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Sunday, June 26, 2005

cruise and lauer

Cruise versus Lauer

I'm not interested in the scientology tosh or Ritalin chatter (although Ms Shields seems to concoct a good reply).

If Tom Cruise's confrontation on the Today show gets the powers-that-be at NBC to pay attention to the consummate drubbing delivered to NBC froth fronter, Matt Lauer, all the hoo-hah will have been worth it.

Alessandra Stanley got it bang to rights in her Talk Show Rarity piece in June 25's NYT Arts page:

"Mr. Cruise seemed unbound, and perhaps even a little unsound, but there was something enjoyably bracing and bold about his outburst ...

'Matt, Matt, you don't even - you're glib,' Mr. Cruise said ... and, actually, he had a point.

Morning talk show hosts are facile and heavily scripted, and too often they recite streams of perceived wisdom as if they were undeniable facts.

Mr. Lauer showed grace but not much intellectual skill as he was out-debated ...."

I don't know about 'grace', but it unquestionably left Lauer the laughing stock of the industry. What little reputation he enjoyed might be hard to recover.

This is a vaporous industry that prefers to quarantine failure before it mirrors their own performance and neuroses.

Lauer and his equally unctuous partner in patter, Katy Couric, define those self-congratulatory hosts currently in vogue for the morning chat shows.

Lauer himself is master of a particularly smarmy trick for handling the anxious or bereaved: having nudged them to the brink of tears, he murmurs some rubbish about "understanding how they feel" and how grateful everyone is that they've agreed to be interviewed. Then, instead of retreating in good taste and shutting up, he proceeds to ask them point-blank how they're feeling, and any other intrusive gaucherie the control panel can think up to whisper to his ear-piece.

The Cruise confrontation was doubly damning for Lauer, first for coming out with drippy questions that confirmed him as a wishy-washy twit with no clue how to proceed once the going got choppy; next, Cruise is in such fabulous shape - puissant biceps straining 'neath taut T-shirt - that his sheer physicality and honest emotion left Lauer a non-starter.

My suggestion is that Lauer keep very quiet about this disastrous encounter lest management - recognizing their golden boy as irreparably busted - cough politely and look elsewhere when the embarrassing question of contract renewal comes up.

An all around pathetic display and devastating exposure.


Comments:
I kinda agree with you but I sure as heck don’t want Tom Cruise to be my roll model or physician. I mean the last time I jumped on a couch I was about 3 years old.

I think Matt made some very good points. Many times we see the results of a medication without ever knowing anything about it. We see the results and for me that’s enough.

Do we in this country take too much medicine my gut tells me we do. Why is that I wonder…I think it’s because we see to much of it advertised on TV/Radio. They make it sound like it’ll fix everything but the evening meal (damn).

On my Blog (www.thebscorner.com) I talked about this on May 10, 2005. I found that the Pharmaceuticals spend more on advertising than they do on R & D. Their budgets went from 200 million a year in 1997 to 3.2 billion (that’s a B) today. I also found that drugs are prescribed 76% of the time when requested and 31% are given drugs when not requested.

Finally IMUS in the Morning has for the past 3-4 months has tried to get the networks to even talk about a serious subject like the problems with Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic. It has pretty much fallen on deaf ears.

The bottom line is that you won’t get much in-depth info on the Networks and the one place you might find some of this kind of reporting on TV the right wing folks want to close it down and that’s PBS.

Go figure.
 
*Very* good response and comment, and I will follow all your links and points you make.

Thanks so much for this detailed and thoughtful follow-up.

I've in fact added Ms Shield's reply and another rebuttal to the excitable Master Cruise's outburst.

I was in fact more mocking of Lauer's inability to drop his smoothie veneer in the face of actual emotion than whatever the content was - but you have made me think on it and given me the links to check. For which, thanks. CH
 
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