Like Lee Siegel, I know where some of the talking heads on the tube came from. Bill O'Reilly was shoveling manure on an Iowa feedlot. Roger Ailes of Faux News was traveling by and the right front tire of his car blew out. While awaiting the tow truck, Ailes watched O'Reilly shovel bullsh*t. The rest is history. Rush Limbaugh was a pharmaceutical salesman before he exhibited his "talent on loan from God." Loading up hundreds of Oxycontin pills in Florida just came natural to this bloviating huckster. The rest is history. Ann Coulter was an acne-ridden adolescent boy when he discovered that he had a shrewish right-wing harridan within his skinny body. After Ann visited the noted sex-change doc (Stanley H. Biber, MD) in Trinidad, CO(?), the rest is history. If this (fair & balanced) fantasy, so be it.
[x TNR Blog — Lee Siegel On Culture]
COURIC, COOPER, HANNITY. WHERE THEY CAME FROM:
by Lee Siegel
Most times, I would rather do just about anything than read one of John Tierney's calculatedly curmudgeonly columns in The New York Times, but last Sunday, he had a great and funny one.
It was about someone named Guy Goma, who emigrated to England from French-speaking Congo, and started learning English only four years ago. Waiting in the offices of the BBC to be interviewed for a computer job, Goma was mistaken by a BBC television producer for an expert on trademark law who was supposed to comment on a news show about the verdict in a courtroom-dispute between Apple Computer and the Apple Corps record label. Goma found himself sitting with the host, before the cameras, and immediately slipped right into the role, acquitting himself with panache.
Tierney used the occasion to reflect (bravely) on how little talent punditry requires. If only he knew the whole story. Thanks to funding from several private foundations that wish to remain anonymous, I've spent the last week looking into the true origins of some of our most prominent news anchors and commentators. This is a Lee-Siegel-on-Culture exclusive. Tell your friends.
Katie Couric. The host of the "Today Show," and soon-to-be anchor of CBS "Evening News" was delivering a Domino's pizza when network executives mistook her for crack investigative crime-reporter Ginny Flynn. With the exception of some tomato sauce on her cheek, Couric did her bit so well that it took weeks before anyone looked into the whereabouts of Flynn, who was eventually found drugged and dancing at a strip bar in Lodi, New Jersey owned by Sal "Masterpiece Theater" Bonpensiero. Producers had thought the tomato sauce on Couric's cheek was blood from a real crime scene. She's been saying cheese ever since.
Anderson Cooper. Imagine. You work for an agency that supplies actors for special events. Your specialty is "Martine, the Crying Diva," and your best clients progressive families who want to throw a birthday party for their openly gay teenager. Rushing up the street outside CNN's New York studios to retrieve a pair of pumps you left behind at a celebration the previous night, you run into a desperate associate producer. He is looking for someone to cry on camera while reporting on a collapsed delicatessen in Queens. E lucevan le stelle.
Sean Hannity. Most people know that "Pork Chop," as his friends call him, worked in construction before he moved into broadcasting. During the winter, though, Hannity had to find another way to make a living. So he became one of the pharmaceutical industry's most popular "subjects" for its clinical trials. Since it is dangerous for subjects to mix radically different drugs, they usually stick with one medical condition. Hannity's specialty was hemorrhoids. It was Norm Plitzker, an ambitious young producer at Fox, who saw Hannity on a street corner screaming, stomping his feet, and begging passers-by to pour a Smoothie into his behind. The rest is history.
Lee Siegel is a critic and essayist living in New York City, whose writing about literature, art, politics, film, and television has appeared in Harper's, The New Republic, Time, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker, among other publications. He received the 2002 National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. Currently, Siegel is a senior editor at The New Republic.
Copyright © 2006 The New Republic
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