"HiltonGate"? And the Winner is Barbara Walters

Let's face it: Al Gore was right about a great many things. Specifically, the former Vice President of the United States criticized America's overheated media coverage of "celebutards" as a national distraction. The fact that this criticism was coming from a man who gave up the presidency and founded a start-up news organization -- Current TV -- for The Attention Deficit Generation was particularly galling to those of us who can handle our panty-less Lindsay Lohan photos, thank you very much. We can quit the celebri-smack anytime we want to (cough, cough); we just don't want to right now, okay?! How dare Gore. And so, we just dismissed him as a cranky ex-Vice turned narc, harshing on our mellow.

How wrong we were, once again, about the prescience of Albert Gore, Jr. The former Vice admittedly sounds overly righteous and, to be sure, cloyingly pedantic as he wags his well-manicured fingers at us from behind the pages of The Assault On Reason. Gore, tragically, has never quite managed to match the tone with the political argument he seeks to purport. Even in the NAFTA debate, it wasn't so much his superlative argument as the overall bat-shit crazy of H. Ross Perot and his bewildering overuse of the pejorative "gorilla" -- which, we admit, still puzzles us after all these years -- when referring to the Vice President of the United States. Gore certainly won't tear eyeballs away from crazy bald Britney or the freakish, couch-jumping Tom Cruise; Gore certainly is, however, essentially correct about the nature of our addiction to celebri-smack.

Case in point: HiltonGate. The celebri-smack is presently poisoning our news. One can almost imagine Al Gore, newly-minted media castigator, gnashing his teeth, throwing coiled fists against a boiling sky, appalled -- appalled! -- at the notion that the prestigious news divisions at ABC and NBC are ensorcelled in Paris Hilton's rarely-used panties. ABC's Barbara Walters was the first penetrate -- no pun intended -- Paris Hilton's inner circle, proving, magnificently, that she could grab the headlines as well as Rosie or Star. Walters scored a legitimate "get" in the course of her prison conversation with the notorious Paris Hilton, which became the talk of a million blogs and talk radio programs last week. There was even some talk among the Chattering Classes that the newly "Spiritualized (Averted Gaze)" Paris might -- might! -- take over the Rosie seat on The View. Allow for the theoretical possibility that a thoroughly vodka-and-lemonaded socialite like Paris Hilton could possibly wake up in the early mornings, on weekdays to boot. Stranger things have happened.

Anyhoo: Fast-forward a smidgeon. Those ever-classy Hiltons (exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment), Rick and Kathy, were -- are? -- serving as Paris' network go-betweens, angling ABC News against NBC News, holding out, rather skeevily we cannot fail to note, for the best deal from the Fourth Estate. CBS News -- the Elder Sister of the Big Three networks -- in a fit of good taste, decided, wisely, not to stay at that particular Hilton. Barbara, with the inside track and the sterling reputation for asking heads of state what kind of vegetation they most resemble psychologically, didn't seem to be worried about anything at all. In retrospect, perhaps she ought to have been.

It must have given Paris' new "BFF" Barbra Walters an unpleasant moment of white-hot cognitive vertigo to say the least in hearing that The Hiltons™ went in for NBC instead of ABC. Paris and The Hilton's were dialoging with NBC News around their common religious understanding pertaining to -- how does one say this? -- "Cash-Money (Ka-Ching)." Paris Hilton's dubious, jejune "spirituality" involves an archaic and esoteric concept known in remote antiquity to monks and sages as "Production Materials Fees (Cue: to Bach's "Mass in B-Minor")." Barbara Walters' own network, ABC, could only pony up $100,000 worth of these holy and spiritual cash-monies; Meredith Vieira's NBC, however, was negotiating a sacred, karmically-positive fee for "collateral material" that put the peacock network in another "Cosmos," one no doubt adjacent to nirvana, Barbara Walters' friendship notwithstanding.

Barbara, of course, don't play that. Barbara Walters, who has been at the media game a lot longer than The Hiltons, lashed back, expertly, not unlike a modern-day Gilles de Ray, defending the integrity of ABC News and their policy not to pay for interviews. We simply won't entertain the possibility that ABC, and allegedly Walters herself, conducted those $100,000 collateral fees negotiations. Whatever the case, the newly sacralized Paris looked surprisingly like the old, skanky one; worse: while locked up in the pokey, Hilton was now soiling America's semi-pristine television news landscape not unlike an untrained teacup chihuahua with a stomach full of vittles.

Zing!

Of course Paris, in prison, trapped, vying to re-invent herself in the eyes of the media, took quite a tabloidal beating. And she had all the time in the world to meditate on precisely what Barbara had done. One can almost imagine Walters lisp, echoing off the prison concrete, softly chuckling at what she's wrought: "That isn't a prison, this is an operating room, and I, Paris, am the head surgeon. From here on in everything is going to be moving fast, as Barbara probably anticipated it would. From Bill Carter in Saturday's New York Times, this is how it went down:

"Thursday night after a spokesman for the Hilton's, Michael Sitrick, released a statement saying that Paris Hilton would not receive payment of any kind for the interview or for what he called 'collateral material,' like photos or videos. 'I don't think it was playing tonally the way the Hilton's wanted it to play.' Said one of the executives involved in the negotiations. 'They decided it looked bad asking for money, no they just pulled out of everything.' Mr. Sitrick did not respond to requests for comment yesterday."

And how does the story end? Rick Hilton, the patriarch, and Paris Hilton, the unmoisturized ingénue, clearly in Hilton Damage Control Mode, each contacted Barbara Walters offering her first dibs -- sans the offensive cash-money -- on an exclusive Paris post-jailhouse interview. ABC News turned the Hilton's down, reputation -- and ratings -- stronger than ever (Charlie Gibson is somewhere, smiling).

Now Hilton is out of jail, off to Larry King tomorrow night. But the real winner is Barbara Walters and ABC. Beyond that, a moral to the story: We should perhaps listen more closely to Al Gore.

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