Remainder of The Day

Amazingly, some people are easily amazed. Take Rachel Sklar:

There's been barely a whisper leading up to Howard Kurtz's new book, released tomorrow — it's been embargoed, hushed, and kept under wraps for months, it's title and cover even kept off Amazon. The book is called Reality Show: Inside The Last Great Television News War, and it chronicles the saga of the latest — and possibly last — generation of Big Three Anchors: Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson, and Katie Couric. Amazingly, Kurtz and his publishers were able to keep the details of the 480-page book from leaking — impressive considering the number of people he obviously spoke with across all three networks — and today is the first day that details from the book have been made available.

Perhaps that lack of excitement has something to do with the supremely uninteresting subject of the book: the Network Anchor Wars. Network nightly news is only of interest to the NewsBusters crowd, which monitors the shows to see if Charlie or Brian is slipping some Socialism into Granny's glass of warm milk. It's a fair guess that Kurtz makes the topic even more boring by reprinting the long and tedious gossip of middle-aged teevee executives and talent who are even more irrelevant than How himself.

And, frankly, who wants to read about dullards who think (or write) like this: "For Williams, it all went back to Sept. 11, 2001. As a citizen, he thought on that fateful day, thank God that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell were on the team." We already know that Brian's a talking wigstand. Do we need to know the styrofoam's infested with silverfish, too?

The good news is that Kurtz has a blog to promote his book, since How apparently doesn't rate the full plug-and-play treatment his employer lavishes on Boob Woodward. Stop by and welcome Howie to the neighborhood, if you're so inclined.