The past few days have not been kind to Nikki Finke, the blogger who has established a reign of terror over Hollywood studios and executives.
First, she (along with everyone else) was beaten to the story that Comcast may take a 51 per cent stake in NBC Universal, by her arch-rival Sharon Waxman, who runs the website The Wrap. Ms Finke pilloried the story at first but then had to concede that it was sort of true.
Now comes a long, amusing profile in The New Yorker by Tad Friend, which describes her as “a combination town crier and volcano god”, and contains the following from one of her favoured sources:
The source says that he and [David] Geffen and Ari Emanuel and Ron Meyer certainly can’t dictate Finke’s coverage but they can ‘position Nikki to some degree – eight to twelve per cent above the facts, a little window dressing of protection, of delay, of shading, or of burying something.’
The piece concludes with this observation from Finke about Hollywood executives:
“They talk to me because that’s how the game is played. They’d like to ignore me, but they can’t. The best way for them to think of it is: I get bitch-slapped today, and someone else’ll get bitch-slapped tomorrow.”
Today’s recipient is Mr Friend, whom Ms Finke excoriates on her Deadline Hollywood blog in mostly unrepeatable terms:
As I expected, it’s an amusing caricature, only occasionally true but hardly insightful. Still, I’m relieved that The New Yorker didn’t lay a glove on me. I found Tad Friend, who covers Hollywood from Brooklyn, easy to manipulate, as was David Remnick (editor of the New Yorker], whom I enjoyed bitch-slapping throughout but especially during the very slipshod fact-checking process.
I used to regard Charlie Gasparino of CNBC as the surliest US business reporter but Ms Finke makes him look positively gentle. Her modus operandi reflects, of course, the theatrically aggressive culture of Hollywood, where this kind of rhetoric is normal.
If there is a lesson, it is that (as Mr Friend notes) the internet has brought back to Hollywood reporting the sort of cut-throat competition last seen in the 1920s and 1930s, when there were more newspapers and gossip columnists such as Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper fought for hegemony.
The era when most US cities were dominated by a single newspaper ended such brutal confrontations and ushered in the carefully balanced, respectable culture of modern US news journalism. Now, the internet is bringing back, for better or worse, the yellow (and red in tooth and claw) press.
Postscript: Nikki Finke tells me that she decried Sharon Waxman’s story because she believed that it was inaccurate (she used a more colourful term on her blog).
The original story on The Wrap said Comcast was in talks to buy NBC and quoted “two individuals informed about the meeting” saying a deal had been “completed at a purchase price of $35bn”. After Comcast denied the latter, it emerged that Comcast was negotiating to take a 51 per cent stake in NBC.
