"Why is it so difficult to have an honest conversation in this country?" asks Gideon Yago, for the new miniseries, IFC Media Project. And Yago used to work for MTV News, so he is perfectly qualified as an outsider to the mainstream media to ask these questions. He is basically a thinking man's Kurt Loder.
Also, great name for the series. Was "Untitled" just too unpresumptuous?
And as much as everyone loves to espouse their favor towards IFC as much as NPR (it shows you prefer "alternative" media!), the ouroboro of a CBS/MTV anchor getting all investigative into the underworld of broadcast journalism just seems a little too quirky/staged for my taste.
But! There are definitely legitimate questions to ask about how news is made, and what information gets left in the cutting room.
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Having just became the latest Jew family to own a New York newspaper, the next step in media bubble entree is showing your face around town. And that's what the new New York Observer owner is doing. Jared Kusher suddenly became the main event at last night's premiere of Factotum – well, Details coverboy Matt Dillon was there too – so we grabbed photog Matthew Krautheim and stalked Kush from red carpet to after party.
After two hours of watching Dillon drink himself half to death, the media posse (which included AMI chief David Pecker) were inspired to open a bottle of scotch and drink till the booze was gone — which may explain why Lloyd Grove went home to get drunk in peace, while the rest of us flocked across town to the after party at BLVD.
It was only a 19 hour wait for the free booze before we could bathe ourselves in copies of last week's Observer. Fishbowler Dylan Stableford stopped by but lost interest once he realized there were no drunken gossips to videotape. Once inside, we realized our encounters with Marisa Tomei and Matt Dillon were destined to be limited to snapping paparazzi-like photos — though we did manage to back Kushner in a corner.
He asked us what blogging was like ("Do you sit on your couch in your underwear? No, I'm not trying to picture it or anything.") and we asked him if his real estate ties were going to impact the Observer's gossipy coverage of his fellow moguls ("I'm not going to have much of a hand in the editorial aspects of the paper."). We would've delved further, but he had to duck out. (Something about a new job and needing to get some sleep … we couldn't really follow.)
Alas, like good writers, celebs, and New Yorkers, everyone was hammered by midnight — surely depressed over the reminder that scribes' lives are pathetic and a 25-year-old can buy and sell them for fun. Ah, well, like we said, the booze was free.
Our photo tale begins, after the jump.
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