You gotta love the gratitude and moxy of reporter Nikki Finke. Not only does she get an 8,000 word piece written on her in the venerable New Yorker, but then once the piece runs, she trounces the magazine basically saying she hoodwinked the magazine in a piece called, “Hollywood Manipulated The New Yorker.”
“I’m too superficial to read The New Yorker because it’s so unrelentingly boring. Even the cartoons suck these days. So back in 2008, soon after the writers strike ended, I said no when The New Yorker first approached me to cooperate for a profile. Fast forward to this summer, when the mag was desperate to liven up this week’s dullsville “Money Issue” with some Tinseltown mockery.”
“As I expected, it’s an amusing caricature, only occasionally true but hardly insightful,” Finke adds. Guess she doesn’t need to be humble or gracious about anything, but Finke continues to prove, while a good reporter, her abject demeanor is never going to win any personality contests and if she ever does fail or even stumble there will always be legion of folks waiting to indulge in schadenfreude. Is that any way to lead a life?
Being a reporter can mean being an asshole in the sense that your obligation should be to the story and not necessarily the people you’re talking to (how many bloggers are “friends,” with filmmakers, have their emails and then just push their agendas along?). Essentially you shouldn’t be a reporter to make friends, but Finke takes that dictum to a whole other level. One can be tough and impartial and detached, but there are also other ways of conducting yourself that don’t make you feel like taking a morality shower afterwards.
