Dueling Media Moguls
            

            Morning, Matt. The promos tell me it's a heavy week of debates, and I
started doing my civic duty by watching Bradley with Chris Matthews last night.
Matthews' idea of "hardball" (aside from titling his show and his book
identically, so every pause for a commercial embeds a book plug) seems to be to
yell four half-coherent questions in a row in a querulous, Bostonian tenor.
Given such an interlocutor, Roseanne would come off looking thoughtful. I do
get tired of Bradley's praying hands, and I have no opinion on his tax
plan--or, for that matter, on anybody's tax plan--but I admit to joining the
dreaded media consensus that he and McCain generate less pain for me, just as
public personalities, than the rest of the herd. Alan Keyes was in that group,
too, until he started complaining that he wasn't getting enough airtime because
he's black.

            Decoding life at the top begins and ends with the knowledge that Rupert
Murdoch and Ted Turner despise each other. The current New York Observer
has a long piece about Rupert's roping ABC and CBS News into a footage-sharing
cartel, with the main purpose being to get CNN's footage (and logo) off all
three networks' affiliates. It's in this context that we should approach the
Ted-Jane split. After all, Rupert dumped his wife for a nice young Asian TV
executive, and got the former Mrs. to tiptoe away nicely. Ted must feel under
pressure to do likewise, or lose a round to the awful Aussie.

            Speaking of sadly amicable divorces, the Republicans are celebrating five
years of running Congress, and where's Newt? I, for one, feel enormously
cheated by the Gingrich settlement, since we will, apparently, never know how
Newt answered, under oath, questions about his affair with a young woman
nominally his subordinate. These answers would tell us whether or not, as I've
long suspected, Newt and Bill Clinton are one and the same person.

            Here's a question for people who actually still cover (as opposed to, in the
case of ABC and CBS, share) news: Does the law shoved through Congress by the
computer industry limiting product-liability lawsuits connected to the "Y2K
bug" prevent state attorneys general from suing? If not, I bet they're meeting
with the lawyers behind the tobacco suits as we sip our coffees. Today's
Washington Post has quotes from Y2K chatrooms about disappointed
doom-expecters threatening to sue, but they have yet to read that law.

            I'll try not to be cavalier about this, but asking me whether I ever play
"real" people means you never saw my Mike Wallace or Alan Thicke on Saturday
Night Live , and, more sadly, means that you're one of the Washingtonians
deprived of my radio broadcast, "Le Show," on which you'd hear Clinton, Gore,
Newt, Newt's mom, Carville, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Hillary, Monica, Linda
Tripp, Ken Starr, et al. Whether or not those are real people, of course, is a
judgment call. Try RealAudioing at my Web site for the answer.

            I like the Times giving R.W. (I don't know him well enough to call
him "Johnny") Apple all that space to indulge his love of food (not to mention
the apparent travel budget that's taken him from Sydney to Rome). It's as if
the Baltimore Sun suddenly said to Jack Germond, "Take the year off,
just hang out at the world's greatest racetracks, and just write about
horses."