Since the articles weren’t exactly what the client wanted, the client announced at many points throughout the forwarded e-mail exchange, that “the time has come” to contact a VP of something or another at the publication who was several levels above the reporter’s head and remind him that the company being written about spent millions of dollars a year to advertise in that publication, millions of dollars, as we all know, that could easily be spent elsewhere. And then the PR people, who will say anything to curry favor, began to agree with her, gently at first, and then anything but. Why this e-mail chain was forwarded I will never know, but I was glad it was. Right there, in print, were a bunch of obscenely over-compensated spoiled brats openly, unapologetically throwing tantrums because their money wasn’t buying the kind of coverage to which they felt entitled. There’s certainly nothing illegal about that, but it was, at the time, the most blatant example of paying for ink that I’d ever seen. Imagine the fun I could have had had I printed that e-mail and sent it around here and there the old-fashioned way, in an envelope, with a stamp and a simple, easy-to-read return address: Anywhere U.S.A.
Years later, I am reminded of that exchange when I see certain pieces on television, and here, from recent weeks, are three of them.
Katie Couric recently promised to reveal “who is behind rising prices at the pump” after the commercial break. If you’re thinking that what’s behind rising gas prices in this country is the instability in the Middle East, think again. It’s the pensions earned by public employees. The oil stocks are managed and manipulated by speculators, and those speculators have been hired to manage the portfolios that pay for pensions of public employees in many states, including California, and in case you’ve missed the news, it’s the lavish pensions for public employees that are crashing the economy. Although I was not part of the editorial planning of this particular story, my guess is that someone paid a lot of money to remind people, as they pay more than $100 to fill the gas tanks of their SUVs, to remember to blame it on those damn state workers.
Another gem from Katie Couric went like this. She led a newscast with a report on the Wisconsin labor dispute. I was impressed by that, actually, but she quickly followed that story with one about the “hundreds of millions” of dollars that federal government employees had allegedly embezzled. Nothing has been done about the embezzlement, so the story went, because nobody has had the time to initiate legal action. This sequencing reminded me of the way that people are often tricked into identifying the wrong person during a lineup of suspects. Government employees in Wisconsin on strike, flash, government employees in Washington on … the take. And as long as we’re mixing one story into another, if reduced to a fraction, what fraction could be used to compare the “hundreds of millions” embezzled to the hundreds of billions handed over legally to bail out the big boys? How much advertising would a corporation have to threaten to cancel for that fraction to be erased from the piece? I’m not saying that’s what happened, of course. I am just explaining why I wonder: I cannot help myself.
The most lavish commercial disguised as news I’ve seen recently concerned a most lavish and most lavishly deceptive corporate sponsor: the Catholic church. Most of the 20-minute segment was an infomercial about the Archbishop of New York, a fat loud mouth who is, I’m sorry to say, a native of Saint Louis. All but about two and a half minutes were dedicated to one thing: showing us how ordinary and down-to-earth Tim Dolan is. He may be widely rumored to be number one on the list of candidates for pope should one from the U.S. ever be seriously considered, but on a day-to-day basis, he’s more concerned with helping and serving and glad-handing and stuffing his mouth with as much free food as he can manage and then washing it down with free beer.
While I would use a much different word to describe him, Morley Safer declared him “gregarious.” So we got to watch the big guy crash into meetings, shout greetings to admirers in hallways and on elevators and embrace young children – I couldn’t help but shudder – and return phone calls from the back seat of his limo as it sped across Manhattan. Though he doesn’t believe in equality for women or for gays – the smile he flashed while revealing his thoughts on those subjects was creepy even by pedophile standards – he does have quite a sense of humor: He turned to someone seated beside him and barked, “And they say there’s nobody to the right of me!”
Laughed my ass off at that one.
For their many faults, Catholics are usually quite reverential toward the language, so I was surprised at how sloppy he was with certain words. He was asked at one point about the “outmoded” teachings of the church, and in his response he used the term “outmotived.” I don’t know if that’s a word or not; if it’s not, it should be. Outmotived. He also addressed Morley Safer many times as “Marley.” At one point Marley leaned forward and, as if he were on the verge of something profound, told the AB that he sensed that he was hiding something: Did the AB really not want the church to … change? Ahh shucks, well, in fact, yes, the AB does think the church should evolve along with the people it serves while still enjoying the rich spiritual heritage with which it’s been blessed. Gosh, Marley, you caught me! You’re pretty good!
Then, quickly, almost as a form of televised fine print: The church still has issues with child molesters and there are still new scandals that emerge from time to time. What did the AB have to say about that? Sit down for this one, friends, because it is indeed that good: In spite of the fact that he had to unload a lot of tax-free real estate during his stint in Wisconsin to underwrite the hanky panky there, he’s not one to wallow in the trauma of it all (which must be a pretty easy stance to take since the trauma isn’t really his). In fact, he’s grateful for the opportunity Catholics have had to cry together.
The End
