Smack-talk smack-down

By MEDIA FARM

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Samuel Israel is a rich guy and a crook. On June 10th He faked his suicide in New York rather than report to federal prison in Massachusetts, and resurfaced in the area last week. Also, he's a dick. Since the story has legs here and in New York, it seems to be a good vehicle for evaluating the current state of both towns' media bastions. The challenge: Whose papers can do a better job ruining a ruined man?

First up, the Herald. "Before surrendering to police, fugitive hedge-fund swindler Samuel Israel III spent a leisurely few weeks at a $40-a-night campground in western Massachusetts. 'He seemed like an easy-going guy,' said manager of Prospect Mountain Campground in Granville, a small town about 100 miles west of Boston." Eh. It's no 12 year-old kid using karate to call the cops and save his family from a gang of gun-toting Asian thugs (the cover story from the day of Israel's arrest), and it's roughly on par, humiliation-wise, with the Globe, which skipped over the trailer park part of the saga in favor of this: "Hedge fund swindler Samuel Israel III rode a scooter to a police station yesterday in Southwick, where he surrendered after a three-week federal manhunt that began with his faked suicide in New York." Boston's paper of record played the rest of it relatively joylessly, though it did note the spectacle of Israel appearing before a federal judge "in a blue T-shirt, shorts, and a cap, and with a thick, graying beard."

By contrast, witness the way they do things in the bigs. The Times is quietly poetic ("Samuel Israel III tricked his investors, lied to his lawyers and misled the police. But in the end, he listened to his mother"), while the Daily News refused to let reporting interfere with its prime objective—calling the guy an asshole in the opening sentence: "The latest scam by Wall Street swindler Samuel Israel ended Wednesday just like his last one: miserably ... The man who ruthlessly bilked investors in the industry's most brazen rip off walked meekly into the Southwick, Mass., police station at 9:15 a.m., wearing a T-shirt and shorts, to end 23 days on the lam."

The New York Post, obviously enough, gets our Gold Medal for Disgraced Fugitive Hedge Fund Manager Surrender Coverage. They couldn't have done worse if they'd Photoshopped him into an adult diaper and had him drooling on the floor: "After nearly a month on the lam, fugitive hedge-fund fraudster Sam Israel III yesterday hopped on his motor scooter at a Massachusetts campground, called his mommy from his cellphone, and walked into a local police station to turn himself in."

THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY dropped 1,000 jobs last week. Wonder how this column will survive when there are no more professional journalists left to mock.

INTERNET-RELATED JOURNALISM is also suffering, albeit for a different reason. Gawker Media owner Nick Denton recently dropped a few of his websites because they weren't deemed to have sufficient growth potential. The sites that remain are growing, as they're supposed to. And that's a problem, because Denton pays based on page-views. Denton's answer? He's cut his rates by a third since the beginning of the year. Nothing like rewarding success.

THE WASHINGTON POST is considering boxing up its political coverage—the prime source of traffic to WashingtonPost.com—and moving it all to a new, separate site, PostPolitics.com. Media Farm applauds the proposed move. Why should the Post ride its niche strengths to success as one of the top two newspapers, online or otherwise, in the country, when they can join their peers in other metropolitan centers by lopping off whatever's made them successful and become a hopelessly doomed, money-shitting cyber-organ?

LAST WEEK, New York Times writer Jacques Steinberg didn't follow the lead of Fox News' press release trumpeting the network's second-quarter ratings conquest over CNN. Instead, he did 10 minutes of work, dug up ratings numbers since the last election cycle, and saw CNN and MSNBC steadily gaining on Rupert Murdoch's flag-raping six-toed monster. So that's the story he wrote.

Fox promptly retaliated by airing crudely altered photos of Steinberg and his editor, Steven Reddicliffe. Both men's teeth were yellowed; Steinberg got a comically enlarged nose, chin and set of ears, while Reddicliffe was given a receding hairline and dark junkie circles around a suspiciously jihadi-looking set of eyes. We'll skip past the typical hand-wringing about the appropriateness of a purported news organ deliberately publishing altered photos and engaging in malicious name-calling and simply ask, Why not just scrawl "HOMO" on the guys' foreheads and be done with it?