"We have fought a really great fight here. We have always been a band of spirited mavericks. The morale was feisty and committed. That has been a thrilling experience ... We took a risk and it didn't work. I feel we did something."

No, that was not Gen. Robert E. Lee speaking to the Army of the Confederacy at Appamattox, but rather publisher Tina Brown on her third failed venture -- Talk -- at celebrity-driven, politically correct, puff journalism.

In 1984, Brown took over the flagship publication, Vanity Fair, of Si Newhouse's Conde Nast empire, and lost gazillions, while selling celebrity puff pieces. So, it was only natural, based on Brown's track record, that Newhouse, the scion of one of America's richest families, would in 1992 entrust the venerable New Yorker to her. The stodgy literary weekly was solidly if unspectacularly profitable, but Tina Brown took care of that. With covers like Art Spiegelman's notorious painting showing a dredlocked West Indian woman and a Hasid in peyes kissing, she got the magazine "buzz" -- her signature -- dumbed it down with celebrity puff pieces, and raised circulation, yet still managed to turn the New Yorker into a money pit. I guess dumbing-down doesn't pay.

After Brown's stewardship of The New Yorker, there was nothing to do but ... give her another magazine! And so, Miramax honcho Harvey Weinstein (notwithstanding that Disney owns Miramax) subsidized Brown's new launch, Talk, in 1999. Last Friday, two-and-a-half years of celebrity puff pieces and $55 million (according to the New York Daily News) later, Weinstein and his partner, Hearst Magazines, had finally had enough.

A lifetime of failure, however, did not tarnish Brown's golden girl image with the scribes who cover her. To the New York Post's Keith Kelly and Braden Keil, she is "legendary magazine editrix Tina Brown." And an unsigned "obit" in Newsday, gushed about "the Oxford-educated, Fleet Street-trained magazine editor who brought new life to old publications." Emphasizing Brown's history of increasing publications' circulation, and raising writers' fees, the Newsday story left out her history of financial failure.

According to Brown, she was just another victim of the World Trade Center attack: "9/11 just put the whammy on us. We had overcome a lot of things, but we could not overcome that."

So, I guess she'll be getting a check from the 9/11 fund.

Although according to the London Times, Talk's circulation was 665,650, it seemed only to be read by media people.

Brown and her acolytes couldn't understand what happened. She had sought, unsuccessfully, to get new "backers," but Time, Inc., supermarket tabloid publisher David Pecker, and neocon Canadian publisher Conrad Black all turned her down. Imagine that -- the socialist Brown even went hat in hand to a political enemy. But there's a language problem here. A legitimate businesswoman seeks "backers," but Tina Brown is not a legitimate businesswoman. Rather, she runs vanity operations. Thus, she seeks patrons. Backers invest their money based on a reasonable chance of making money; patrons support creative endeavors based on their love of the arts, and as a tax write-off.

When poor folks think the world owes them a living, we call that a welfare mentality. And when rich folks think the world owes them a living, I call it a ... welfare mentality.

The same mentality was at work in 1995, when left-of-Clinton New York Newsday was shut down after ten years and $100 million in losses. Far from feeling any remorse at having wasted a fortune of its parent Los Angeles Times' stockholders' money, editor-in-chief Don Forst (now running the Village Voice) and his staffers were angry at the L.A. Times for not throwing more money at them. They insisted that they were just about to become profitable, just as on Friday, "Talk executives said that they had turned a corner and were headed toward success," according to the New York Times' Alex Kuczynski and Geraldine Fabrikant.

After the ax fell on New York Newsday, one highly paid columnist, Sydney Schanberg, wrote an apologia, in which he emphasized what a virtuous fellow he was, working for peanuts in the journalism business. Editorial page editor Jim Sleeper (The Closest of Strangers, Liberal Racism) outdid Schanberg, in publishing a weird essay, in which he heaped scorn on New York Newsday's "yuppy" reporters, and emphasized his own aristocratic, German Jewish lineage as a descendant of Dolly Schiff, the socialist former owner of the New York Post.

Time was, men would jump out of windows out of shame for having wasted their backers' money. But this is the age of "I'm o.k., you suck."

Europeans have long considered America crude, because of the role of new money here, and the sort of tacky characters -- Babbitry -- the worship of money brought to the fore. But at least there was a freedom from the sort of inherited decadence of congenital imbeciles whose noble titles permitted them to permanently afflict society. Today, we have the worst of both worlds -- what the Germans call a "Geldaristokratie," an aristocracy of money. In our public life, we suffer crude, tacky people, simply because they were born rich, and our rich folks feel obligated to give other rich people money.

But it gets worse. For rich American fools are not only supporting Americans born to wealthy families, but foreigners, too. Does British subject Tina Brown have a work permit? Does the INS know about her?

About a year ago, a libertarian economist writing in the magazine Ideas on Liberty gave a tortured rationalization for OVERPAYING business managers. In a world in which alleged free market economists believe in throwing fiscal restraint to the wind for the sake of millionaire managers, and media moguls believe in handing Tina Brown millions of dollars to waste, is it any wonder that socialism retains its allure for so many people?

There's an old saying: "Money helps money; money marries money; money makes money." Well, two out of three ain't bad. Tina Brown married rich incompetent Harry Evans, the longtime editor-in-chief of (Si Newhouse-owned) Random House (since given the "show-no" job of editorial director of Mortimer Zuckerman's U.S. News & World Report), and money certainly helped her. But all the connections in the world, would not give Tina Brown the talent to make a dime.

If a cashier's register were consistently short, her manager would fire her -- after taking the shortfall out of her paycheck -- assuming he didn't press charges for larceny. And she would never work as a cashier again. But rich folks live in a different world. Tina Brown is still chairman of Talk Media and Talk Miramax books. Apparently, she will always be raiding some rich, American fool's cash register.

Copyright 2002 by Nicholas Stix. All rights reserved.
Don't bring around a crowd,
to reign on my parade!