To this Cable Gamer, Paula Zahn always epitomized what was wrong with TV news--the old model of news, in which liberals could pontificate from the back of limousines.
She was richer, better looking, and thinner than the rest of us--but that's OK, because it's understood that performers have to suffer for their art. If you wish to present yourself to the world, you have to uphold an aesthetic ideal, willing to sacrifice for grace and graciousness. That's the story of anyone, especially any female, who wants to be in the public eye--the camera makes you look fatter anyway, so you have to be ruthless on yourself, diet-wise. But the point of graciousness is not to let everyone else know that you are better than them for having suffered. The point is to be graceful and easygoing about it, to wear your superiority with the understated poise of, say, Queen Elizabeth.
But not Paula. She was better, and she wanted everyone to know it--that was why she could never get ratings than a "dead racoon," as Roger Ailes said about her when he finally got rid of her. Indeed, watching Paula over the years that she was at CBS, then Fox, then CNN, I always had the feeling that she knew that we knew she was of a higher order of being, and that she expected us to bow down to her. So our fandom was't a gift that we could bestow on her, it was tribute that she expected from us. Well, it don't work that way, lady, not in a world of cable choice. So TCG was pleased when CBS let her loose, surprised that Fox picked her up, briefly, and not at all surprised that she has been failing ever since 2001 at CNN. I can still remember that she wore a lime-green outfit as she covered 9-11 for CNN. If she had been at Fox, they would have put her, right away, in dignified and respectful black.
The real problem with Paula was tha she icier and smugger and more obviously liberal than the rest of us. I always got the feeling that she was condescending to be with her audience. Yes, she would be on TV, but only for the purpose of instructing us out of our prole ways--or at least reminding us that she didn't share those prole ways. So when I read, in David Bauder's wrapup for the AP, that she had deliberately moved left in recent months, I wasn't surprised--it made perfect sense, as PZ seeks to emancipate herself, once and for all, from red staters. Here's the way Bauder put it:
She and veteran executive producer Victor Neufeld had found a niche in recent months reporting extensively on issues of race relations, and Zahn said she was proud of that work.
The above passage tells us everything I need to know about her exit strategy from CNN. Zahn knew that she was on her way out--it's been in the rumor mill for a year now--and so she and Neufeld must've figured to themselves "Why not go out with our noblesse oblige heads held high? That way, once again, we can look down on fat-armed Americans? Thus we can pick up the John Edwards guilty-white liberal constituency, and so tell ourselves, when we finally get cancelled, that we were just too far ahead of the prolish, trollish American people?" That was a great plan for being a heroine in Manhattan, the Hamptons, and Martha's Vineard--which, of course, is all that Paula ever cared about. So CNN cut her loose, but don't be surprised if she soon has a gig with PBS and WNYC--or maybe the Pew Center for Media Liberalism or the Harvard Academy for Instructing us Dopes on Being Green.
Yet the decisive,in-your-face reminder that she was different--and held herself to be different--came during the controversy over Pale Male ,, the wonderful red-tailed hawk that roosted in Paula's building on (where else?) Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park. Here's Paula, this big liberal, and her husband, Richard Cohen, trying to destroy this wonderful bird,, which had the audacity to try and live in the same city as her. In other words, she was a total hypocrite when it came to putting her liberal ideals in practice. (And her marriage to Cohen didn't last, either--I guess he, too, failed to live up to her high standards.)
So now PZ is free--free to perfect herself all the more, to become the rich social x-ray that she always was, without having to lower herself to our level. So we, the rabble, can eat cake, while she sips on celery soup.
She wins by being finally rid of us, and we win by finally being rid of her.
