The return of Huma Abedin; Beyonce pictures and a bad bus driver
Today's tabloids, June 16, 2011.
7:26 am Jun. 16, 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: Well, it was a nice one-day respite, but we're back this morning with "THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE." Those are the words set in white text on a red strip at the top of today's Post front, reminding us of the rubric they've chosen for their ongoing coverage of the Anthony Weiner texting-tweeting-twitpicing scandal.
I can't help but feel bad for Huma Abedin; it may have been expedient in the moment for Weiner to tell the press corps that he couldn't possibly make a decision about whether to stay in office until he'd spoken to his wife, who was on a week-long official trip with Hillary Clinton to North Africa and the Middle East until the wee hours yesterday. But the result is that the paparazzi were there in force at 4:30 a.m. to see her pull up in her black Volkswagen to the door of the couple's D.C. apartment complex, and the image taking up the top part of the page is a grainy closeup of Huma at the wheel, pulling in. To make things clearer, a silhouette of her head is set over that, with a clumsy broad dropshadow behind it. The bottom half of the page: Giant black text reading "HONEY, I'M HOME." The dek reads, "Huma returns as rat Weiner eyes quitting." Rebecca Rosenberg's lede begins on the front, under a Washington dateline, "She's baaack!" It continues from there.
In more shocking news, porn star Ginger Lee, one of Weiner's Internet correspondents, held a press conference yesterday to complain that her pole dancing career has been on hold since she took the Congressman's advice to lie low; no more. She headed yesterday to Atlanta to do a special themed edition of her routine, advertisements for which promised to bring Weinergate to town with the dancer who talked to the "Peter tweeter."
Daily News: Is it Friday? Throughout the year, Saturday and Sunday covers of the tabloids have a certain … quality to them. What the industry calls "evergreens," things that could be published anytime so stay in the hopper until there's a slow news day; tie-ins to big movies or fashion-spreads licensed from glossy magazines; special sections driven by advertisers on things like Where to Find a Good Dentist; "human-interest" stories and small-bore crime stories. Every once in a while something big happens in the news cycle and breaks the pattern.
But in the summer, there's seepage: Friday editions start to look like weekend ones. There's a part of me that thinks that's not all about desperation: The feeling, even if it's subconscious, that you get on Friday morning when you look at the tabloids and it's all fluff is edifying. It's practically the weekend!
The problem today is, it's Thursday. Much of the visual drama of today's front page comes courtesy Patrick DeMarchelier, the W photographer who shot Beyoncé Knowles for a Lynn Herschberg celebrity profile for the magazine. Seven looks that exemplify her career image, which has always, she tells Herschberg, been about projecting femininity as power. OK! Here she gets that done with "Gucci’s silk shrug; Nina Ricci’s silk satin bra and briefs. Louis Vuitton hat, mask, and boots; Solange Azagury-Partridge’s 18k white gold and emerald necklace."
Somehow the crop of the image on the front of the News looks more yellowish than the acid-green fumes she seems to be writhing in in the original, which is perhaps so that it matches better with the wide skybox atop the flag. All yellow and orange flames in the background, pictured is a pullout called "BBQ in the Boros," advertised as "SIZZLING SUMMER BBQ RECIPES." I picture lots of ads from above-ground pool outfitters, fake-stone patio installers, and Loew's, generously studded with medium-interesting barbecue recipes.
But this upside-down L configuration for the fluff leaves plenty of room for a poster with today's big news. And today, that news is a 45-year-old New Jersey man named Edward Meehan. Here's what the front has to say about him: "CITY'S WORST BUS DRIVER." The dek: "Suspended 15 times—and still has a job!"
It's a puzzling choice for the sale when you go in and read the story. On the one hand there was better material: His suspension, and the recommendation now pending that he be fired, relates to the fact that he was observed on three occasions finishing up his shift as the driver of the X22 express bus by driving to Staten Island, where his depot is; parking on a residential street; admitting a lone woman who pulled up in her own car, who disembarked 20 or 30 minutes later and sped off. (Neighbors tipped off the MTA.) So wait: Did we miss an opportunity to talk about the Sex Bus on the cover?
Straining a little bit more: It's union regulations, basically, that have this guy still on the job. Having resigned a year after getting a job as a bus driver for New York City Transit, he took a civil servant exam that's another way to get into the gig, but which has a different and more powerful union. His union reps have been able to keep him in clover through all those suspensions. It's a sort of predictable outrage—but not especially predictable coming from the News. It's the Post we expect to take these opportunities to union-bust; this poor Ralph Cramden, trying to get his jollies (he says he was sad and the woman was giving him advice), would seem rather more someone for the News to identify with.
Or maybe when someone's not playing by the rules, you're supposed to hate him more: Ralph Cramden as defender of the honor of bus drivers. Either way: Is this 56-point cover text?
Observations: I can carp all I want about Weiner fatigue. And at a certain point I think it will really take hold among readers, too. But the fact is it hasn't. The News itself has devoted a special section of its home page to "The Anthony Weiner scandal," in which it collects some of the most atrocious stuff out there, including a truly unfair picture of Weiner as a sophomore at SUNY Plattsburgh wearing a bra and pantyhose to a party, cadged from The National Enquirer. This is the tabloid business, in which it probably does not behoove us to score based on principles, at least not too much.
Winner: The New York Post.
