Take Two Tabloids and Call Me in the Morning
            

            Dave--

            Oddly, in midtown, it's a balmy 72 degrees. You really ought to come up here
for a visit; it's lovely.

            OK, so it's actually freezing cold here--colder than the mayor's heart, as
New Yorkers like to say. Or as I like to imagine they like to say.

            Since there seems to be no earth-shattering news in today's papers, let's go
right to my favorite story: the 78-year-old doorman, retiring from the Plaza
Hotel. What I like about this story is that it's a perfect tabloid story--a
heart-tugging human-interest piece, with lots of celebrity names--and, since
both tabloids were clearly tipped off to it, it provides an ideal opportunity
to compare and contrast the New York Post and the Daily

               News . As it happens, their coverage confirms a long-held belief of mine:
You don't mess with Gersh Kuntzman. Kuntzman is, as best I can tell,
responsible for something like half of the text that appears in the Post
each day. You can find his byline all through a typical day's paper, usually
appended to a few news items and at least one human-interest story, written
with all the tough-guy-with-a-heart-of-gold panache you expect from the
tabloids, but so rarely get. I like to imagine him as the sort of newspaper
reporter you'd see in movies from the 1940s, pounding the street from dawn to
dusk, picking up tips from shoeshine boys and calling his boss "Chief."

            For an object lesson in the magic of Gersh Kuntzman, compare the
Plaza-doorman stories in the News and the Post . Both papers do a
fine job of hitting the guy's career highlights (the Beatles, Jackie Gleason,
Lana Turner). But the News glosses over the reason for his retirement
("Szorentini decided that yesterday would be his last day ..."). Gersh,
however, gets the scoop: "'I wouldn't be leaving this job if it weren't for my
heart.' ... 'I feel like I've lost everything,' Szorentini said, crying ..."
Advantage: Post .

            This actually ties in with my earlier thought, on Monday, about the division
of labor between the city's papers: It's actually far more finely nuanced than
I initially said. It's not just that the Times handles the serious news,
and the News and Post handle the fun, frivolous stuff. There are
also subdivisions among the tabloids: The Post has better gossip, more
celebrity coverage, and, of course, Gersh Kuntzman. The News has better
TV coverage, better city-news coverage, and "Doonesbury." You really have to
buy all three papers if you want to make one whole one--and the Wall Street
Journal , if you'd like a business section, plus lifestyle pieces on how to
spend $20,000 in a hurry.

            As for the character issue, it seems to me to be a convenient canard to
distract attention from the fact that the candidates' real differences run the
gamut from A to... well, pretty much A. It's not so much that they're all
saying the same thing--there are some substantive differences in their
approaches to policy--as it is that the public has by now picked up the sense
that those differences won't necessarily result in substantially different
outcomes in the long run. The president is not, after all, king--he has
Congress to contend with, and even once a law has been passed, it doesn't
necessarily mean that it'll be enforced. The barriers between a candidate's
rhetoric and his achievable results mean that the two bear the same relation
that an original document does to its 200 th photocopy. So, like I
said, the character thing is a canard. Which means "duck." Perhaps, instead of
focusing on the character issue, each character should groom a duck to be his
representative, and we could all grade them on grooming, behavior, ability to
do tricks, and the like. I'd like that.

            Tim