Watching the watchdog

Steve Brill is at it again. His latest victim: Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates. Plus, quaking columnists, media sexism, and more.

Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy

Steven Brill just can't seem to help it. The second issue of his media-watch magazine, Brill's Content, has hit the newsstands. Like the first, it's filled with earnest articles about insidery topics such as the maturation of USA Today, the sins of Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle (written before Barnicle's forced resignation), and the executives who choose what cable services you get.

But, as in the debut, Brill undermines his magazine's credibility with a sleazy, grossly overhyped cover story.

Last time, it was his own novella-length, intellectually dishonest, poorly written screed about "Pressgate," the name he hung on the media's performance in the first three weeks of the Monica Lewinsky scandal ("Don't Quote Me," News, June 19).

This time, it's the two faces of Bill Gates -- a recent photo of him in a tuxedo, and a 21-year-old mug shot of him in the custody of the Albuquerque police department. The cutline that explains this supermarket-tabloid stunt says a lot more than the picture: "Bill Gates under arrest for a probably minor but still unknown charge in 1977, two years after Microsoft was founded." Now, that's enterprise reporting.

The story, by Elizabeth Lesly Stevens, is a fairly interesting -- if overlong -- take on "the public relations machine behind Bill Gates and Microsoft." But Stevens gets the piece off to a shoddy start by laying out in great detail the story behind the mug shot. You see, Content had been pressuring the Albuquerque police to release the picture. And Gates launched a preemptive strike, showing it himself at a conference last spring. But he lied about where it came from, and then posted it on Microsoft's Web site in a format that was almost impossible to decode. But Content finally got it. And, and -- well, you get the idea. Stevens's own article says it all: "The crimes or negligible misdemeanors of the 22-year-old Gates are of minor interest." Change "minor" to "no" and the statement is entirely accurate.

Gates aside, the most fascinating aspect of the new issue is the ongoing controversy over Brill's "Pressgate" article -- fascinating because Brill devotes an enormous amount of space to coming clean, but in a very cynical way. In a self-serving "Rewind" column on the media buzz that greeted the article, Brill admits to minor mistakes (failing to disclose he'd made campaign contributions to Bill Clinton; "gratuitously calling NBC's David Bloom a `lapdog' "). But he never offers so much as a whisper about his more-serious lapses.

For instance, he criticizes the Weekly Standard for not interviewing him before running a piece critical of "Pressgate." Yet he never addresses the substance of the Standard's two-parter: that Brill wrote an ideologically tainted, error-laden account whose central premise -- that independent counsel Ken Starr broke federal law by leaking to the media -- is at best dubious, and at worst dead wrong.

Or take what was perhaps the most impressive part of "Pressgate": Brill's dissection of how ABC's Jackie Judd overreached in claiming Lewinsky may have kept a dress stained with presidential semen. As it turned out, of course, Judd was right on the money. But you won't find any acknowledgment of that from Brill.

Sadly, Brill's much-touted ombudsman, Bill Kovach, curator of Harvard's Nieman Foundation, weighs in with a piece that reinforces Brill's self-righteousness. Indeed, in giving Brill the wet-noodle treatment for failing to disclose his political contributions, Kovach opines that Brill's after-the-fact openness "may be . . . forging a new standard of disclosure for journalists covering politics," adding: "It will be interesting to see how this is played out in the next national election cycle." Excuse me? Maybe, like Lily Tomlin, I'm trying to be cynical but just can't keep up. But I can't imagine that journalists for respectable news organizations give money to politicians. It's right out of Journalism 101. Then again, Brill has a law degree.

Kovach's role is not the only troublesome inside connection. Perhaps the most regrettable is Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz's status as a contributor. (He wrote the USA Today piece in the current issue.) As the country's most visible media commentator, Kurtz should be free to kick Brill's butt if he thinks it appropriate. But after doing some reporting for the Post on the "Pressgate" fallout, Kurtz declared he would seek to refrain from writing about Content in the future. Kurtz's ethics are above reproach; but by letting himself be neutered for lucre, he has made it considerably harder for the rest of us to hold Brill accountable.

It's a shame. Brill's Content could be a vital new media voice. It's not that it's better than the American Journalism Review and the Columbia Journalism Review; it isn't, Brill's condescension to the contrary. But with a reported $30 million golden handshake from Time Warner, and with the stature that comes from being the impresario behind American Lawyer magazine and Court TV, Brill has the money and visibility needed to focus unprecedented public scrutiny on what has become our most powerful, influential industry.

In the most recent issue of the newly redesigned Mother Jones, Jim Ledbetter asks Brill some pointed questions about his dual role as publisher and editor. "But I'm a damn good editor," Brill replies.

Based on the early returns, it would appear that the editor is deluding himself. And the publisher is not in a position to tell him the truth.

---

Some ugly repercussions appear to be inevitable following the exposure of former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle as a plagiarist and a fabricator by the Boston Herald, the Boston Phoenix, and the Weekly Standard.

On the one hand, anyone who has an ax to grind about a columnist is going to go public, no matter how trivial or unsubstantiated the complaint. Last week, for instance, I received a letter from Boston-based freelancer Jim Murray charging that, in 1974, nationally syndicated columnist Art Buchwald lifted an op-ed piece he'd written for the Globe several months earlier. Other than the fact that both columns make use of the not-terribly-original notion of Uncle Sam's being in the hospital, I couldn't find any similarities. (The irony would have been great fun, seeing as Buchwald won a large settlement a few years back over the use of his ideas in Eddie Murphy's movie Coming to America.)

On the other hand, some serious allegations are likely to come to light, too. A particularly ominous threat was made on August 20 by Scott Shuger, who writes the "Today's Papers" column for the Web publication Slate. (Shuger, by the way, is profiled in the aforementioned Brill's Content.) Shuger threatened to out "fiction artists and plagiarists" he claims to be familiar with who are "still writing with undeserved reputations." He added, "So Today's Papers issues this challenge to America's papers: Come clean about the Mike Barnicles still in your midst before you have to."

In an e-mail exchange with the Phoenix, Shuger declined to elaborate on his plans, other than to label a squib in Monday's New York Times a "bastardization."

Shuger sounds pissed. No doubt a few anxious pundits await his next move.

---

Author and BU journalism professor Caryl Rivers wrote a generally smart piece for the Globe's op-ed page last Friday in which she decried the media's sexist fascination with the less-than-picture-perfect looks of Clinton-scandal figures Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, and Linda Tripp. (Although, given Rivers's argument that the media shouldn't obsess over women's appearances, her gushing over Lewinsky's resemblance to " '50s sex goddess Jane Russell" was weird.)

So it seemed oddly inappropriate that the Globe chose to illustrate Rivers's column with mildly unflattering caricatures of Lewinsky, Jones, and Tripp by Dorothy Ahle and Paul Szep.

"Sure, the thought crossed my mind," says interim op-ed-page editor Bill Ketter. "But I thought the illustrations were sufficiently flattering that they were not in the same genre as what she [Rivers] was talking about. I haven't heard any negative feedback."

Adds Rivers: "Cartoonists always exaggerate everybody's features, male and female, so there isn't so much of a gender gap there."

---

A few random observations -- some, I should hasten to add, passed along by friends.

Headline of the week: CLINTON-LEWINSKY SCANDAL RAISES MORAL QUESTIONS, in the August 21 issue of the Pilot, Boston's Catholic newspaper. You can't slip anything past Monsignor Peter Conley, the Pilot's editor.

It did not go unnoticed that the Globe started using an illustration of sports columnist Michael Holley, an African-American, right after Barnicle's temporary return to the paper had set off shock waves among minority staffers and within the black community.

What's wrong with this picture? On page 46 of Monday's debut issue of the redesigned and expanded Boston Herald is a photo of publisher Pat Purcell -- holding up a copy of the debut issue. A rupture in the time-space continuum that threatens to destroy us all?

I wonder how USA Today will handle the one about Bill, Monica, and the cigar?

Picked up a copy of George lately? I didn't think so. Tell John-John to phone home.

A well-placed insider says Mike Barnicle is through at WCVB-TV (Channel 5). The station's announcement that Barnicle had requested a 90-day leave of absence is said to be the closest nice-guy president and general manager Paul La Camera can come to admitting that Barnicle's kaput.

The way they're snickering at the Globe over at One Herald Square, you'd think the Herald had been wise to "war hero" Joseph Yandle all along.

I haven't finished it yet. But, so far, A.J. Liebling's The Earl of Louisiana is a yuk on every page.

---

Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

---

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

---

Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

---