This Media Life

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And yet creators of magazines create bad magazines. It goes with the territory. The most fabled among them, Jann Wenner, Clay Felker, Hugh Hefner, all made stinkers. They got laughed at but were spared the moral condemnation that Tina has attracted.

Psychoanalyzing the backlash, we're bound to get to the formulation that it's not about them; it's about us.

There was an obvious co-dependence. We were each other's enablers. It was an age of excess, of overweening ambition, of greed, and phoniness, and sucking up, and the glorification of strange, obnoxious, preening, uninteresting people. And Tina Brown and, by association, Harry Evans have the misfortune of coming to stand for all this (not to mention having made us participate in it).

I wonder, too, if the backlash doesn't also say something about the general-interest-magazine business. Tina's New Yorker and Vanity Fair may have been the last gasp of the magazine as social chronicle. By spending huge amounts of money and through constant vainglorious acts of self-promotion, and by creating a subculture of editorial dirty pool (if you could help the magazine, or Tina and Harry, you were stroked; if you couldn't help or hurt the magazine or them, you were fodder), she supported a dying genre. Everyone in our business cheered her on, hoping out of self-interest that she would succeed, but when she didn't (and, I might argue, she couldn't), we all distanced ourselves from her embarrassing and desperate acts.

Likewise, she helped import to New York, and the constricting publishing business, an English sensibility. Because in the publishing world there is so little room to maneuver and there are so few opportunities, it was fertile ground for the development of a class-based, hierarchical structure, which she at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and Harry at Random House reigned over. In this system, you're always kissing up to the people above you, but at the least sign of weakness (places in the firmament being so scarce), you rip them apart. The fact that she has run three magazines that compete with each other only increases the strain. Indeed, the author of Tina and Harry is a Vanity Fair writer -- the perception, certainly at Talk, is that when Tina goes down, Vanity Fair and its editor, Graydon Carter, go up.

Then there's the Hollywood thing, which was the magic potion she poured on a magazine (and which fit the spirit of a self-aggrandized era).

Her father, George Brown, was an English movie producer; she came of age when the movies were the hottest part of media (she also had a foreigner's awe of Hollywood); she transposed British class hierarchies to America by elevating Hollywood celebrities; and, most recently, she's married herself to a movie company. But now, as the result of various cultural transformations (for instance, technology, which Tina has seemed really dim about), the movies have become peripheral and disposable (certainly Talk magazine often seems to be a cavalcade of celebrities no one could care less about); it's a bottom-of-the-class business. It isn't where the heat is; nobody takes movies seriously anymore. Hollywood, which once made Tina look hip and powerful, now makes her look craven and silly -- and like a dumbo for not getting that it's so over with.

Ironically, Tina and Harry turn out to be bad at playing the media game (doubly ironic because they had the game fixed for so long -- no one would say anything bad about Harry and Tina because everyone was on their payroll or invite list).

They have, it turns out, no appreciation of the rhythms of thrust and parry. Bad press sticks to some people (and then it increases geometrically), while other people brush it off. The process of brushing it off involves a certain level of self-confidence -- you have to be able to not take it seriously. Whereas Tina is always chewing over her bad clips, calling reporters and attempting to recast quotes, having friends call reporters, deploying P.R. agents. And Harry, while in one life a crusading journalist, is, in another, an enthusiastic libel plaintiff.

They wound easily. They're paranoid. They're Nixon-like. They're thin-skinned.

Worse, they set themselves up. You don't throw the party of the century (her big do at the Statue of Liberty) to launch a fledgling magazine -- I mean anybody who knows anything knows about managing expectations.

It is the self-confidence issue, though, that may go to the heart of the matter. To some degree, I wonder if this doesn't have to do with a structural anomaly of their success. Tina, especially, achieved massive notoriety of the kind associated with the biggest payday (hence engendering the most resentments). She should have been rich. She became an international brand name. But because she was, in reality, just an employee (and at Talk, despite her best efforts to become a mogul, continues to be just an employee) and because her successes, at least from a P&L standpoint, have been mostly illusory, she never made her fuck-you money.

And the money is where the confidence and the respect come from -- it redeems you. Not having the money means you're just a sucker. Which is, in essence, the social rule propounded most forcefully and unforgivingly by Tina Brown.

E-mail: michael@burnrate.com