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Bravo Dishes The Dirt on The Daily News
"What are they gonna do," says Burke, "have endless shots of cats typing on the city desk? They had to find someone out on the streets, and I was their boy." Burke says he sometimes asked the filmmakers to stop because "I'm talking to people who've witnessed homicides, I can't have the camera on. . . . I got real mixed feelings about it because anonymity is an asset, certainly in my end of the game."
Rush was also reluctant about the Bravo venture: "They kind of had to talk us into it. It was a little bit annoying at first. They call it a reality show because that's what sells, but it really is more of a traditional documentary. They didn't try to goose up some confrontation that's not there."
  "I never got used to it," Joanna Molloy says of the camera that followed her for "Tabloid Wars." (By Steve Freeman -- Bravo) Save & Share |
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Says Rush's wife and the column's co-writer, Joanna Molloy: "I never got used to it. I would be talking to a source on the phone and all of a sudden this long lens would be poking over the cubicle."
And how did Molloy come off? "Overweight," she says. "I came off as someone who seems to go to parties a lot," even though most exclusives, she says, are obtained in more private settings.
Some of the stories, it must be noted, have a certain odor. Rush and Molloy are seen bringing their dachshund to a screening of the film "Must Love Dogs" and getting the scintillating scoop from Howard Stern's girlfriend, Beth Ostrosky, that Stern helps clean their bulldog's rear end.
Kinsley's Bombshell
Washington Post columnist Michael Kinsley had successful brain surgery last week in an effort to reduce the symptoms of his Parkinson's disease.
In a Time essay written before the operation, Kinsley reveled in the procedure's status as a "conversation stopper": "'So, Mike -- got any summer plans?' 'Why, yes, next Tuesday I'm having brain surgery. How about you?' . . . Brain surgery remains shocking and mystical. People don't expect to run into someone who's having brain surgery next week squeezing the melons at Whole Foods."
The former Slate editor says he dropped his previous approach to Parkinson's -- denial -- because "my symptoms are past the point where dishonesty and self-deception are a useful approach."
Mr. Wrong
New Republic reporter Eve Fairbanks wrote an amusing piece recently on men she had encountered through the ConservativeMatch dating site.
She responded this way to one of them: "I'm petite with curly red-brown hair, and I'm wearing a casual black pinstripe suit with a magenta top. See you this evening!"
In her piece, Fairbanks poked fun at the man -- a lover of Guns & Ammo magazine whom she dubbed "Shooter" -- as being "perched awkwardly on a stool, clad in an oversized white polo with his company's logo on the breast." There was a picture of him, Fairbanks wrote, in a "Club Gitmo" T-shirt on Rush Limbaugh's Web site, which accepts submissions from fans.
Now Shooter has fired back in a posting on Slashdot.org. While he found Fairbanks "bright, charming and very pretty," he says, she never told him she was writing about him in the "Mr. Right" article, even though they stayed in e-mail contact after the date.
Shooter, a Washington area defense contractor who asked that his name be withheld in discussing his dating habits, says in an interview that many friends recognized him from the details and asked when he had started "dressing like a dork. . . . I cannot believe I spent two weeks trying to get a second date with a total dimwit."
Fairbanks says she's "befuddled" by his response. "I was writing a light piece, and I actually think he comes off pretty well. I went to great lengths to totally obscure his identity. It seems to me to be a pretty old and major tradition in journalism to go undercover."
Media Morsels
· Katie Couric's six-city "listening tour" was closed to the press, which made for an awkward moment when Minneapolis blogger Matt Bartel was pulled out of the audience after having been invited by the local CBS affiliate. He was told to either surrender his notebook or be expelled. Thankfully, a compromise was reached: Bartel surrendered his pen.
· Paul Steiger, the Wall Street Journal's top editor since 1991, will step down at the end of next year. A Journal memo says a successor will be chosen next spring.
· Ann Coulter is at it again. Rallying to the side of Melanie Morgan, a conservative radio host who says New York Times Editor Bill Keller should be sent to the gas chamber if tried and convicted of treason for publishing national security secrets, Coulter writes: "I prefer a firing squad, but I'm open to a debate on the method of execution."