We adore David Carr, one of our own who left the Twin Cities Reader to edit Washington City Paper in the midst of a long boom of greatness there that produced folks like Jack Shafer and Brett Anderson. Carr now writes sober and precise media stories for the New York Times, although he is no longer officially on the media beat. But we must say that we never expected him to drink the Kool-Aid when it came to Tina Brown. After giving us a clear signal as to how this happened (he admits in a parenthetical disclosure that he has been a guest on Tina’s now-defunct cable-TV show “Topic A”), he trots out an astonishing string of sycophantic silliness that seems to propose that Ms. Brown invented the modern celebrity. Now, we have as much respect for Tina Brown as the next guy, but let’s be reasonable here. Tina did not create celebrity, nor even very many celebrities—she merely identified the crest of their ephemeral waves. As he says, her knack for timing was uncanny (actually, it was more a consequence of holding deadlines until they were insanely late, driving all of her sub-editors rabidly insane), but we think Carr went way, way overboard here. Hey, we think she’s cute and smart and MILFY too. But never having got an audience with her royal pain-in-the-highness, we feel our vision is somewhat clearer than our Manhattan friend’s.
In Carr’s 1,200 word hagiography, we extracted a few reconstructions and reformulations of the Queen Bee’s virtues. This thing has more glowing appositives than the Manhattan Yellow Pages:
“Ms. Brown, who all but invented the escalator that makes people famous in nothing flat…”
“Tina Brown’s streak as America’s premier magazine editor demonstrated that she understood American culture in a way few natives did.”
“Ms. Brown, who knows more about the thermodynamics of hype than almost any person alive…”
“As the chief architect of a formula where celebrities and media outlets colluded to create a fizzy, fabulous world, Ms. Brown has no one to blame but herself, of course.”
“Ms. Brown, who can be good at math if not budgets, knew the score.”
“A Middle Atlantic media phenomenon, Ms. Brown edited the British Tatler magazine at 25, crossed over and revived Vanity Fair at 30, dusted off The New Yorker at 38, and at 45 created Talk. Boy, did she create talk. She imported a British disposition about celebrity, turning gossip and glitz into a not-so-dirty pleasure, with a knack for turning magazines into crucibles of heat.”
“Despite the money lost during her tenures – she spent millions to make Vanity Fair profitable and racked up $70 million in losses or so at The New Yorker – she was a necessary figure at both magazines.”
“The start was rugged – she frequently looked surprised when the camera came her way – but Ms. Brown, who once was lauded by her husband for “ratlike cunning,” gradually got the hang of it.”
“Ms. Brown had an uncanny knack for deadline alchemy.”
“The unchallenged queen of the A-list seems to be flailing in a B-list nation.”
“Ms. Brown, who had long been the Simon Cowell of American…”
“Once something of an alien and unspeakably fabulous, Ms. Brown has become, oddly, one of us.”
“Ms. Brown is still the best-connected editor in New York. Someone should give her a magazine.”
At last, we seem to have arrived at Carr’s point. We get it! A referral from a friend—well, why didn’t you just say so?
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