Red-Carpet Treatment

'Access Hollywood's' Maria Menounos, Covering a Caucus of Politics and Celebrity

ST. PAUL, Minn., Sept. 4 -- There is no better view of the worlds of celebrity and politics converging than here, in an NBC box above the convention floor, where Maria Menounos is about to tape her daily report.

"I'm at the Republican National Convention, as all eyes focused on Sarah Palin -- her hair, her makeup, her campaign couture," Menounos says, looking down at her script, practicing out loud. " 'Access Hollywood' breaks down Sarah's style."

And why not? Everybody wants a piece of politics these days, including outlets traditionally associated with celebrity gossip. When OK! magazine offers a double-cover issue, with one side about Barack Obama ("Life With My Girls") and the other about Sarah Palin ("A Mother's Painful Choice"), and both those stories trump the first photos of Halle Berry's baby girl (!), you know something strange is happening. When Us Weekly's Web site poll about whether Palin would make a good vice president is right there with the poll about whether J. Lo should have more kids -- oh yeah, there is no going back.

It's best just to follow and see where Menounos is going. It's Wednesday and she looks red-carpet ready: Prada top, Chanel necklace. ("It's the little details," whispers her makeup guy, Bret, after he adjusts those strands for the camera.) Already Menounos has taped a segment about "a $60 white burp cloth" that 17-year-old celebrity mom Jamie Lynn Spears may or may not have sent to Palin's pregnant 17-year-old daughter. Menounos is the perfect vehicle for proving the convergence of political and celebrity reporting, because in addition to working for "Access," which lives on the red carpet, she also reports for two other NBC programs -- "Today" and "Nightly News." She does analysis of the Republican youth vote, and she does burp cloths.

Menounos, 30, has a sense of humor about the weird sphere she inhabits. At the Democratic convention, she says, looking up from her script, she did her live shots next to reporters who were doing traditional political coverage.

"They're talking about the foreclosure rates and I'm going, 'Michelle Obama's style -- was teal the right color?' " she says, grinning. She felt more than a little distracting. She kept apologizing to the other reporters.

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It's everything: It's "Inside Edition" quoting Rudy Giuliani at the Republican convention, and it's "Entertainment Tonight's" Web site excerpting from Meghan McCain's blog. It's People magazine's Web site: "Barack Obama Reveals How He Popped the Question to Joe Biden." It's TMZ ambushing former senator Fred Thompson yesterday as if he were Hilary Duff and asking if it was a good thing that -- okay, follow this -- that Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter's boyfriend appeared onstage with the Palin family Wednesday night. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself," Thompson replied. (TMZ posted footage of his non-answer, along with non-answers from Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Florida Rep. Adam Putnam under the headline "Republicans to TMZ: We Can't Hear You!")

This political entertainment mash-up had long since started when, all those eons ago, John McCain's campaign ran an ad comparing Obama to Paris Hilton, in a move to inflate his image so much it might burst. And it grew when Hilton joined the conversation with her own ad, ostensibly talking about energy policy but really talking her way into more publicity.

It's everything: It's the entertainment outlets covering Bristol Palin like she's an up-and-coming reality TV star -- and there she is, five months pregnant, in a photo gallery called "Shocking Teen Pregnancies!" on Us Weekly's Web site, alongside Spears, of course, and the deceased onetime teen mom Anna Nicole Smith.

It's the broadening of the definition of "celebrity" to mean anyone in front of a camera, which means politicians and, yes, politicians' families. And it's all those Hollywood types flocking to Obama's campaign, luring the entertainment news outlets.

"Where Oprah goes, so must we," says Rob Silverstein, the executive producer of "Access Hollywood."

It's the very fact that this presidential race has featured so many 20-something candidate kids -- which was what led Menounos to do "Nightly News" interviews with, among others, Meghan McCain, Sarah Huckabee and Cate Edwards. And it's the fact that this campaign has been historic, featuring a woman and an African American vying for the Democratic nomination, and now a woman running as the Republicans' vice-presidential nominee, and -- well, entertainment news outlets would be fools not to grab a piece.

"They are following the very discernible fact this is an election of high interest," says Jonathan Wilcox, a former Republican speechwriter who now teaches communications at the University of Southern California. Celebrity news outlets are "the businesses that are most apt to understand what people want to read."

"The Obama family in our eyes is a rock-star family," Silverstein says. "There's just something sexy about it and it sells. His back story is amazing." Add in Michelle and the two cute kids, Silverstein says, and "especially if you're going after female readers or female viewers, it's right in your strike zone."

It was Menounos who nabbed the first interview with the entire Obama nuclear family, including the candidate's young girls. Menounos says she showed up expecting to interview the candidate and his wife, and maybe briefly get the girls on camera, but bonded with Sasha and Malia over dogs and the Jonas Brothers.

The candidate caught a lot of flak after that interview -- folks accused him of exploiting his children after insisting they be left alone by the media -- and he vowed he wouldn't again allow them to be interviewed. Which was quite all right with Menounos's boss. "That interview will go down in history," Silverstein says. He says he even got a call from a competitor -- Harvey Levin of TMZ. Levin congratulated him.

There are obvious reasons to go on "Access," as Hillary Clinton and Cindy McCain have, as well as on other shows of their ilk. Candidates and their families aren't going to get policy questions. They're more likely to be asked about the softer sides of their biographies.

"What the candidates are looking for when they allow themselves to be profiled on entertainment programs is they want to establish some intimacy with their audience," says Johanna Blakley, who studies the impact of entertainment on society at USC. And "they're looking to connect with an audience that may not seek out political programming."

But it isn't just celebrity outlets moving into political coverage; it's mainstream outlets chasing celebrity stories, too. We are awash in information about the "intricate details" of public figures' lives, as Menounos points out. Politics is "a pop culture phenomenon this year," she says. So if it seems natural now that people want to know whether, say, Heidi Klum does or doesn't pump her own gas, perhaps it's just as natural they should want to know whether Obama dresses kind of dorkily when he rides his bike. (For anyone who missed those photos, he does.)

Menounos is at the nexus of all this. During the Democratic convention, she interviewed John Legend and Ben Affleck about their Obama support. Here, she does stories on Palin, whose complicated family life and rock-star speechifying gives the McCain ticket sizzle.

Menounos herself is somewhere between covering-the-red-carpet and of-the-red-carpet. But why draw such distinctions? Everyone is a celebrity. She grew up as the child of working-class Greek immigrants in Medford, Mass., and from the age of 13, she says, she knew she wanted to live in Los Angeles and work in the news world somehow. She is a former pageant contestant, and she has acted, and has done Pantene commercials. On this day, she is tended to by Bret and her hair guy, Brad, who are dressed almost identically in white shirts, with short-cropped hair and German-looking glasses. Bret fusses over her like she's about to appear onstage to pick up an Oscar.

"Can I get a tighter shot?" Bret says, when he sees Menounos's face on-screen. The camera closes in on her face. "That looks gorgeous."