Tabloids hit 'Like' buttons on Vanity Fair, Andrew Cuomo, Table-Talk pies and cults from Quebec
Today's tabloids, Feb. 1, 2011.
9:35 am Feb. 1, 2011
Each day, the New York tabloids vie to sell readers at the newsstands on outrageous headlines, dramatic photography, and, occasionally, great reporting. Who is today's winner?
The New York Post: At the beginning of the year, our new governor Andrew Cuomo made a symbolic gesture to a press corps that had been quailing at his vise-like grip on information coming out of his preceding campaign and previous post at the attorney general's office when he opened up the Hall of Governors, the long corridor leading to the room where the governor meets with his top advisers, to the press corps. As some reporters continued to grumble and others marveled at the buttonholing of top executives they were getting in the new setting, The New York Observer's Reid Pillifant turned much of his attention to the larger question of how Cuomo's regular interaction with the press was going to work. Among other things, he spoke to Rex Smith, editor of the Albany Times-Union, the stalwart and long-suffering chronicle of Albany ridiculousness.
"I think we've all been appalled at the way The New York Post has been basically his delivery vehicle for any message he wanted to put out there for years now," Smith told the Observer.
Today's cover of The New York Post is not a particularly momentous tilt on the news in favor of the new governor: It just rehashes a bunch of stuff Cuomo is saying today in many newspapers about the way the budget process works in Albany, and how his hands are tied on billions of dollars of spending because of laws that automatically renew current spending on some budget lines. In fact, his Op-Ed piece appears in the Post, where it is given full-page treatment in the news section opposite the story the Post has on its front.
It's as though it's not enough for the Post to agree to give the Governor the same platform it gives everyone else (albeit with ean entire page, with a large photo and headline) to rant under his own byline about the corruption in Albany: A full facing page, full of outraged display type and the kind of outrage-infographic only the Post could design, must supplement it, so that the newspaper's political staff trumpets that very editorial in a rehash item in their own words, with token give-aways toward the end to the governor's detractors. (I use the word "trumpet" advisedly: the news article calls the Op-Ed a "clarion" call.)
The problem here is not the political staff of The New York Post—though Fred Dicker, the dean (don?) of the Albany press corps, has come under public fire before, accused of being a mouthpiece for Cuomo. (Most famously, gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino got into a famous shouting match with Dicker on the campaign trail when he accused him of that.) The problem today is the decision-making behind the front page. The Post goes a long way toward creating the appearance of an arrangement with the governors' office to trade access for coverage. Such arrangements are rarely explicit, though reporters in many beats will tell you stories of reporters, and powerful people, who have struck such explicit bargains. It's the whole "appearance" thing: If the editor of the Times Union and Cuomo's opponent in a gubernatorial campaign have already expressed the view that there's a mutual appeasement campaign going on between the Post and the governor's office, it can look enough like competitors' snipes to not be damaging to the Post's relationship with its readers. Here, I seriously wonder whether they haven't taken the obviousness to a new level.
Of course, now that I have written that, it's possible that another avenue for the Post makes it clear that building Cuomo up now as a great fighter for justice in Albany—aside from being rabble-rousing good copy—is a no-lose proposition: If the Governor continues to take the right point of view on Albany and special interests, he continues to get built up. If he screws up—either in his relationship with the paper or in his policies (or his personal life), the Post's position is even more powerful: The bigger they come, the harder they fall. And that, too, is great copy.
Maybe it's even worth getting into the substance for a second. On a black field, enormous knockout type on the wood reads "DIRTY SECRET." Cuomo looks angry in this unusually large hedcut silhouette. The dek reads "Andy lifts the lid on how Albany steals your money."
Cuomo's Op-Ed was remarkably candid in fact. He's about to try to cut out built-in budget increases, and they'll look like cuts, for which he'll take a big hit. The thing is they are not quite cuts: They won't help pay down the current deficit. What they do is ensure that the real "cuts" have a shot at actually closing up the gap by the governor's own deadline. What he's explicitly trying to do is not condemn Albany for some secret scheme to continue spending regardless of the state's finances, but to prepare the field for the intense wave of criticism that will follow his announcement of severe spending cuts.
The Post is credulous on the governor's behalf, making it out as though Cuomo has arrived in Albany and suddenly discovered Sheldon Silver's secret scheme to defraud YOU. With this kind of helpmate, the governor would do well to close the Governors' corridor again.
As if to alleviate all this seriousness, the Post does that trick of finding an excuse to put a pretty, famous face (and body, and legs) along the left margin. Cropped from the Norma Jean Roy Vanity Fair photos for the annual "Young Hollywood" extravaganza (which is timed to the Oscars each year and generally is a group photo of a Greek symposium that's mostly girls in gossamery dress draped across each other in a luxe panorama) is Jennifer Lawrence, star of Winter's Bone, with the headline "Bright new stars of H'wood" at the hem of her gown. It's a photo spread! Licensed from Vanity Fair!
Daily News: New York's Picture Newspaper gives us an extended caption around the well-worn fantasy scenario in which a truck full of (insert awesome thing here) overturns and the crowds go mad plucking goodies out of the auto-piñata. This time it's a load of Table-Talk pies, and the ladies grabbing them up look so overjoyed it's actually a little bit sad. Have you ever eaten a Table-Talk pie? But I have to admit, "SUR-PIES!" is enough of an excellent Dad-pun that the whole thing is working on me. It seems the truck crashed into a livery cab. If there had been blood all over the pies, this might also have made the front page, but one hopes the ladies scooping them up would not look so manically gleeful, or the whole thing would seem a lot less good-natured.
On the right we get "THE LYIN' 'NUN'" in giant type. All the quotation marks are important so I'm going to take out mine—it reads THE LYIN' 'NUN.' "Lyin'" is because the best crop on "SUR-PIES" left them little horizontal space for the story, so even though the old sitcom in which Sally Field plays Sister Betrille, a nun with a flying habit (ha get it! Her habit makes her fly; and she does it all the time!) is called "The Flying Nun" and not "The Flyin' Nun," the pun here required removing the G. It's all a little ugh-inducing. So why is NUN itself in single scare-quotes? Because the Staten Island woman who claims to have been dragged through the streets in her elaborate habit, raped and thrown in a snowdrift is in fact a member of the Apostles of Infinite Love, an order not affiliated with the Catholic Church, started by a defrocked Quebeçois priest in 1960, which has successfully defended itself against sex abuse allegations in the past, according to the News. The "nun" has recanted her tale and said that she told it to avoid getting in trouble for a romp she had with an employee at a local bodega. Without getting into the question of what really happened here, I'll just note the reason for the scare-quotes around "nun," which are the white ethnic boroughs population that is a mainstay of the News readership, and which is sensitive to any treatment of crime stories involving members of the Catholic clergy. The News must take care not to be credulous of fringe religious groups and associate them with the Roman church. One wonders what coverage of some Islamic organizations and charities might be like if papers felt the urge to treat them the same way.
Observations: Various outrages and minor infractions against serious journalism committed on both woods today have been committed, and we couldn't really let them pass, could we? But the question remains whether two small-bore, local stories—one a crime tale involving a wacky ersatz nun from a Quebeçois sex-cult and one a discomfiting tale of desperation for bland apple pies driven by a photo that looks like a throwaway scene from an old Popeye cartoon but where nobody is white—can beat out two power-center stories, where the Post lathers itself up over Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and Governor Andrew Cuomo. Which is likely to move more papers? It's a tough call and in a way today is a banner moment in the tabloid battle. The People's News versus the Power Beat. I'm holding my nose a little.
Winner: The New York Post.
