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Dr. Laura: 20th century fraud?
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Sept. 1, 1999 |
And what on Earth was obscure Irish soccer player Ronnie O'Brien doing atop the list last week? (Wacky computer glitch.) The buzz surrounding the selection of Time's Person of the Century honors has escalated from low hum to the noise level of, say, an AOL server room, but it's Time.com's newest, largely undiscovered poll, Phonies and Frauds of the 20th Century -- with its glinty hint of Schadenfreude -- that's caught Nothing Personal's attention. Let others debate the relative merits of Albert Einstein and Mohandas Gandhi. We'd rather cast our vote for whether Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Jerry Springer, Don King, Donald Trump or Marion S. Barry is the biggest charlatan. (Poor Geraldo "the safe was empty" Rivera has nearly 21 percent of the vote thus far, with Linda "the heart was empty" Tripp just behind with about 15 percent.) Amy Reiter Amy Reiter's column appears daily on the People site, Monday through Friday.
Got a hot tip? Tell Amy! But hey, even the Phony vote touched off a little controversy after its launch last Tuesday. Seems some folks weren't too tickled to see names like the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell, Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton up there -- even though all of the names posted for voting were culled from a month-long nomination process on the Time.com site. The protest e-mails came flooding in and Time.com pruned out the names of religious leaders -- "no matter how well justified in some cases by their behavior," notes the Web site -- just two days later. "It was an interesting place where the irreverent culture of the Web clashed with the need not to step on people's faiths," Time Inc. New Media's executive editor, Dick Duncan, explained to Nothing Personal in a voice so kind and gentle you'd never guess he was behind such a giddily wicked poll. "I thought, well, in the end this is bad taste because you end up floating on other people's beliefs. And that's not a good idea. It's just not appropriate." But religious leaders weren't the only scammerific contenders deemed too hot to handle by Time.com's staff. "All presidents, prime ministers and top politicians, and their families and staffs, were disqualified on grounds that they are generally recognized as professionals in this field, and our contest is for amateurs and those who pretend to be something else," notes the site. "Also, we did not want this poll to degenerate into an expression of dreary partisan prejudices." So, although there were "a whole lot of Ronald Reagans and a whole lot of Bill Clintons" who came through the nomination process, you can't vote for them or Richard Nixon -- or their various hangers on. That's right, no George Stephanopoulos, no Haldeman and Ehrlichman -- although Ollie North, Henry Kissinger and J. Edgar Hoover have managed to skirt the censors (in Hoover's case, I suppose, quite literally). Perhaps they were deemed strictly amateurs after all?
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