Spectator

Posts with category ‘Gossip Hound’


Magazine maven Bonnie Fuller poised to market her toughest brand yet: Herself

The gap between Canada Day and the star-spangled Fourth is a good time to reflect on the differences, similarities and absurdities that define the decidedly imbalanced relation between our “two great nations.” (My colleague Andrew Clark, The Guardian’s man in New York, full of ill-informed good cheer, saluted our national day thusly: “Happy St. Canada’s Day. Hope the turkey and cheesy fries go down well.”) And while I’m sure it was inadvertent, The New York Times did devote rather a lot of space—the lead feature in last Sunday’s business section—to one of our own: the inevitable Bonnie Fuller. The writer was David Carr, the Times’s go-to guy on the media biz, who contends that Fuller—whose peripatetic risings and fallings in the New York magazine world are the stuff of endless clucking—is to our celebutante-inebriated culture as Einstein was to quantum theory. (That’s a, er, rough analogy, but you get my drift.) To wit: “Through nearly two decades of vision and relentlessness, Ms. Fuller created a way of objectifying the A- and B-list that turned celebrities into not only our ‘friends,’ but also American royals, unelected gods who walk among us.”

Continue Reading


On not being famous at Moses Znaimer’s IdeaCity

It’s a Friday night in Toronto’s Distillery District, a vast commercial, residential and “arts” space installed in a renovated booze factory close to downtown. I’ve come to attend one of Moses Znaimer’s “legendary” IdeaCity parties, held at this time every year as part of a three-day festival attracting “luminaries” to the city. There’s a rather elaborate entry protocol, which involves me standing around a long while waiting to be confirmed. Once in the door, I feel practically naked as I don’t have a giant badge with my name on it indicating that I’ve paid Moses however many thousands of dollars to listen to 20-minute snatches of wisdom selected by him. Among this year’s merchants of wiseness are Margaret Atwood, listed as a “Canadian literary icon”; Christie Hefner, written up as “CEO Playboy Enterprises” (now there’s an idea!); and Betty Krawczyk, “Head Raging Granny.”

Continue Reading


Peter Munk interview at Indigo goes awry due to rowdy audience member

image for

Balzac’s neatly turned observation that “behind every great fortune there is a crime” has developed into a veritable shibboleth of the activist left. One thing is sure: if you make or inherit a great fortune, it’s a lock you’ll be accused of a great crime. Gates is a monopolist, Murdoch a closet fascist, Thomson a virtual polygamist, and don’t even get me started on all those Russians. Tuesday night in Toronto I saw this phenomenon in action. Peter Munk, whose Barrick Gold Corporation has developed into one of the great Canadian money-spinners of recent times, was interviewed on the stage at Indigo Books. His interlocutor was his daughter, Vanity Fair contributor Nina Munk. The subject of the chat was supposed to be a new book by Munk the Younger and Rachel Gotlieb that is titled The Art of Clairtone and celebrates the design innovations of Peter Munk’s long-defunct stereo company. The evening went more or less as planned, with Nina asking Peter straightforward journalistic questions concerning the content of her book. And then, in a moment, things went haywire.

Continue Reading


Might Thomson Reuters try to buy The New York Times?

As noted yesterday by my august colleague Philip Preville, the Globe and Mail has, in its infinite wisdom, eliminated one of the ways it annoys the readers of its print manifestation. They have officially ended the idiotic practice of charging for double-dipping—that is, charging for Web access to their premium material. The New York Times, a somewhat more essential read, has been free since September and the Wall Street Journal—from which the Globe still takes sloppy seconds in the business section—is moving more and more in that direction. The Globe’s archive is another matter; it remains behind a pay wall whereas the Times is mostly gratis. Still, for the Globe, it’s a start.

Continue Reading


Montrealer Autumn Kelly marries into the royal family tomorrow, and the press’s reaction is as classy as ringette

image for

What is it about the Anglo-Canadian fascination with aristocracy that puts everyone in a flap at the first sign of pretense? When Conrad Lord Black of Crossharbour was sent down for thievery, Canadian and British papers hadn’t spilled that much ink on a single story since D-Day. And this morning arrives an e-mail from the reliably snarky Andrew Clark, The Guardian’s business correspondent in NYC. He begins in typically deadpan prose: “I am rejoicing at the new link between our two nations which will be forged at tomorrow’s royal wedding. No doubt you will be glued to the BBC World Service.”

Continue Reading


Toronto Star editors asleep at the switch

image for



Star on the march—the annals of editing: in an otherwise tedious exercise in dull normal reportage (Shania Twain is getting separated blah-dee-blah), an editor at the Toronto Star (or was it a writer looking for a buyout?) inadvertently added a line for the ages. The piece appeared this afternoon on their Web site and will surely be taken down by the time you read this. In the interest of amusement and giggles, though, we’ve saved it so that future generations might know the truth.

Continue Reading


Gaffe of the Week: Tory hacks caught on tape!

This morning’s on-line version of The Hill Times offers a thorough and thoughtful summary of what, for lack of a better handle, I’ll call the Sparrow’s Folly. I am referring, of course, to the ill-fated effort of the PMO’s media machine to spin the RCMP’s investigation into alleged election finance malfeasance. In events that sound remarkably like the embarrassing jokes told by your Uncle Lester after several too many at Christmas, three Torys—a flack (party spokesman Ryan Sparrow), a hack (Tory campaign director Doug Finley) and a lawyer (Paul Lepsoe)—held a secret briefing in an Ottawa hotel for selected journalists (this after changing the location to put other ink-stained hounds off the scent). They were found out, confronted by the excluded journos and forced to flee down a fire escape. I’m not making that up. Promise.

Continue Reading


Mark Penn’s sleaze machine links Clinton to Canada

image for

Yesterday’s coverage of Hillary Clinton tossing her chief strategist, Mark Penn, includes—shock of shocks—a Canadian angle. Penn, acting in his role as CEO of global flacks Burson-Marsteller, was jettisoned for personally servicing a contract with the Colombian government that would help grease the wheels for a pending free trade deal with the States (a deal that Hillary, in an effort to suck up to working-class voters, has repudiated vociferously). Turns out that Burson-Marsteller is the same outfit that contracted with a Canadian company, Spin Master (yes, that’s really their name), to do damage control over a toy they were distributing.

Continue Reading


Times 2, Journal 0: The newspaper war heats up over Tom Cruise, Bear Stearns and Murdoch’s henchman

image for

In a feature piece last Monday, Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz offered an overview of Manhattan’s current newspaper war: The New York Times versus The Wall Street Journal. Interviewed therein was the Journal’s new publisher—former Times of London editor and Murdoch henchman Robert Thomson—who took the opportunity to aim several broadsides at his uptown rival:

Continue Reading


Could Margaret Wente be an expert on the Spitzers’ marriage?

A local footnote to the continuing tsunami of stories on the now ex-governor of New York. An august member of this city’s editorial elite wrote me this morning:

Continue Reading


Spitzer coverage hints at war between The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal

If you didn’t spend at least part of day two de l’affaire Spitzer with your nose buried in the pages or, to bend the analogy, the Web sites of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, I have to ask: does your blood run red? This story has it all: intrigue, hubris, venality, corruption, a wife spurned and, yes, hookers. Yet if you read carefully, another story starts to emerge: the Spitzer coverage represents the early days of an all-out newspaper war—the Journal vs. the Times—for the hearts and minds of Americans generally, and New Yorkers specifically.

Continue Reading


Is Rupert Murdoch’s reporter sniffing out Obama pal Tony Rezko?

Filed under “W” for “what a weird coincidence,” a reporter close to the scene at the Tony Rezko trial (overseen by the same judge who handled the Conrad Black matter, Amy St. Eve) told me last week:

Continue Reading