Droll 'Atlantic Monthly' essay on Barbara Walters' 'Audition'

By James Warren | Tribune reporter

May 12, 2008

Barbara Walters is our media roadside crash, a two-legged gaper's block. As one is reminded by Caitlin Flanagan's "The Uses of Enchantment" in the June Atlantic Monthly, we can't take our eyes off her even as we cringe. For sure, there's more of "substance" in the issue, including James Fallows on China's growing sense of responsibility for what's been its environmental disaster, as well as Gregg Easterbrook on seeming NASA nonchalance about our getting whacked by a big asteroid or comet one day. But Flanagan's review of Walters' new memoir, "Audition," is a superb, droll essay on a person ridiculed by the press elite who has "elicited more irreducible statements of self from more notable people than have all the giants of New Journalism."

Flanagan underscores Walters' modus operandi, her self-delusions, her pandering, her astute understanding of male ego and clear disdain of the notion of conflict of interest as her interview subjects become bosom buddies. She captures the way Walters becomes enamored with even the most loathsome of personalities, especially if she can get them to sit down and emote.

Quickly:Washington Monthly's "Confessions of a Sweatshop Inspector" is T.A. Frank's account of time spent with a firm dealing in "corporate social responsibility monitoring," a cottage industry since the 1990s and used by companies seeking to avoid bad publicity, notably those who rely on foreign labor. He lays out the challenges of catching shady practices and worker exploitation, no matter how diligent and suspicious you may be, including when dealing with employees who obviously have been coached to deny horrible pay and conditions. ... May Reason inspects what it argues is the deceitful manner in which the Bush administration is paying for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, namely by relying heavily on "emergency" supplemental spending bills that allow them "not only to hide the costs of the conflicts but also to avoid painful budget choices while funneling billions of dollars in unvetted goodies to favored interest groups." … Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald underscores the distinct silence among many of the broadcast and cable networks surely embarrassed by the New York Times' outing of the Pentagon's "military analyst" program in which it covertly curried favor with mostly former military officials serving as television "experts" on the war.