• by John Gaffney , October 31, 2002

Other People’s Riffs:

Don’t Mess With Cartoon Network: According to Drudge, before President Bush boards Air Force One, his staff makes sure that the plane's TVs are tuned to nearly anything other than cable news. Otherwise, Bush might spot CNN or FOX News and demand, as he has in the past,"Who turned that on?!"

Understatement Of The Week: Fox Sports chairman David Hill said baseball's labor strife this year was partly responsible for the decrease in ratings: "Once again, baseball managed to turn off its loyal fans. I hoped it would pick up when we got to the postseason. It certainly hasn't been what I hoped it would be. Our ratings had been terrific all year. They went in the bucket when all the bristling and saber rattling started.”

Well, Talk, Maybe: There was a party this week for magazines that have been the casualty of an overblown economy. "The sad thing is," said Katherine Rosman, former Brill's Content senior writer and frequent New York Times Sunday Styles contributor, "as proud as I am of the time I put into Brill's and what Brill's tried to do, I don't think anyone gives a [expletive] that they --Talk, Brill's, Industry Standard -- don't exist today.”

Strange Snobbery: Tina Brown described her new column in The Times Of London to The Earth Times: “I think the trouble is that fun has often been confused with a sort of irresponsibility or a sort of trashiness. I'm trying in the column to be entertaining without being mean. Sometimes, obviously, I can be very sharp. And I think about that before I take aim. Of course I have been sharp on a few occasions in the column. I think that it's important to make something as entertaining as you can while having integrity. There's a strange snobbery about that, it seems, in the serious publications here. It's almost as if, in America, the mixture of high and low has still not really been integrated in quite the same way that it has in Europe.”

Reader Riff Of The Week: Michael Strassman got all fired up about my assertion that we should surrender to the reality of reality TV: “Giving the slack-jawed TV watchers what they want is no excuse. It gives us intolerable mediocrity in politics, and it results in an unnecessarily vapid culture. Just as in politics there used to be a time when leaders led instead of sticking a finger in the wind, popular artists used to lead instead of marketers conducting a focus group. Pop culture used to produce high quality entertainment and, dare I say, art; and it didn't do it out of charity. The golden age of television (and much of today's cable landscape), 50s and 60s pop music, and Charles Dickens novels made plenty of money for the business managers who supported them without pandering to the lowest common denominator. There's no reason that this couldn't be the case today, except that the multinational corporation will no longer tolerate the vagaries of the artistic process and opts instead for mass production of detritus because the vast majority of people, while responsive to quality, will settle for a lot less. The blame lies with the mass audience that consumes this fluff, but is also squarely on the shoulders of media companies who are too lazy and gutless to strive for something better.”