But ABC Has the Story About the Snake and the Electric Blanket

This would be, I believe, the third day that the New York Times has given ink to the possible plight of Brooke Astor, the celebrity zillionaire who may be (but perhaps is not) languishing in squalor due to the malice and cupidity of the son. The original story had at least a core of bona fide journalism: the report that (as the Times put it) “In a lawsuit, one of her grandsons has accused her son of mistreating her and turning her final years into a grim shadow of the glittery decades that went before.”

Fair enough, and we will put aside carping over whether anyone would have cared had she been Mrs. Schmaster. The Times followed up on Friday with the inevitable editorial assuring us that it’s not just salacious voyeurism at stake here. Nononono: “the case should bring home a larger point”—that we should be nice to old people (there are also a couple of letters to the editor, from writers to whom the phrase “rush to judgment seems never to have occurred).

Thanks, Times, we’ll write that down. And better be quick about it, too, before we get distracted by Saturday’s story –no, wait, make that two stories— that just might be seen as drifting from the main event. One tells us that Brooke’s former spread in Maine is now in the hands of her daughter-in-law. The implicit subtext is that the younger woman is some kind of a malefactor but the Times, not wanting to get its scrawny establishment butt sued off, doesn’t go nearly so far as to say so. The other story seems devoted to saying that a lot of people are talking about the Astors.

Enough, already. It’s old news that the Times strives to fill the niche as the poor man’s People Magazine. But the rush of gush over Brooke seems to be striving for vacuity. Fortunately, with all this fluff, the Times has not lost its taste for outright fiction.