbook changed Jennifer Aniston's clothing and gave her a new haircut.)
The reality distortion field has bled over from the art department to the editorial department.
I suppose that at some level, Blair?who did a bunch of "reporting" by looking closely at wire photos of subjects and scenes he claimed to have visited firsthand?was thinking, If you can Photoshop pictures, why not reality, too?
A very magazine-world way of looking at things, really. As for Howell Raines, I predict he'll land on his feet. I see him editing a very buzzy magazine someday.
"The Glossies" columnist Simon Dumenco (sd17@aol.com) is not making this up.
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