Beware Mr. Media Man;
He Is Borat


I sat next to Mr. Media Man at a dinner party recently. I don’t often go to such parties anymore, now that I have a family of my own and got cable TV. I had almost forgotten Mr. Media Man exists; although he’s someone I knew intimately years ago, when I used to date within my profession, before I discovered that I could have a lot more fun drilling nails into my head.

The experience of his proximity—which I’ll share with you, so that you might know who’s lurking behind the byline next time you pick up a paper or a magazine or a “hot” book about “what’s hot” or “next” or “new”—made me thankful all over again that the Lord has delivered me from the Media Men, nervous all over again about who’s delivering us the news.

(Every man in the media isn’t Mr. Media Man, of course; some of my best friends are men in the media; but they tend to have evolved. They’ve raised children, goldfish, attended Buddhist retreats. Or they’re just the odd, good bloke.)

Mr. Media Man:

Mr. Media Man is a white man, not particularly handsome; his face is often bloated, his eyes heavy and glaring from too many late nights procrastinating and drinking in bars with any female who will listen to his many views and possibly pay the bill.

Mr. Media Man likes to begin a conversation with a shocker (this has been useful in catching the attention of his editors). Our Media Man announced that he “found Borat offensive.” His delivery was almost angry; only he, Mr. Media Man, could see past “the hype” of the critical acclaim and the laughter of untold millions out there in the dark.

“He”— director Sacha Baron Cohen—“is making fun of poor people and black people!” Mr. Media Man declared self-righteously.

When several people at the table tried to advance the argument that Mr. Baron Cohen was taking up where Lenny Bruce left off, exposing racism and other forms of prejudice through a comic pose, Mr. Media Man snarled, “Lenny Bruce didn’t go to Cambridge!” (as did Baron Cohen, who wrote his dissertation on American Jews and the Civil Rights Movement).

Most Media Men have gone to Harvard or Yale or at least Brown or Wesleyan themselves—still, they firmly believe they are populists, even though their contact with anyone poor rarely goes beyond those who are spitting in their food in a restaurant or bagging their groceries from across a supermarket counter.

Our Mr. Media Man was a thornier breed—he had grown up poor (he said), although he did love talking about his success in real estate: “I bought my house for $57,000 in 1992 and now it’s worth 2 million bucks!” he crowed. (What does one say to that?)

Mr. Media Man shuns the word “liberal”—which has become something associated with Mike Dukakis looking like Snoopy riding atop a tank—but believes he would have marched at Selma, had he only been there. He has no black friends. He doesn’t date black women (although he does think “Asian girls are hot”). He isn’t into hip hop.

There’s a strain, of course, of a younger sort of media man who thinks “Tupac was the man!” But when push comes to shove he is in his bedroom listening to Radiohead trying to summon forth that novel that will get him out of this media rat race and chillin’ in a plush condo in Soho, pimpin’ like his man Jay Mc-the-Nerney.

Mr. Media Man hates political correctness but also those who have made a killing being politically incorrect. There’s a limit to how much success on the part of any other media man Mr. Media Man can stand. A very low limit.

He is achingly jealous of the other Media Men who have “done better” than he. It’s just not fair, after all, when it is he who is the real talent!

There are certain Media Kings he particularly resents, particularly if they seem to be having too much fun. He calls them “hypocrites,” says they’ve “sold out,” with the fury of a peevish son watching his cool dad score chicks around the pool on a Caribbean vacation.

Mr. Media Man is a snob.

Not a fun one, or an admitted one; not one with a sense of humor.

Mr. Media Man thinks he has a very excellent sense of humor.

Mr. Media Man cannot stand to be challenged. He thinks anybody who knows something he knows nothing about is “a conspiracy theorist.” How could there be something he knows nothing about? After all, he’s Mr. Media Man.

Mr. Media Man believes the New York Times is “the truth”…

…“What do you do for the poor?” he demanded, bizarrely, after he’d swung our conversation, bizarrely, into a competition of who at the table came from humbler beginnings. People stammered. “What did your father do for a living?” Mr. Media Man insisted.

When someone at the table ventured that he wrote pieces critical of the Bush administration, which does little for the poor, Mr. Media Man scoffed, “What does that do? No one really cares about the poor! They don’t even vote!” We were all happy when more wine came…

It is characteristic of the other Media Men at the table that none of them told Mr. Media Man he was acting like an asshole. I did, however. Silly me. After all, I'm just someone who “writes stories about bratty kids and Paris Hilton,” he informed me.

Mr. Media Man doesn’t think any of this has anything to do with how he does his job, how he looks at the world.

Mr. Media Man’s most unshakable belief is that he is “objective.”

It’s his religion.