Page Six in Hell
Along with the rest of New York, and particularly the Daily News, I could not be enjoying the Page Six scandal more.
Those of you who are lucky enough not to be regular readers of the New York Post may not know this story, so a brief recap:
1) Page Six, which appears in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, is the most powerful gossip column in the country, and usually the nastiest. Its content is regularly recycled elsewhere, and it's had an enormous, and unpleasant, impact on celebrity journalism.
2) One of its longtime contributors, Jared Paul Stern, has been captured on video apparently demanding payoffs from billionaire Ron Burkle in exchange for positive coverage—$100,000 to start, then $10,000 a month. The whole episode was captured on tape by the FBI and the United States district attorney's office in Manhattan.
3) The resulting fallout has brought critical attention to the way Page Six does its dirty business, and it's becoming apparent that the whole page appears to be a web of payoffs and profiteering. At last, the rest of the New York media is turning the same kind of critical eye upon Page Six that its editor, Richard Johnson, and his flunkies have cast upon the city for too many years. (Full disclosure: I've been on Page Six a few times, all but one of which I have erased from memory.)
A Murdoch flack, Gary Ginsberg (whom I know slightly), has come out of the woodwork to defend Page Six by saying, "I think the franchise is as strong as any in journalism. This is highly aberrational." But as the scandal starts to grow, the exact opposite impression is forming: Everything on Page Six appears to be up for sale. And because of the column's popularity, Rupert Murdoch has never troubled himself about its corruption.
Sure, not everything on Page Six is bad. Someone has to reign in all those out-of-control publicists and tantrum-throwing models. (You know who you are.) But in general, New York would be a better place without it....
