The Sixth Photo

NYU student needs sources

I received this plea to post this "advert." If there are any takers, please contact her directly.
RC
____________________

Are you a student who charges for access to your own web cam porn site?

I’m writing an article about students who share their sexual exploits for profit through web cams. I’d like to get a grasp of the ins and outs of the business.

Any prospective source would be greatly appreciated; student need not be from Columbia University.

**ALL INFORMATION IS TREATED WITH THE STRICTEST CONFIDENCE.

Thanks,

Nicole Clarke
Nicole.Clarke@nyu.edu

was she for real?

After seeing Cynthia McFadden on the post-"Good Night, and Good Luck" panel on Friday, I'm even more shocked and annoyed about this.

What, Me Worry?

"The Big Picture:
2 reminders that journalists once pursued greatness"
By Patrick Goldstein
Los Angeles Times


For a journalist, it's surely a guilty pleasure to see a movie about someone who commits himself wholeheartedly to the pursuit of a story with no thought for the consequences. As portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Capote," the New Yorker's Truman Capote was just as cunning and exploitative as any marauding paparazzi in the course of reporting "In Cold Blood," his mesmerizing account of the brutal murder of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kan.

The man whose book influenced a generation of young journalists was a master of the black art of doing anything to get a story — lying and flattering, deceiving and dissembling nearly every step of the way. When he couldn't get access to Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, the two imprisoned killers, Capote handed the prison warden a $10,000 bribe. He wooed Smith relentlessly, bringing him Thoreau to read in jail. He helped the suspects get a new lawyer so they'd stay alive long enough for him to complete his interviews. And why not, Capote reasoned. As he breathlessly tells his pal Harper Lee after an early meeting with Smith: "He's a gold mine!"

Of course, if you prefer a journalistic hero cast as a white knight instead of a wily charmer, look no further than "Good Night, and Good Luck." Directed and co-written by George Clooney, it chronicles a climactic battle between CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow and Red Scare-era demagogue Sen. Joseph McCarthy. At a time when most journalists are portrayed in TV and film as gushy lightweights — many deservedly so — it's quite a jolt to see someone act like a real hero. Played impeccably by David Strathairn, the laconic, chain-smoking Murrow is uncompromising and incorruptible, like Gary Cooper with a bespoke suit instead of a pair of six-guns.

This pair of artful portraits of two world-class journalists couldn't come at a better time. As you may have heard, morale at newspapers and TV news divisions is at a low ebb, thanks to circulation drops, low ratings and a string of layoffs. As cable news grows more influential each day, network news is scrambling to reinvent itself and hold on to its aging audience. The sense of turmoil is equally apparent in print journalism. With circulation down and costs up, newspapers are in the midst of a wave of soul-searching as they grapple with how to compete with the lightning speed and breezy informality of Internet news sources.

It's nice to have these Hollywood reminders that journalists once pursued greatness, not just ratings and ad linage. One of our biggest challenges these days is facing up to our low standing in public opinion. That's where movies come in — almost since their inception, they've been a reliable barometer of the nation's attitude toward journalists. In the years before the U.S. entered World War II, in such films as "It Happened One Night" and "His Girl Friday," newspapermen were wisecracking working-class heroes, in the racket for the scoop, not the money. By the 1950s, the portrait was less romantic, ranging from the bitingly cynical "Ace in the Hole" to "Sweet Smell of Success," a damning portrait of abuse of power, with Burt Lancaster as a Sith Lord-style Broadway columnist who demolishes everyone in his path.

After Watergate, our crusading image flickered back to life, thanks to films like "All the President's Men" and "The China Syndrome," but by the 1980s, as in "Broadcast News," critiques of hollow careerism were in vogue again. In recent years, the movies are largely focused on journalistic excess and ineptitude, from the portrayal of plagiarist Stephen Glass in "Shattered Glass" to a variety of TV news buffoons, like the one Jim Carrey plays in "Bruce Almighty."

There's a good reason Clooney had a hard time finding anyone to finance "Good Night, and Good Luck." Murrow's rectitude is out of sync with today's cynical attitude about newsgathering. If you asked young moviegoers to cite a typical 21st century journalist, they'd probably point to the doe-eyed young Vanity Fair-style scribe played by Alison Lohman in "Where the Truth Lies," which opened this weekend. Lohman is uncovering a murder mystery about a '50s showbiz team — think Martin and Lewis — whose career is derailed when a beautiful blond turns up dead in their hotel suite. Her investigatory methods include doing drugs, posing as a schoolteacher, wearing outfits that would make Jessica Simpson blush and sleeping with both members of the duo (though not at the same time, as the dead blond did).

It's probably fortunate that Murrow and Capote died young, Murrow of lung cancer, Capote of booze and pills. They would've had precious little good to say about their heirs, especially the ones so enamored of glitz and celebrity. Esquire, once the hallowed home of Norman Mailer, Michael Herr and Gay Talese, is now crammed with fashion advisories — the October issue actually has a style section in which male models, wearing Prada and Armani, pose as paparazzi. In Murrow's day, journalists comforted the afflicted. Today they celebrate the comfortable. Last Thursday, in its House & Home section, the New York Times ran a huge story largely devoted to helping Rupert Murdoch sell his SoHo triplex — he's asking only $28 million.

Even worse, all too many of today's most recognizable journalists — meaning the ones you see on TV or Dominick Dunne — aren't interested so much in uncovering a story as in making themselves part of it. After Hurricane Rita, "The Daily Show" featured a variety of cable newsmen "covering" the story, including a CNN reporter rescuing a puppy and Geraldo helping a wheelchair-bound lady down the stairs of a flooded rest home. As a kicker, Jon Stewart cut to Ed Helms, his correspondent on the scene, who did his report with a man he'd "rescued" slung across his back.

While Capote is guilty of all sorts of unscrupulous behavior in getting his story, once he put pen to paper, he left the stage, allowing his characters to have the spotlight to themselves. What makes "In Cold Blood" so sobering, now that the movie has allowed us to see its author at work, is that it undermines many of our bromides about good journalism. Though a pivotal work of reporting, it is also a fascinating test of our eternal "do the ends justify the means" debate: Do you judge a writer by his brilliant work or by the deception that went into creating it?

Capote isn't the only journalist to cut corners getting his story. As Marc Weingarten writes in his new history of New Journalism, "The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight," when Hunter S. Thompson didn't have an ending for his book "Hell's Angels," he deliberately provoked the Angels into giving him a sound thrashing to give the book a more dramatic conclusion. Even now, decades later, the Angels are ticked off that Thompson made them look like the heavies.

As Joan Didion warned three decades ago, "Writers are always selling somebody out." They are usually selling a point of view too. "Capote" and "Good Night, and Good Luck" demonstrate how little the hallowed journalistic notion of objectivity applies to their central characters' work. Battling McCarthy, Murrow is clearly a partisan voice, willing to risk his reputation — and his job — by taking up the cause of a man who was kicked out of the Air Force for supposed communist ties.

Defending his adversarial stance, Murrow said, having searched his conscience, "I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument." This is a far cry from how today's TV mavens would handle McCarthy. They'd simply referee a squabble between the witch hunter and one of his antagonists, letting the audience decide who offered the more persuasive retorts.

If Murrow comes off more as admirable than Capote, his righteousness trumping Truman's narcissism, it's because we see that while Capote's work took a huge emotional toll — he never finished another book after "In Cold Blood" — Murrow's courage was in support of a greater cause, our freedom of speech. Standing up to a bully always earns bigger applause than empathizing with a killer.

Still, it is Capote who turned out to have the larger influence on modern-day journalism. Murrow's quiet authority is completely out of fashion in a TV news world that has become a carnival of noisy attention-seekers. And too many of today's writers seem to have learned the wrong lessons from Capote, soaking up the reporter-as-celebrity persona of his later years rather than studying his exacting, imperturbable prose. The seduction of his subjects was only one of Capote's many gifts, but today it is often the raison d'être of celebrity journalism.

When I asked "Capote" director Bennett Miller if he was worried that the film made Capote appear too unsympathetic, he answered, "The truth is that good people do horrible things and terrible people can be surprisingly kind. The tragic thing is that Capote didn't just betray Perry Smith, he betrayed himself."

The same thing goes for journalists today. It's not our subjects I'm worried about, it's our souls.

The Fifth Photo