Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Philip Weiss and Crazies

Philip Weiss Tangentially

Boned Jello

 ASME and Amazon.com Announce the Finalists of the 2010 Best Magazine Cover Contest

Ran into this yesterday, and of course my eye went immediately to NOPE and HATE.  First time I'd seen that New York Magazine (September 28, 2009) cover.  Sleuthing yielded the article, written by Philip Weiss, and that sent me off on this  tangent.  Weiss, it seems, owns the rights to Hate and Crazies stories (not a bad thing).

In 1997 Weiss, a contributing New York Times editor, was sent to Arkansas to do a story for the New York Times Magazine.  His mission: find the crazies causing Bill Clinton all this trouble, then expose and discredit them.  That resulted in The Clinton Haters - Clinton Crazy.  

An odd thing happened however.

Weiss did find a bunch of them; like Larry Nichols, Hugh Sprunt, and Pat Matrisciana, "a film maker, who had  developed a monstrous view of Clinton as Satan's nephew."  He ate with them; drank with them; and reported what they said.  What he did not do is paint them as nut jobs who made stuff up.  In fact, Weiss later confessed that the crazies made a better case than did the Clinton apologists,  The New York Times was not happy, and as far as I know that was the end of his association with the Gray Lady. I've had a healthy respect for Weiss ever since, and would read his recent "Crazies"  article, except I hate Obama  too much. Love the cover though, and wonder why it's in the "Most Controversial" category, and not "Best Vampire?" 

3 comments:

JMcD said...

I hate Philip Weiss and I'm staying with it.

JMcD said...

When I first read the above I thought,"What the dang heck does the "American Society of Mechanical Engineers" care about magazine covers.

TimO said...

Funny how BushHitler was OK in their eyes tho....

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