And I'm rather amused at watching Michael Isikoff blather on, on camera. All he's doing is to opine and then opine some more, with a bit of a brush-by of analysis thrown in so it sounds good. I stand by my original assessment of this dude - that he couldn't investigate his way around the inside of a paper bag unless there was a Clinton and a stained blue dress in there. He keeps saying - "we don't know WHY..." Well, if you're an investigative reporter, Isikoff, aren't you supposed to come up with some of the answers already? Isn't that supposed to be your job? Oh, I forgot - your all-GOP sources aren't helping you on this one, are they! All you're capable of "investigating" are Democrats, and especially sex scandals. And since there isn't much of either in this one, you're sitting there hogging face-time and opining and pontificating and then opining some more.
I'm still waiting for Michael Isikoff to impress me in a truly objective, non-partisan, non-salacious way. Anybody here old enough to remember Rona Barrett? She was mainly an L.A. ABC-TV and ABC network show-biz columnist/commentator and she dished her fair share of Hollywood gossip. Hated being called a "gossip columnist," but she did a lot of that aside from entertainment news. She had a segment every morning on "Good Morning America." She started at local L.A. television KABC and then went to the network. She moved to NBC and wound up not a very good fit. She ended up leaving NBC and television in general. That was during the 60s and 70s. Sorry to carry on about "old days," but it's instructive to know and consider what's come before - from which we can learn a lot as far as more successfully navigating the present.
What I'm getting to is - Isikoff reminds me of her on his many on-camera turns. She had a way of sitting - at a slight angle behind the long anchor desk. Sometimes it was her whole upper body facing very slightly off-camera including her face, or her upper body facing forward but her head cocked to one side. BUT her eyeballs looked back over toward the camera. It was body language of the first order. It rendered this sly-looking, sidelong gaze that suggested all kinds of meaning! Strike that pose yourself and see if it doesn't make you feel slightly sneaky/dirt-dishing/"Psst! Don't tell anybody but..." and even a little conspiratorial - wink-wink. It was almost the kind of posture you make when you're flirting and smiling while shaking your finger and saying "naughty-naughty!" Rona Barrett used that posture every night, and it conveyed powerful visual meaning. It undermined her argument that she was no gossip columnist - because dammit, sitting and looking sidelong at you that way from behind her desk made her look like one!!!
And I still remember Michael Isikoff copping that pose every night on TV when the Washington press corp(se) was digging into Bill Clinton's underwear drawer around the Monica Lewinsky witch-hunt. GOD he loved it. You could tell he was relishing every word and every camera-second! He damn near needed a bib! As near-slobbering as Chris Matthews becomes when he gets his little self all worked up. And he sat that way, with this conspiratorial "naughty-naughty" pose looking sidelong at you from his seat on the set. He doesn't have anything that meaty here. It's gotta be sex and Democrats to get a - um - rise out of him. He's an investigative reporter. He shouldn't be sitting there all afternoon repeating how "what we still don't know is the 'why'." Well, dude, that's your job. You are supposed to be an investigative reporter. You with the hot job on a big cable network. Where were you when the "peons" at the local New Jersey newspaper and online news service far away from the lights and cameras uncovered this story? Where are you now when it should be everybody else BUT you saying "what we still don't know is 'why'." You call yourself an investigative reporter? Well then, investigate. It could still put you in the running for a Pulitzer or something. At the moment, though, the big awards seem to be gravitating toward the Little Guy at the Local Paper like the Bergen Record or some humble community blog.
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