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Newsmags Go After Rich Guys

Mar 13, 2009  •  Post A Comment

Syndicated newsmagazine shows that usually track celebrities like Britney Spears are now going after the rich villains in the nation’s financial collapse, the New York Times says. “Extra” was outside the courtroom where Bernie Madoff pled guilty and TMZ reported that a bank that got $1.6 billion in taxpayer money had hosted clients at a golf tournament. “Britney is fluff,” Rory Waltzer, a photographer for TMZ tells the paper, “but the stories about Northern Trust and Madoff and politicians in D.C. really have an impact on the country.”
—Jon Lafayette

3 Comments

  1. If the likes of TMZ and others will actually go after the real villains of our times, those who have drained pension funds, charities and individuals of their life savings, then more power to them.
    These money grabbing thieves should be exposed, charged, tried and convicted.
    The Press has always played an important part in our society, a component in the system of checks and balances.
    Celebrities and all their neuroses are, as mentioned above, “old news”.
    Go after the Bad Guys (& Gals) who have, and are, ripping us off, (do you think Madoff is the only one)?
    Peter Bright

  2. Oh yeah – going after a company that’s doing business in a normal way and was never in trouble (Northern Trust) certainly “has an impact.”
    (Northern Trust, by the way, is in the process of paying back the $1.6 billion they didn’t want to begin with, especially as rules are being applied to the cash after the fact.
    It’s entirely like being given cash for your birthday by your grandparents, but then having them demand it back when they find out you used money you had made on your own at your summer job to buy a car they don’t approve of.)
    If they want to go after Madoff, that’s fine. Stanford? No problem.
    But individual businesses simply doing business?
    What would happen if they “exposed” to the public how studios cry poverty and demand subsidies to make films in the United States yet provide untold numbers of perks to the talent working on those films?
    Meanwhile, congratulations to TMZ for helping to destroy the hospitality industry. Banks flee from sponsoring golf tournaments because it might “look bad” and in exchange thousands of housekeepers, cooks, maintenance workers, course groundskeepers and others making $10/hour or less lose their jobs at resorts across the country.
    (Not unlike the way Congress, by demonizing the private planes that they all fly whenever possible, has managed to destroy tens of thousands of jobs in the aviation industry building private aircraft and servicing them. But that’s OK, that ramp worker making $15/hour refueling private aircraft was just helping those wealthy people anyway. Who cares about that family.)
    But hey, they “had an impact,” right?
    Perhaps next TMZ can expose how the studio heads who cry poverty and demand subsidies for filming in the United States lavishly treat casts making those films.
    Why not destroy the craft services industry next – actors can grab a bite at McDonalds or a coffee at 7-11 on the way in, they don’t need those lavish spreads on-set… sigh.

  3. What kind of matter really, thank you for sharing, we have a common interest.

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