G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
What haircut stories tell us about the press
By Eric Boehlert
Created May 2 2007 - 9:54am
Only because it would save time and make them more efficient, I think
members of the Beltway press corps should consider starting up a new
reporting pool, to duplicate the one currently in place for shadowing the
president; the one that boasts a rotating cast of reporters who cover his
every mundane move and then share the information. Except, instead of
tailing the president at each public event, this new media pool would focus
exclusively on the grooming habits of leading Democrats.
Call it the haircut beat.
Matt Drudge for years has done his best to stay on top of all the breaking
haircut news, but with the 2008 campaign ramping up, no single person can be
expected to monitor such an important press topic. News organizations would
be wise to act now, rather than be caught flat-footed if and when news
suddenly breaks that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has changed barbers, or Sen.
Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) has opted for a different hair tint. After
all, both stories, while admittedly trivial, could serve as telling
metaphors for a modern-day campaign.
It was only through hard work and focused determination that the Beltway
press corps was able to stay on top of the recent John Edwards haircut
blockbuster, after news broke that he had to reimburse his campaign for two
pricey $400 haircuts. But how many times can reporters and pundits be
expected to respond with such vigor? There needs to be some sort of
collective newsroom mechanism in place so that no Democratic haircut lead
goes unreported.
Creepy media undercurrent
Yes, I'm being facetious, but in the wake of the Edwards haircut saga, it's
hard not to be contemptuous of the press. And I'm not just referring to its
skewed pursuit [0] of trivia. Fact: According to TVeyes.com, CNN aired more
references to John Edwards' haircut than it did to Edwards' reaction to the
Supreme Court's decision to uphold the ban on so-called partial birth
abortions.
Addressing the pressing topic of Edwards' trim recently on National Public
Radio, which returned to the issue again and again, Vanity Fair's Todd
Purdum phoned in to announce the story served as a telling metaphor for the
campaign.
I'll say. The only difference is Purdum thinks the story revealed a telling
trait about the Edwards candidacy. I'm convinced the story exposed something
far more informative about how the Beltway press operates.
For one, haircut stories reveal a very creepy media undercurrent as
millionaire pundits use the mini-controversies to prove that they -- unlike
spurious Democrats -- are still in touch with their working roots. Why
journalists feel they need to manufacture blue-collar bona fides remains
unclear. (What are they running for?) Yet they regularly press the point in
the context of supposedly unmasking "phony" Democrats.
Teeing off on the breaking haircut news, New York Times columnist Maureen
Dowd recently ridiculed [0] Edwards. Referring to him as the Breck Girl and
the Material Boy, she claimed Edwards' lavish lifestyle meant he wasn't
qualified to talk about working-class woes in America. "You can't sell
earnestness while indulging in decadence," she lectured Edwards.
But to me, this was the most telling passage:
Speaking of roots, my dad, a police detective who was in charge of Senate
security, got haircuts at the Senate barbershop for 50 cents. He cut my
three brothers' hair and did the same for anyone else in the neighborhood
who wanted a free clip job.
Belittling Edwards for being out of touch, Dowd felt the strange urge to
prove she had a working-class bond, so she invoked her dad, the cop. Of
course, it would have been more persuasive if Dowd had referenced something
from her adult life, but since I'm guessing she pays more than $400 for her
SoHo rinse and trims, dear old dad had to do.
Meanwhile, NBC anchor Brian Williams appeared as a guest on David
Letterman's show last week where discussion soon turned to Edwards' haircut.
Asked what was the most he'd ever paid for a trim, Williams responded,
"probably $12."
Really? I have to pay $16, plus tip, for a trim at a little barbershop on
Valley Avenue in the New Jersey 'burbs. But Williams, who lives in a
restored farmhouse in Connecticut where he parks his 477-horsepower black
Porsche GT2 (that is, when he's not decamping on the Upper East Side), gets
his haircut for just $12. And remember, that's probably the most he's ever
paid.
Williams enjoys a $10 million salary [0]. He's a celebrity journalist and
recent Men's Vogue cover boy [0], who, up until just a few years ago, was
probably known as much for his perfectly coiffed locks as he was his
reporting skills. Yet, eager to project himself as one of the guys, Williams
insists his trims cost chump change.
And it wasn't haircut-related, but did you see NBC's Tim Russert being
interviewed on Bill Moyers' recent documentary, Buying the War, which looked
at the media's weak, lapdog [0] performance during the run-up to the Iraq
invasion? Pressed at one point about why he allowed himself and Meet the
Press to be co-opted by the White House in 2002 and 2003, Russert responded,
"I'm a blue-collar guy
from Buffalo and I know who my sources are [and] I work 'em very hard"
[emphasis added].
Then again, presenting himself as a Working Joe has become something of an
obsession with Russert over the years -- albeit a Working Joe who makes
seven figures a year and, as the Daily Howler has noted [0], summers with
the swells on Nantucket, lounging around in his multimillion-dollar beach
island home; a "sprawling gray-shingled house, with rooftop sundeck and
cutting garden," as Washingtonian magazine described it.
The point is that journalists who often announce that Democratic haircut
stories matter because they pierce the "folksy [0]," working-class persona
that campaigns work so hard to create, are often the same journalists who
work so hard to create their own "folksy," working-class personas.
Only Democratic haircuts count
The problem is the media/haircut trend goes far beyond the recent Edwards
hiccup, which everyone agrees was an obvious campaign misstep.
The press has been perversely obsessed with the grooming habits of Democrats
for years. In 2002, Matt Drudge created a press stir when, on the receiving
end of a Republican National Committee leak, he reported that Sen. John
Kerry (D-MA), "the self-described 'Man of The People' pays $150 to get his
hair styled and shampooed, the cost of feeding a family of three for two
weeks!!"
Drudge's math only worked if that family of three ate king-size Snickers
bars for each meal over those two weeks. (i.e. $1.19 per person, per meal.)
But no matter, CNN treated the Kerry haircut story as news, with its Inside
Politics host announcing, "Just two days after moving closer to a
presidential race, John Kerry already is in denial mode."
The coif of Sen. Clinton, as well as her salon bills, has been the topic of
much debate while she's served in the Senate and earlier as first lady. For
candidate Al Gore, the press, in search of clues to his "character,"
obsessed over his wardrobe rather than his haircuts.
Of course, the granddaddy of the haircut capers came in 1993 when the
Beltway press, led by The Washington Post, went absolutely bonkers over the
fact that President Clinton received a haircut aboard Air Force One from a
man who often charges $200 for a trim. The original stories also claimed
everyday travelers at Los Angeles International Airport were delayed because
of Clinton's vain ways. That part was later debunked, but the press
continued to cling to the "Hair Force One" story as being a very big deal.
The Post referenced the silly incident 50-plus times in less than 50 days,
treating the hoax as a serious political story. And these papers all played
the frivolous haircut story on the front page: The New York Times, Los
Angeles Times, Orlando Sentinel, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, San Francisco
Chronicle, Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
The Washington Post, and The Washington Times.
Year in and year out, the press uses haircut stories to paint Democrats as
vain (read: effeminate) hypocrites. Vain, because they care too much about
how they look. And they're hypocrites because Democrats claim they care
about working people, but in truth they only care about their appearances.
(See "vain.") The press loves playing Hypocrite Police with Democrats.
(Here's [0] the Associated Press from last week scolding Democratic
candidates for not jet-pooling to their South Carolina debate and failing to
"to save money, fuel or emissions.")
What's telling is that the press treats only Democratic haircuts as news.
Personal grooming foibles and other potentially embarrassing issues of
vanity on the Republican side are deemed to be beneath serious consideration
because they don't reveal anything about the politician.
President Bush wears $3,000 hand-made suits. And for the 2005 inauguration,
Laura Bush sat for a $700 haircut [0] from stylist-to-the-stars Sally
Hershberger. The press, though, shows no interest in dissecting the First
Couple's at times vain and extravagant lifestyle.
Meanwhile, serving as president in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was among the
select number of American septuagenarians with a full head of dark, dark
hair. Did vanity get the best of Reagan and did the former actor dye his
locks in exchange for a more youthful, vigorous appearance? As Michael
Kinsley noted in 1991, "Shortly after he left office, Reagan's head was
shaved for brain surgery, and briefly, as it grew back, his hair was
completely grey."
Did Reagan's hair treatment serve as some sort of symbol for his presidency?
At the time, the press corps came to the understandable conclusion that the
issue was essentially pointless and it was not treated as news. In recent
years, however, the press, with the help of mischief-making Republicans, has
signed off on the notion that Democratic grooming habits are big news. They
matter.
I'm sure journalists would stress they never took the Edwards story all that
seriously and that they shouldn't be scolded for having a little campaign
fun.
But in its Conventional Wisdom Watch column [0], Newsweek placed The Haircut
directly behind the Virginia Tech massacre and Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales' Senate testimony as that week's most important news events. And a
New York Times Week in Review piece included a roundup of key news
developments and highlighted the surging stock market, the rise of the
British pound, the record-setting amount of mutual funds distributed to
investors last year, and yes, Edwards' costly trim.
Indeed, if journalists truly thought the story was trivial, then the haircut
details wouldn't have been picked up by CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio,
Fox News, Time, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, the Associated Press,
The Arizona Republic, The Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, The Charlotte
Observer, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning
News, The Denver Post, The Des Moines Register, the Detroit Free Press, The
Indianapolis Star, The Kansas City Star, the Los Angeles Times, the New York
Post, The New York Times, The (Newark) Star-Ledger, the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, The
Washington Times, The Seattle Times, The Oregonian, and the San Antonio
Express-News.
Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post's media critic, addressed the haircut
story not once but twice online. And according [0] to Dave Johnson and James
Boyce, writing at the Huffington Post last week, the haircut story spread
rapidly: "If you do a Google search for pages that contain the words
'edwards', '$400' and 'haircut [0]' [0] there are already 187,000 web pages
that contain those terms!"
And lastly, note that while appearing on The Late Show with David Letterman,
NBC's Williams agreed with the host when he said that the Edwards haircut
story was "silly" and there was "no reason for us to continue talking about
it." Yet just two days later, serving as moderator for a televised
Democratic debate [0], Williams' second question to Edwards was about The
Haircut.
That tells us more about Williams the journalist than it does about Edwards
the politician.
_______
About author A senior fellow at Media Matters for America, and a former
senior writer for Salon, Boehlert's first book, "Lapdogs: How The Press
Rolled Over for Bush," was published in May. He can be reached at
eboehlert@aol.com [1]
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Eric Boehlert
Created May 2 2007 - 9:54am
Only because it would save time and make them more efficient, I think
members of the Beltway press corps should consider starting up a new
reporting pool, to duplicate the one currently in place for shadowing the
president; the one that boasts a rotating cast of reporters who cover his
every mundane move and then share the information. Except, instead of
tailing the president at each public event, this new media pool would focus
exclusively on the grooming habits of leading Democrats.
Call it the haircut beat.
Matt Drudge for years has done his best to stay on top of all the breaking
haircut news, but with the 2008 campaign ramping up, no single person can be
expected to monitor such an important press topic. News organizations would
be wise to act now, rather than be caught flat-footed if and when news
suddenly breaks that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has changed barbers, or Sen.
Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) has opted for a different hair tint. After
all, both stories, while admittedly trivial, could serve as telling
metaphors for a modern-day campaign.
It was only through hard work and focused determination that the Beltway
press corps was able to stay on top of the recent John Edwards haircut
blockbuster, after news broke that he had to reimburse his campaign for two
pricey $400 haircuts. But how many times can reporters and pundits be
expected to respond with such vigor? There needs to be some sort of
collective newsroom mechanism in place so that no Democratic haircut lead
goes unreported.
Creepy media undercurrent
Yes, I'm being facetious, but in the wake of the Edwards haircut saga, it's
hard not to be contemptuous of the press. And I'm not just referring to its
skewed pursuit [0] of trivia. Fact: According to TVeyes.com, CNN aired more
references to John Edwards' haircut than it did to Edwards' reaction to the
Supreme Court's decision to uphold the ban on so-called partial birth
abortions.
Addressing the pressing topic of Edwards' trim recently on National Public
Radio, which returned to the issue again and again, Vanity Fair's Todd
Purdum phoned in to announce the story served as a telling metaphor for the
campaign.
I'll say. The only difference is Purdum thinks the story revealed a telling
trait about the Edwards candidacy. I'm convinced the story exposed something
far more informative about how the Beltway press operates.
For one, haircut stories reveal a very creepy media undercurrent as
millionaire pundits use the mini-controversies to prove that they -- unlike
spurious Democrats -- are still in touch with their working roots. Why
journalists feel they need to manufacture blue-collar bona fides remains
unclear. (What are they running for?) Yet they regularly press the point in
the context of supposedly unmasking "phony" Democrats.
Teeing off on the breaking haircut news, New York Times columnist Maureen
Dowd recently ridiculed [0] Edwards. Referring to him as the Breck Girl and
the Material Boy, she claimed Edwards' lavish lifestyle meant he wasn't
qualified to talk about working-class woes in America. "You can't sell
earnestness while indulging in decadence," she lectured Edwards.
But to me, this was the most telling passage:
Speaking of roots, my dad, a police detective who was in charge of Senate
security, got haircuts at the Senate barbershop for 50 cents. He cut my
three brothers' hair and did the same for anyone else in the neighborhood
who wanted a free clip job.
Belittling Edwards for being out of touch, Dowd felt the strange urge to
prove she had a working-class bond, so she invoked her dad, the cop. Of
course, it would have been more persuasive if Dowd had referenced something
from her adult life, but since I'm guessing she pays more than $400 for her
SoHo rinse and trims, dear old dad had to do.
Meanwhile, NBC anchor Brian Williams appeared as a guest on David
Letterman's show last week where discussion soon turned to Edwards' haircut.
Asked what was the most he'd ever paid for a trim, Williams responded,
"probably $12."
Really? I have to pay $16, plus tip, for a trim at a little barbershop on
Valley Avenue in the New Jersey 'burbs. But Williams, who lives in a
restored farmhouse in Connecticut where he parks his 477-horsepower black
Porsche GT2 (that is, when he's not decamping on the Upper East Side), gets
his haircut for just $12. And remember, that's probably the most he's ever
paid.
Williams enjoys a $10 million salary [0]. He's a celebrity journalist and
recent Men's Vogue cover boy [0], who, up until just a few years ago, was
probably known as much for his perfectly coiffed locks as he was his
reporting skills. Yet, eager to project himself as one of the guys, Williams
insists his trims cost chump change.
And it wasn't haircut-related, but did you see NBC's Tim Russert being
interviewed on Bill Moyers' recent documentary, Buying the War, which looked
at the media's weak, lapdog [0] performance during the run-up to the Iraq
invasion? Pressed at one point about why he allowed himself and Meet the
Press to be co-opted by the White House in 2002 and 2003, Russert responded,
"I'm a blue-collar guy
from Buffalo and I know who my sources are [and] I work 'em very hard"
[emphasis added].
Then again, presenting himself as a Working Joe has become something of an
obsession with Russert over the years -- albeit a Working Joe who makes
seven figures a year and, as the Daily Howler has noted [0], summers with
the swells on Nantucket, lounging around in his multimillion-dollar beach
island home; a "sprawling gray-shingled house, with rooftop sundeck and
cutting garden," as Washingtonian magazine described it.
The point is that journalists who often announce that Democratic haircut
stories matter because they pierce the "folksy [0]," working-class persona
that campaigns work so hard to create, are often the same journalists who
work so hard to create their own "folksy," working-class personas.
Only Democratic haircuts count
The problem is the media/haircut trend goes far beyond the recent Edwards
hiccup, which everyone agrees was an obvious campaign misstep.
The press has been perversely obsessed with the grooming habits of Democrats
for years. In 2002, Matt Drudge created a press stir when, on the receiving
end of a Republican National Committee leak, he reported that Sen. John
Kerry (D-MA), "the self-described 'Man of The People' pays $150 to get his
hair styled and shampooed, the cost of feeding a family of three for two
weeks!!"
Drudge's math only worked if that family of three ate king-size Snickers
bars for each meal over those two weeks. (i.e. $1.19 per person, per meal.)
But no matter, CNN treated the Kerry haircut story as news, with its Inside
Politics host announcing, "Just two days after moving closer to a
presidential race, John Kerry already is in denial mode."
The coif of Sen. Clinton, as well as her salon bills, has been the topic of
much debate while she's served in the Senate and earlier as first lady. For
candidate Al Gore, the press, in search of clues to his "character,"
obsessed over his wardrobe rather than his haircuts.
Of course, the granddaddy of the haircut capers came in 1993 when the
Beltway press, led by The Washington Post, went absolutely bonkers over the
fact that President Clinton received a haircut aboard Air Force One from a
man who often charges $200 for a trim. The original stories also claimed
everyday travelers at Los Angeles International Airport were delayed because
of Clinton's vain ways. That part was later debunked, but the press
continued to cling to the "Hair Force One" story as being a very big deal.
The Post referenced the silly incident 50-plus times in less than 50 days,
treating the hoax as a serious political story. And these papers all played
the frivolous haircut story on the front page: The New York Times, Los
Angeles Times, Orlando Sentinel, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, San Francisco
Chronicle, Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
The Washington Post, and The Washington Times.
Year in and year out, the press uses haircut stories to paint Democrats as
vain (read: effeminate) hypocrites. Vain, because they care too much about
how they look. And they're hypocrites because Democrats claim they care
about working people, but in truth they only care about their appearances.
(See "vain.") The press loves playing Hypocrite Police with Democrats.
(Here's [0] the Associated Press from last week scolding Democratic
candidates for not jet-pooling to their South Carolina debate and failing to
"to save money, fuel or emissions.")
What's telling is that the press treats only Democratic haircuts as news.
Personal grooming foibles and other potentially embarrassing issues of
vanity on the Republican side are deemed to be beneath serious consideration
because they don't reveal anything about the politician.
President Bush wears $3,000 hand-made suits. And for the 2005 inauguration,
Laura Bush sat for a $700 haircut [0] from stylist-to-the-stars Sally
Hershberger. The press, though, shows no interest in dissecting the First
Couple's at times vain and extravagant lifestyle.
Meanwhile, serving as president in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was among the
select number of American septuagenarians with a full head of dark, dark
hair. Did vanity get the best of Reagan and did the former actor dye his
locks in exchange for a more youthful, vigorous appearance? As Michael
Kinsley noted in 1991, "Shortly after he left office, Reagan's head was
shaved for brain surgery, and briefly, as it grew back, his hair was
completely grey."
Did Reagan's hair treatment serve as some sort of symbol for his presidency?
At the time, the press corps came to the understandable conclusion that the
issue was essentially pointless and it was not treated as news. In recent
years, however, the press, with the help of mischief-making Republicans, has
signed off on the notion that Democratic grooming habits are big news. They
matter.
I'm sure journalists would stress they never took the Edwards story all that
seriously and that they shouldn't be scolded for having a little campaign
fun.
But in its Conventional Wisdom Watch column [0], Newsweek placed The Haircut
directly behind the Virginia Tech massacre and Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales' Senate testimony as that week's most important news events. And a
New York Times Week in Review piece included a roundup of key news
developments and highlighted the surging stock market, the rise of the
British pound, the record-setting amount of mutual funds distributed to
investors last year, and yes, Edwards' costly trim.
Indeed, if journalists truly thought the story was trivial, then the haircut
details wouldn't have been picked up by CNN, MSNBC, National Public Radio,
Fox News, Time, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, the Associated Press,
The Arizona Republic, The Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, The Charlotte
Observer, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning
News, The Denver Post, The Des Moines Register, the Detroit Free Press, The
Indianapolis Star, The Kansas City Star, the Los Angeles Times, the New York
Post, The New York Times, The (Newark) Star-Ledger, the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, The
Washington Times, The Seattle Times, The Oregonian, and the San Antonio
Express-News.
Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post's media critic, addressed the haircut
story not once but twice online. And according [0] to Dave Johnson and James
Boyce, writing at the Huffington Post last week, the haircut story spread
rapidly: "If you do a Google search for pages that contain the words
'edwards', '$400' and 'haircut [0]' [0] there are already 187,000 web pages
that contain those terms!"
And lastly, note that while appearing on The Late Show with David Letterman,
NBC's Williams agreed with the host when he said that the Edwards haircut
story was "silly" and there was "no reason for us to continue talking about
it." Yet just two days later, serving as moderator for a televised
Democratic debate [0], Williams' second question to Edwards was about The
Haircut.
That tells us more about Williams the journalist than it does about Edwards
the politician.
_______
About author A senior fellow at Media Matters for America, and a former
senior writer for Salon, Boehlert's first book, "Lapdogs: How The Press
Rolled Over for Bush," was published in May. He can be reached at
eboehlert@aol.com [1]
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson