A few things about today’s coverage of the election, Iraq, and of completely miscellaneous details — like the fact that Senator John McCain had to have his earwax build-up removed earlier in the year and former Gawker writer Emily Gould’s 12-page musings on her boyfriends Josh and Henry (and other scintillating details).
My morning of media 
bafflement started off with MSNBC’s show Morning Joe, featuring such incompatible conversationalists as Mika Brzezinski and Pat Buchanan. After a week literally stuffed with conversation of the candidates pitched through the prism of gender and race, I was still shocked and angered about how much sexism Pat Buchanan shoved into the coffee talk. In a discussion over Clinton’s purported lack of ability to move crowds, he said that when she “raises her voice, and when a lot of women do…it reaches a point…where every husband in America has heard at one time or another,” she cannot reach Obama’s “levels effectively, as it is to make them sort of a rally speech. They’re not good at that.”
“I know that’s a sexist comment, but there’s truth to it…there’s truth to it.”
Really, Pat?
If the pronouns were switched, and somehow Obama’s race was implicated as the rationale for some oratory ineptitude, I’m sure this comment wouldn’t have floated through the air so breezily. In fact, Brzezinski, as the sole woman on the show, initially seemed to feel some responsibility to repudiate Buchanan’s out of line commentary. However, as Megan Garber points out in the Columbia Journalism Review’s blog, Mika’s pointed finger of justice degrades into quasi-ambivalent, polite laughter. Maybe she felt that defending Hillary and womankind would make her a “b-word” in the eyes of her male counterparts, as she previously referred to the expletive. To make matters worse, Mike Barnicle likened Clinton to “everyone’s first wife standing outside a probate court.” Apt, fair commentary being broadcast to the masses from the designated commentator of the show.
My countenance shaken and my mind reeling, as is often the case after too much time spent with Pat Buchanan in my living room, I took the subway into work, sat down at my desk, and began perusing the New York Times headlines. Here is what I immediately found: sordid details of McCain’s health situation this year, apropos earwax removals and Mrs. McCain’s training in searching for melanoma around the Senator’s belt-line. Whatever. I also was surprised to see that the site’s primary photo was dedicated to the tattooed body of Emily Gould, linking to the online leak of her Sunday feature in the NYTimes Magazine entitled “Exposed.”
For those fortunate enough not to have read about Gould (and by reading about her, I think we immediately know too much), she served as a main blogger at Gawker.com, the boring, bored Manhattan businessman’s companion to Perez. Though I’m definitely not a fan of Gould, the article was featured in such a prominent location on the web site’s page that I ended up clicking on the article and beginning to read through it.
After hitting the “next page” button 12 times, I finally reached the lackluster conclusion. No broader, sweeping revelations about blogs or even Gawker in general were hidden in the wretched loins of this piece. The only thing that was “exposed,” as the title teases, was a reaffirmation that Gould IS in fact starved for attention, long-winded, and loves to over-share about details on her personal life. After learning about her brooding ex-boyfriend Henry, who plays the bass guitar in a band and enjoys Project Runway, and her steamy trip to Fire Island with co-worker Josh, I found no deeper, more fascinating or relevant information disguised within. Instead of relating these personal stories to a larger message about blogging in general, the rambling piece fizzled to a finish with an assertion that over sharing on the internet is dangerous. Was she aware of her grossly contradicting nature in saying this and is really more ironic and fantastic than I realized, or was she simply rationalizing this cross-over into print media?
Also, I felt like I was looking at some Suicide Girls application — a barrage of artsy, half-lit photos of Emily’s tattooed body strewn across her bed, Mac conveniently crammed into the shot, littered the left sidebar of every drawn out page.
My erstwhile question was why NYTimes found this memoir-in-a-magazine important enough to a) keep in its incorrigibly bloated, ramblingly long state, b) preview it online before its Sunday release, and c) feature it so prominently on the website. Was there some ulterior motive on the Times’ part? Someone at work today suggested that such a juicy memoir might boost blog hits, thus creating smiles all around.
Whatever the reason, one thing that they DEFINITELY didn’t feature was the recently released report on the financial situation of the war. When the Pentagon itself finds that you’ve been irresponsible with billions of dollars that weren’t yours to begin with, and that you’ve signed over millions of those to nebulous purposes in completely unethical ways, it’s probably just the tip of the iceberg…but nobody seems interested. To find this headline, you had to click the “U.S.” section and scroll way down past David Petraeus’ latest and greatest remarks as to why the war is curiously not going the way he promised it would be last December.
