Topic A Goes Buh-Bye
Tina Brown
is leaving her TV show to work on a Princess Di book, and everyone's being all snarky about it. I think that's a mistake. Yes, Tina wasn't the most natural on-air host. (To my mind, that's to her credit.) And yes, sometimes the show suffered from a certain incestuous quality. Enough Harvey Weinstein....
But on the other hand, Topic A was always smart, and the show featured guests talking about subjects you couldn't see anywhere else on television. And I'm not just saying that because Brown had me on talking about Harvard Rules. Tina Brown was interested in serious subjects and did her best to make them palatable to a widespread audience. That she failed says more about the culture than about her.
There's an element of today's media culture which is much more interested in tearing down people who take a chance than in supporting them. Like people in any other industry, media practitioners tear down their peers as a way of building themselves up—only when they do it, it's public and, some of the time, pretends to be objective.
To my mind, this is one of the least attractive qualities of the American media—and particularly its Manhattan-based epicenter.
