Synergy Watch

What happens when close Clinton political adviser Dick Morris is revealed by the Star, a publication that feeds at the bottom of the journalistic food chain, to have betrayed his family with a prostitute and betrayed his employer by letting the prostitute listen in to privileged conversations, and then reveals that he had betrayed his employer even earlier by signing a secret book contract to tell all about his employ, and then betrays his publisher by threatening to shop the now-hot though unwritten book around and thus finagles an upped $2.5 million advance? He gets invited to breakfast by The New Yorker, a publication at the very pinnacle of the journalistic food chain.

And what happens at that breakfast, a forum designed to woo advertisers, where his presence calls attention to the prospective book which is to be published by Random House, a book publishing division of Advance Publications, which also owns The New Yorker, thereby helping to justify the publisher's expenditure on Morris and at the same time calling attention to the magazine's own upcoming political issue? The prestigious journalists on the magazine's staff (including one whose Random House book was feted the night before) are offered up as entertainment, trotted out to ask questions that, it is primly announced, will not lead to stories in the magazine, to play at being the journalists they are. Thus are the newsgatherers transformed into a promotional gift, packaged in a myriad of synergistic ribbons, and handed out to advertisers along with the celebrity and the bagels.

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