There's No Crying In Nieman Marcus



I read about this guy and his pitchfork and it genuinely scared me, especially his description of Ben Stein and his intermingling of the political and the aesthetic.

I'm



Stein achieved fame, but not fortune, in December of 1987, when he published a column in GQ under the pseudonym of "Bert Hacker." The author—who began his piece with the line "I have known Joan Rivers for more than twenty years"—wrote that he'd had dinner with the comedienne ten days before the suicide of her husband, Edgar Rosenberg. Later, he said, he went to her home to sit shiva for Rosenberg.



There were problems with this piece, all of the hallucinatory nature. Stein had never met Joan Rivers, much less been invited to her home to grieve with her. But now it appeared they would meet, in court—Rivers filed a $50 million libel suit against Stein and Condé Nast Publications.



With that, Rivers says, Stein's lawyer contacted her to deliver a threat: If she didn't withdraw the suit, the world would soon know she was a lesbian who gave her husband the pills he used to kill himself. Rivers says she challenged Stein's attorney to go public—and told him how much she was looking forward to announcing that it was Stein's wife who lured her out of the closet.



Stein had no comment until his appearance on the CBS This Morning show in February of 1988, when Kathleeen Sullivan suggested his reporting techniques leaned heavily on hearsay. Not at all, Stein said—his reporting methods were the norm. "The entire Watergate coverage was based on hearsay, and they gave the people who wrote that the Pulitzer Prize," he told his astonished interviewer. "If you look at any day's front page of The New York Times and The Washington Post, the huge majority of what is reported is hearsay."



(From Highly Confident, the Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken, by Jesse Kornbluth)

NY Times



Ben Stein's TV ads for a scuzzy "free" credit product have finally caught up to him: The New York Times has fired Stein as a Sunday business columnist for violating ethics guidelines.



Stein was pilloried online for his endorsement of the bait-and-switch operation, which offers a free credit score but charges an outrageous $30 per month to see the credit report behind the score. As Reuters blogger Felix Salmon pointed out, consumers can get a free online report under federal law.



The Times' issue, though, is that Stein has violated its ethics policy, which states "it is an inherent conflict for a journalist to perform public relations work, paid or unpaid."

tacky

stupid

public

sympathy

unfair