Author Gore Vidal insists that one should never avoid a chance to have sex or be on television.
Christopher Hitchens, a brainy and acerbic British native and Washington reporter, ruefully agrees, according to December Vanity Fair, after an exhausting and revealing descent into the media abyss.
In recent years, Hitchens has become a fixture in the ever-critical (for pundits and policymakers) Rolodexes of TV producers. In particular, they reflexively beckon him when it comes to two subjects: Britain’s royal family and Mother Teresa. He hated both.
When both Princess Diana and Mother Teresa died in the same week, his phone rang off the hook. You name the network, TV show or radio station, they called. Peter Jennings, Katie Couric, MSNBC, Kathie Lee Gifford and C-SPAN were among the throng.
Sitting in Washington, D.C., as Couric was in London for the funeral, he heard her “perfectly fluted lips” utter the detested words, “Christopher Hitchens, royal-watcher.” As everybody else bashed the media, Hitchens suggested that perhaps the driver of Diana’s car was both a danger to his passengers and everybody else on the road.
“It’s a disgrace for Mr. Hitchens to effectively blame Princess Diana for her own death,” quickly responded another pundit in London. “You are a left-wing republican journalist.”
He referred to the royals as the “House of Dracula” on one cable show and then saw his remark lifted as the “comment of the week” in the New York Post.
When Tom Brokaw’s aides de camp insisted they wanted him because they felt the fawning over Diana had gotten way out of hand, he decided to appear on a “Nightly News” segment. Ultimately, it was a waste. His views were a “nanosecond blip in a torrent of inexpensive, unanimous sentimentality.”
By the time Mother Teresa died, neighbors in his building had become used to the TV-paid limos outside his building and the camera crews in the lobby; anything for a hot quote or two.
Waiting to go on “Meet the Press,” he encountered a priest in a waiting room “who demands to know if I have ever experienced an act of God’s grace.” Hitchens wondered why the guy wasn’t in church at that hour, but concludes that there is no longer “a separation of Church and Network,” at least not this week.
Flooded with more requests, Hitchens placed a message on his answering machine underscoring his disdain for Mother Teresa pandering to the rich “and the tawdriest of the tawdry.” He writes that a message was left from a “Father Daly in Maryland, who nearly suffers a clerical thrombosis while leaving his foam-flecked message.”
Soon he found himself denounced by the New York Post, Cardinal John O’Connor of New York and Rosie O’Donnell. National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” was rebuked by a conservative activist for having him on. “There you have it,” the activist fumed, “the life of an angel, reduced to dirt by a reprehensible Marxist guttersnipe.”
The calls kept coming, from BBC’s World Service, CNBC’s Equal Time, ABC’s “Nightline,” among others. It left Hitchens withered but firm in the knowledge that he would have erred to reject the notion that either event merited such expansive coverage.
“If you ever criticize the prevailing news values, whether to a booker or a researcher or a pre-interviewer or a presenter, you will always be told that the public wants it this way, and is only being given what it wants, and indeed likes what it gets.”
Quickly: The November Champion, from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, looks at Marv Albert and other high-profile cases and finds a growing willingness among media-hungry lawyers to “sacrifice a client’s confidences for the sake of his own reputation”; (available via 1025 Connecticut Ave. N.W., Suite 901, Washington, D.C., 20036). . . . December National Geographic checks out a fierce Bengal tiger, Sita, who is found in India Bandhavgarh National Park and beloved by conservationists because she’s produced more documented litters than any of her species, at least six during her 16 years . . . January-February American Prospect includes several articles in which liberals confront tricky 1st Amendment dilemmas, including those inspired by a Supreme Court ruling equating campaign expenditures with free speech and by so-called content filtering mechanisms for use on the Internet. Elsewhere, the University of Chicago’s fabled “law and economics” school of thought as personified by professor Richard Epstein and federal appeals judge Richard Posner is derided. The world they see, says Jedediah Purdy, is akin to Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, “where all the children, besides being above average, are perfectly rational”; ($4.95, 6 University Road, Cambridge, Mass. 02138-5723).
