Saturday, May 15, 2004

Beleaguered editors

I readily admit that I live in an anglophone bubble, but I think it's probably fair to say that Piers Morgan is the highest-profile newspaper editor in the world. Make that was the highest-profile newspaper editor in the world: He has now been fired, and escorted out of the building without even having the oppportunity to say goodbye to his own staff, for refusing to apologise for running faked photographs purporting to show UK soldiers abusing prisoners.

The Mirror staff blame mysterious "faceless American shareholders" for the ouster, but even without elaborate conspiracy theories, it is clear that Morgan, for all his ethical misjudgments, was very popular in his own newsroom. The people clamoring for his head were in Westminster, not so much in the media or the public. In the UK, hacks misbehave the whole time, and their worst punishment is usually ridicule in the pages of Private Eye, rather than righteous defenestration.

In the US, on the other hand, editors should be much more afraid when newspapers attack them than when politicians do. It was media hounding, more than anything else, which resulted in the firing of New York Times editor Howell Raines, and now the New York Times and LA Times have both rushed to print today with stories saying that Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, might be a little too cozy with Hollywood; more such stories seem sure to follow. The articles are pretty weak – one of the reasons that readers like Vanity Fair is precisely because it oozes insiderism – but the defenses of Carter's apologists are weaker.

Kurt Andersen, Carter's co-founder at Spy, says in the LA Times piece that "the obligations of a reporter for the Los Angeles Times or New York Times are different from an editor at a magazine or other media entity," before sensibly deciding not to dig himself any further into that particular hole, and declining to elaborate.

Jack Shafer, in Slate, on the other hand, makes an attempt at a full-fledged defense, saying that what Carter did was not so different from the actions of Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone or Tina Brown at Talk. But there's a crucial difference: Carter is a hired editor, not a proprietor. Journalistic ethics, in real life, do not apply to publishers: if Piers Morgan had owned the Mirror, rather than merely editing it, he would have been untouchable. The distinction that Shafer elides is that Wenner is being accused of abusing his position for personal benefit, rather than for the benefit of the magazine or its owners.

And Shafer also buries the most damaging accusation so far down that you'd barely notice it. Here's his take on what Carter's accused of:

The two newspapers compile similar dossiers on Carter's extracurricular adventures in the movie business: He's produced pictures (The Kid Stays in the Picture; 9/11, a CBS documentary), worked as a paid consultant (Brian Grazer's A Beautiful Mind), partnered with screenwriter Mitch Glazer to pitch (unsuccessfully) a movie based on a Vanity Fair story, acted (the Alfie remake), and built friendships with Hollywood notables (Barry Diller, Jim Wiatt, Grazer again).

Do you see the smoking gun? No? Well, it's that bit about "worked as a paid consultant". Long after A Beautiful Mind was produced and distributed to critical acclaim, Carter started saying that he deserved some kind of reward for suggesting that the Vanity Fair article on which the movie was based should be turned into a film in the first place. And so it came to pass:18 months after the film came out, Carter got his $100,000. No-one was paying Carter to consult: he basically demanded cash from a successful Hollywood film producer, who knew better than to say no.

It seems corrupt on its face: a powerful magazine editor (the most powerful magazine editor in Hollywood, in fact) essentially extorting money from film producers. But Carter runs an extremely profitable book, and he's likely to keep his job, along with its hefty 7-figure salary, for the time being. Unless much more along these lines starts trickling out, of course.

Posted by Felix at 0:09 EST