MONDAY: ABC interviews Stephen A. Smith!

MONDAY, APRIL 14, 2025

One journalist uses her words: Broadly speaking, we'll be pondering certain aspects of journalistic language this week. 

In the simplest part of that undertaking, we think one columnist makes a nice choice of words in this morning's New York Times. That columnist is Jessica Grose, who's writing about the all-female, borderline "space shot" which set off for the stars this morning.

Grose views this event as celebrity piffle. Her column starts like this:

Lauren Sanchez, Sheryl Sandberg and the Death of Celebrity Feminism

A celebrity in 2025 looking to raise awareness about critical women’s issues has no end of worthy targets. She could talk about the millions of women losing access to contraception and other vital health care because the Trump administration has taken a hacksaw to U.S.A.I.D. or discuss the mass layoffs at the early child care program Head Start, which will affect poor moms and their kids the most.

Instead, some prominent women—the ones able to command attention in our information-saturated world—are going to space for 11 minutes, and they’re using the related publicity to raise awareness about eyelash extensions.

This is not an “eat the rich” satire, though I don’t think I could have invented a better one. Lauren Sánchez, the fiancée of one of the world’s wealthiest men, Jeff Bezos, organized an all-female flight on Blue Origin, her man’s private rocket ship company. Sánchez and the rest of her crew...appeared on the cover of Elle magazine’s digital edition to talk about their “historic” achievement.

While they discuss the importance of women in STEM and the value of representation for young girls of color, they spend a whole lot of time talking about their “glam.” The most memorable, embarrassing exchange is between Sánchez and [the pop star Katy] Perry...

"We are going to put the 'ass' in astronaut." Perry is quoted saying at that point. Later, Sanchez offers this:

“We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule!”

In Grose's view, this is wealthy celebrity piffle, of a type which undermines real interest in critical women’s issues and basically eats the culture. 

We tend to share that reaction; your results may differ. Whatever your particular view might be, we thought Grose delivered an excellent choice of words as she discussed her view:

This morally vacuous space stunt should be another nail in the coffin of celebrity feminism. There was a moment, more than 10 years ago, when being a loud and proud, self-proclaimed feminist was in vogue among the rich and famous. Actresses and pop stars were constantly asked about their feminism in interviews, and books like “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” by the former Facebook/Meta executive Sheryl Sandberg, were mega best sellers.

I was always skeptical that this kind of surface-level advocacy would have a major impact on the average woman...

Even with my skepticism, I held out some small glimmer of hope that celebrity feminism could rub off in some way on the larger culture.

According to Grose, that's what she was once inclined to think. She says she's stopped thinking that way now.

We tend to agree with Grose's view. We applaud her particular choice of words—her description of this celebrity shuttle as "morally vacuous."

With the invention of high-income celebrity journalism, a lot of room was carved out and reserved 1) for the morally vacuous and 2) for the intellectually fatuous. 

Fatuous and vacuous? In our view, those words don't get used enough. Live and direct from ABC News, here's part of where that takes us:

Stephen A. Smith says he has 'no choice' but to consider a run for president

Stephen A. Smith, host of ESPN's "First Take," hammered the Democratic Party and suggested he has "no choice" but to consider a run for president.

"I have no choice, because I've had elected officials, and I'm not going to give their names, elected officials coming up to me. I've had folks who are pundits come up to me. I've had folks that got a lot of money, billionaires and others that have talked to me about exploratory committees and things of that nature. I'm not a politician. I've never had a desire to be a politician," Smith told ABC News' "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl.

Smith reiterated that because of the number of people asking him to consider a run, he has to leave the door open.

Pitifully, the report continues from there.

We don't offer this as a commentary on anything Smith might have said, absurd as his recent nonsense has been. We offer this as a commentary on the fatuous conduct at ABC News, where someone decided to book Smith as a guest on this once-a-week Sunday program.

In our view, fatuous conduct ruled the roost within the mainstream press during the Clinton-Gore years. The war in Iraq, and eventually the arrival of Trump, tended to sober these entities up. But the tendency to revert to type can be remarkably strong.

This Week is on the air for exactly one hour per week. This is the way someone at ABC news decided to burn up that hour.

They did so in the face of the deeply difficult disasters with which the society is now confronted. This was fatuous conduct all the way sown. This conduct was "morally vacuous."

We thought the same thing about some of what we saw on yesterday's Meet the Press. For starters:

Are you running for president, Senator Booker? No really—are you running for president?

That mandated piffle was bad enough. In our view, this heartfelt harangue was even more empty than that:

WELKER (4/13/25): Jonathan, there was this extraordinary, speaking of the Democrats, moment—

MARTIN: Yes.

WELKER: —when Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan came to Washington, delivered a speech about tariffs, said she wished there could be a more careful approach, then went to the White House to meet with President Trump. 

Her team said she was surprised when she was kind of ushered into the Oval Office while he was signing EOs [executive orders] and this happened. 

[Photo of Whitmer] 

She literally, for a moment, covered her face. It's an extraordinary, striking moment that speaks to how complicated it is for Democrats right now to figure out. They want to energize their base, but also reach out to independents, particularly those who are potentially eyeing a run in 2028.

MARTIN: And in her case, trying to run a state for two more years that voted for Trump. 

But look, that picture is instantly iconic. This is Dukakis in the tank for the 21st century. The difference being, Dukakis could blame his staff. She had nobody to blame but herself. And I think it—it was maladroit on two levels. 

First of all, the macro politics of it. Her assumption to A) give the speech she gave, talking about working with Trump, and then to go to the White House. Her party right now views Trump as akin to Erdogan or Orban, foreign autocrats. You don't cut deals with somebody who's trying to consolidate power and erode American institutions. That, number one, is her, I thought, faulty assumption. 

Then there's the micro. Why on earth is she in the White House at all, and let herself be brought into the Oval Office? That's not her staff. That's her own instincts and her own politics culminating in holding up that file folder. You just don't do that. It's an error for the ages.

Based on what we've read about this event, Whitmer could, in fact, blame it on the Trump White House, which seems to have tricked her into being caught in an awkward setting. (We were once told a story, by a high elected official, about what that official regarded as a similar bit of deception.)

If we insist on pretending that this sort of thing matters—even that it has produced "an error for the ages"we could possibly have decided to blame it on some slippery staffer at the Trump White House. Instead, the pundit in question went all "Dukakis in the tank" in reaction to this ultimately pointless event.

He couldn't imagine why this governor would have been at the White House at all! Can this really be the way these privileged pundits understand life within our devolving world?

Again and again, we think we see a certain cultural phenomenon playing out at the high end of the mainstream / legacy press. Se think we see that life can still be silly and fun at certain enjoyable ends of the income/celebrity levels.

Given the difficult circumstances of the present day, that harangue struck us as silly and dimwitted all the way down. Historically, this type of fatuous punditry started with started with Dukakis in the tank (and failing to punch Bernie Shaw). It then moved ahead to the endless inanities of the mainstream press corps' devotion to the destructive, invented Storyline known as AL GORE, LIAR.

(The liar who didn't know who he was! The liar who hired a woman to teach him how to be a man!)

They never quite seem to escape the gravity of this impulse toward the vacuous / fatuous. Especially at this dangerous time, we thought Jessica Grose engineered an insightful choice of words.

Final note:

Pablo Torre was on Morning Joe today as a general political analyst. He may well be the world's nicest guy, but what explains his elevation from the pointless but fun world of sports?

In conclusion, it never ends:

ABC interviewed Stephen A. Smith concerning his possible White House campaign! Elsewhere, Katy Perry and the others were putting the "ass" back in "astronaut!"