NO DEGREES OF SEPARATION
Rules of the Game

BY ERIC ALTERMAN

Rules of conduct for the exclusive media elite in New York -- I call them the MetaMedia (MM) -- bear precious little relation to those taught inside the nation's top journalism schools. If Hollywood is often described as "high school with money," the New York media elite is "high school on somebody else's dime." True, the top denizens of the media aristocracy are paid in significant seven figures. (A few even hover closer to eight.) But most toil away for not much more than movie moguls pay their masseuses. And because media mavens are pretty certain they could be earning like investment bankers or corporate lawyers if only they had been willing to settle into so boring and monotonous a life, a great deal of effort goes into embracing and achieving a life-style that vastly exceeds their means. Two-hundred-dollar expense account lunches, free tickets for sold-out Broadway shows, four-star hotels, the free weekend in the Hamptons timed to the "artists vs. writers" softball game, and the like are measures not only of physical but also of psychological comfort.

New York's MetaMedia is one of the few communities in America -- and probably the only one in this insanely expensive city -- where rankings and respect have no direct corollary to earnings. A top reporter at The New York Times is paid less than half what an anonymous producer of some dreadful sitcom watched "out there" makes. Harper's editor, Lewis Lapham, once told me that he makes more money writing paid advertorial for a free golf magazine than he does editing his tony magazine. But nobody cares what some golf writer or sitcom producer thinks about John Updike or Norman Mailer's latest attack on Tom Wolfe, much less the latest U.S. bombing mission in Kosovo. And they sure don't get invited by (the beautiful, brilliant) Peggy Siegal to a buzz-building dinner at Le Cirque following a private screening of the new Gwyneth Paltrow flick.

There is no clear old-fashioned equivalent of the football team or the cheerleaders in the MetaMedia. Where you stand depends in large measure upon where you sit. Brains count on paper, but looks count in front of the camera. Having cool friends matters in the gossip columns, which can help, particularly in TV. Making lots of money is, of course, better than not, but it works as a means of keeping score only within your particular substrata, i.e. Rather vs. Jennings, Walters vs. Sawyer, and Tina vs. Harry.

No matter what part of the MM world you work in, there are certain rules that everybody seems to know as if by osmosis. For instance, one day power lunches simply picked up and moved eleven blocks north from "44" at the Royalton hotel to Michael's, where the food is not as good.* Dinner, however, remained at Elaine's, unless somebody was springing for The Four Seasons or the ABC News Commissary (also known as Café des Artistes). Four Seasons works for any meal, but nobody goes to Elaine's for lunch and nobody goes to Michael's for dinner. Why? Don't ask me. (The food at Elaine's is another reason to wonder if the members of the media elite are not nearly so smart as they think.) Other rules include: Stick to the crabcakes at the Century; Don't break a sweat in the softball game; Never quote a book you're reading unless it's still in galleys; Politics do not matter except on the extremes (as liberals and conservatives of all stripes are welcome provided they can laugh at their own kind). All intra-MM conversations are off the record unless explicitly put back on, usually in a phone call or e-mail the following day. And perhaps most important, always have an excuse for why you weren't there, if it's somewhere your reputation might suffer for your having been missing. This goes for Tina Brown's parties at various national landmarks as well as any remotely reputable lists of the best in the business. (I, for instance, am conveniently ineligible to be on cjr's Media 200 by virtue of having agreed to write this article.)

Like Picasso (or Ornette Coleman), if you've demonstrated that you've mastered the rules, you are allowed to show off a bit by openly breaking them. For instance, at a CPJ dinner a couple of years back, Tom Brokaw took an interesting, calculated risk -- in praising the dinner organizational efforts of Time's editor-in-chief, Norman Pearlstine, the anchor noted that such talents must be the reason that Walter Isaacson, then Time's managing editor, was able to put out the newsweekly while still managing to attend virtually every cocktail party in Manhattan.

The gambit was risky for two reasons. In the first place, Brokaw is well known for being the only superstar who manages to give Isaacson a run for his money in the cocktail-party Olympics. Second, at first glance the anchor appeared to be violating an unwritten-but-extremely-rigid law of high-level MM toasts: "Always Rib Upwards."

As Tom Brokaw is sufficiently savvy to know this rule, his ostensible flaunting of it in so public an arena immediately raised a number of complicated questions. Was Brokaw implying that the M.E. of Time outranks the Anchor of NBC News? Did Brokaw believe that if he appeared to believe this, he could win points for modesty, or even for pretending to be modest? Was Brokaw so miffed at Isaacson's ability to go to even more parties than he does that he simply could not resist, rules or no rules? Only the anchorman knows for sure.

All this is probably too much for any novice to remember. That's why instead of trying to learn all the rules at once, it's better to just try to learn to think like a member of the media elite and hope the rest comes naturally. The key to success is to know your strengths and weaknesses. If you have what is unkindly known as "a face for radio," you are better off attempting to scale the greasy newspaper pole, rather than the magazine pole, where stylishness is much more at a premium. Investigative reporting is another potential route to admittance, but quite a few news outlets tend to define it as knowing just when Robert Downey Jr. is getting out of rehab again, and how long before he'll be back. Given the explosion of the Internet and 24/7 cable TV, joining as a member of punditocracy has never been easier, witness the presence of Geraldo Rivera at Elaine's with the foul-mouthed leggy blonde bombshell Ann Coulter on his arm. Here again, however, you can't learn this stuff in journalism school. I doubt even Columbia has a class, for instance, on where to buy a leopard mini-skirt or when it's appropriate to call the president and his wife "white trash" and when "pond scum" is more apt.

One area in which MetaMedia social life does mimic high school is that star quality is transitive. If you have cool friends, it makes you cool, too. If you marry a star, or sleep with one quite publicly, you become a star yourself. Best of all is to convince your movie star friend to allow you to play yourself in a big budget Hollywood flick, but having the star quote your sage opinions in Vanity Fair will do in a pinch.

Though it's an option open only to a select few, MM membership can be bought as well as earned. You don't even need to use your own money. Your dad can give you a newspaper. Your wife can spring for a small opinion magazine. Or your multinational conglomerate can decide it would like to add a network or two to its portfolio. It is highly unlikely that Mort Zuckerman would be invited to pontificate on television about the Middle East and such things were he still just a real estate mogul -- who had not hired himself to write a column in his own magazines. The problem with purchasing your status in the media elite is that it is revoked immediately after you leave the room. That's when real journalists demonstrate their contempt for filthy lucre by making fun of what you just said.

Yet another expensive way to upgrade your status in the media elite is to become a news story yourself. Matt Drudge is a genius at this, what with all his lawsuits and fake scoops and real scoops and inability to tell the difference, though his membership is clearly temporary. My fellow Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens has also demonstrated an impressive facility in this area, but not quite enough to challenge the field's reigning champion, Carl Bernstein. Most recently the major-league New York Times correspondent Adam Clymer was admitted into this tiny circle, though it's not clear he was pining for the honor.

Another useful talent is versatility. Most journalists are good at only what they're good at, be it TV, tabloid journalism, or Timesese. But the true greats like the late Murray Kempton, of Newsday, could go tabloid in the morning on the latest outrage in a Bronx courtroom and then bicycle across town after lunch to knock off a few thousand words on Cicero for The New York Review. Nobody alive can match Kempton's range, though it should be noted that the late Lars-Erik Nelson was doing a bang-up job on politics for both the Daily News and the New York Review. Print journalists who make it on TV are a dime a dozen, but the profession is always a bit in awe of TV guys who turn out to be smart enough to write books and essays on the side.

Here's a surprising discovery: it helps to be a nice person -- or at least to appear to be a nice person -- but only in the long run. In the short run you can get away with almost anything, because there are so many courtiers who want to rub up against you, and hostesses will want you at their parties. Hurtful insults will be considered clever bon mots and temper tantrums evidence of your "artistic temperament" so long as the going's good. Whereas if you are a genuinely kind, thoughtful person, you might be able to stretch a single moment in the sun into a lifetime of good tables at Elaine's or parties at George Plimpton's East River townhouse and possibly even an entire career somewhere in Time or Newsweek -- though these have admittedly become much rarer in recent years.

A final MetaMedia secret is that at the very top, at least, the meritocracy works. Hence the straightest path to the red-hot center is to be tremendously talented and to work extremely hard in the bargain. This combination is rarer than one would imagine. As they get older, talented people often deploy their gifts for the purpose of finding themselves well-paying, well-respected jobs that merely ensure that various media trains run on time.

The day Si Newhouse could not seem to make up his mind whom to hire to replace Tina Brown as editor of The New Yorker -- the elite's crown jewel -- turned out to be a red-letter day for merit. The owner's two finalists, David Remnick and Michael Kinsley, had next to nothing in common, either with one another or with their glamorous predecessor, Tina Brown. Remnick is both a reporter's reporter and a natural litterateur, whose light-handed profiles and heavily researched articles on Russia read like elegant novellas. Kinsley is the former boy-genius editor of The New Republic who does not even believe much in reporting and does not evidence much interest at all in literature. Yet his steel-trap mind and piercing dissection of the unexamined pieties of conventional wisdom have made his columns and articles the standard against which other pundits consistently fail to measure up.

Still, if you are looking for a representative MetaMedia figure, neither Kinsley nor Remnick will entirely do, as both are so talented as to make them inimitable. The other obvious choices, Brokaw and Isaacson, have surely reached the top of their respective greasy poles, but their victories are a bit narrowly defined.

My nomination for archetypal MetaMedia Man would be the old White Horse legend Pete Hamill. A journalist for all seasons, Hamill can go high, as a staff writer of The New Yorker and a biographer of Diego Garcia, and he can go low, as a columnist and briefly editor of both the Post and the Daily News. As for star quality, dating Shirley MacLaine and Jackie Kennedy (among many others), hanging with the Rat Pack, and playing a Times reporter in an Oscar-nominated movie more than qualify. Throw in a few well-reviewed novels, memoirs, a fat collection of essays, a stint as editor of a Mexican newspaper for seasoning, and some late philosophizing, as the doors close at Elaine's, on anything from Jackie Robinson to Jack Daniels, and you have your true Renaissance MetaMedia Man.

There's just one problem, Pete. Where were you for Tina's party at the Statue of Liberty? This better be good...

Eric Alterman is the media columnist for The Nation, the "Cash Values" columnist for Worth, and an opinion columnist for MSNBC.com. A second edition of his Sound and Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy was published in 2000.