Letters to the Editor
GTC
Published Letters: 1
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The Readers Have Spoken
[Read the article: Camille's back!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I hope I'm not inadvertently casting a vote for Camille Paglia's new tenure at Salon by submitting this letter. (I often get the sense that the pieces which generate the most controversy are considered good for the magazine because they stir interest and generate wider talk about Salon.) This is hardly a controversy. As of a few minutes ago, you had 440 readers responding, and the vast majority of them were appalled by this editorial choice. (And for every reader who took the trouble to write, I'm sure there were many others who felt the same way.) It was not Paglia's political or intellectual positions they were objecting to--it was the overwhelming narcissism of her so-called style. Name dropping, horn-tooting, utterly irrelevant observations about her personal photo collections, promos for her other scribblings, bizarre musings about her deep mourning for an utterly fluffy celebrity... It should be clear from the massive response that this is not the sort of quality writing that draws most readers to Salon.
Camille Paglia is not contributing substance to Salon, nor provoking serious thought; she's providing spectacle. Yes, that might generate new readership, but so would putting pictures of naked girls on page 3, or posting videos of the latest melee on the Jerry Springer show. It's one thing to boost traffic by spreading celebrity gossip in The Fix, but at least that's clearly labeled as such, and easy to avoid. By spreading this kind of showy, vapid content to the other parts of the magazine, Salon risks losing integrity and respect. Maybe the readership will bump up a little, but is it worth it? As the recent O.J./Judith Regan flap showed, even Rupert Murdoch occasionally acknowledges a mistake...