Maybe the recession is dampening sweeps offers after all. I'm not finding as many as I sometimes do. Though summer often means a lull in new sweeps. So it seems that everyone and their mother's been in a tizzy over Elizabeth Edward's new book and of course most people are not responding to the book, they're responding to the process around the book -- the decision to write and publish and then promote the book. I find this a bit maddening, but it's the reigning cultural dynamic, ours is a process culture, we talk around most events/objects/personalities instead of about the event/objects/personalities themselves. The detail that gets lost in the telling is that she had a book contract before John confessed, which for me is critical, I could see her saying, "Dang, that man might stray but he is not going to mess with my right to construct narrative." Or some such. Tina Brown wrote a scathing column about the book on The Daily Beast yesterday. I took offense at some insensitive phrasing in the piece, Elizabeth Edwards Fed Herself to the Vultures.
She’d written this:
Some first TV impressions are indelibly strong and Edwards’ media blitz now is unlikely, in any case, to wipe out the ghastly car crash of her Oprah exchange.
I posted this in the comments section:
Tina Brown,
Shame on you to be so insensitive to your subject.
You wrote "to wipe out the ghastly car crash of her Oprah exchange."
Elizabeth Edward's first born died in a car crash. Did you forget?
What's next? A cancer on a presidential candidacy?
Later, the sentence had been changed to this:
Some first TV impressions are indelibly strong and Edwards’ media blitz now is unlikely, in any case, to wipe out the ghastly spectacle of her Oprah exchange.
Conclusion: Tina Brown is easy to edit.