[Cross-posted] This whole Jennifer Hawkins nude cover story has been another media-concocted non-story. But I will give it some kudos: it influenced Australian celebrity dialogue for a week, and it shows that Murdochs still have some sway over public opinion.
   We knew about it at Lucire, and thought: OK, a radio presenter doesn’t like the cover and got quoted in an Australian newspaper supplement. It’s a fair opinion, had it been for body image, and thought that was it. Let’s wait to hear from the other side.
   The story, however, ran and ran, in various media outlets in Australia, reporting only the one side.
   It was only on the 7th that a holidaying Jennifer Hawkins broke her silence and said that the photographs’ real purpose (remember, we were still to hear about this, despite the four days’ speculation being reported as fact) was about promoting a healthy lifestyle.
   It was never about being the poster girl for body image.
   It could have been nice to have done a bit of research over the photos’ purpose.
   Next thing, the sensationalism continued, with another Murdoch Press report over Hawkins being ‘dumped’ from the cover of Australian Woman’s Day.
   If the dumping is true and not another sensationalized story, it seems to show that Woman’s Day is not particularly good at standing their ground, and is easily swayed by what was a “nothing” story. But read on: there is no comment from Woman’s Day to say that Hawkins was actually dumped.
   I wouldn’t be surprised if, in fact, it was just a regular editorial decision than an actual “dumping”.
   Maybe Woman’s Day simply didn’t want to go out with another Jennifer Hawkins cover while Marie Claire Australia had its one.
   It reminds me of an earlier (2007) Australian media gaffe about Miranda Kerr, which was also run as fact in Murdoch Press newspapers, Channel 9 and other media outlets.
   The problem is that they got the location (New York, not Los Angeles), year (2005, not 2007) and fashion label (Heatherette, not Victoria’s Secret) wrong.
   Other than that, I believe they got their facts right.
   Only one Australian media outlet actually got that story right: Sassybella. The internet beat the supposedly superior infrastructure of old media.

Jennifer Hawkins has broken her silence over her nude cover photo for Marie Claire Australia, which has caused a great deal of controversy this week.
   The former Miss Universe says the shoot was only done to raise money for an eating disorder charity, and to promote a healthy lifestyle.
   The furore has surrounded claims that the shoot, which appears to be untouched, was about proving that every woman has flaws.
   It was sparked on the 4th by Australian radio presenter Bianca Dye, who called Hawkins an improper role model for body image in a Murdoch Press newspaper supplement.
   Hawkins calls the misunderstanding in the media, which was fuelled in numerous Murdoch Press publications, embarrassing.
   She stresses that her relationship with Myer, the Australian department store chain, remains strong, although she admits she should have informed the company of the shoot.

Tyra Banks has announced that her daytime talk show will end, with the last episodes to be made in the spring.
   Even after the end of production, the show will continue to air for 2010–11, though with best-of episodes, says Variety.
   The Tyra Show began in 2005, and has won Daytime Emmys in 2008 and 2009.
   Banks says her plans after the show ends will be to focus on a new film company, Bankable Studios. In addition, she would continue to be involved with reality series America’s Next Top Model and True Beauty.

Above The five finalist labels of the FedEx Global Access Fashion Award.

One thing fashion journalists are seldom called on to do is the sort of investigative probing that was best exemplified by the fictional Cal McCaffrey, as played by John Simm, in State of Play. We investigate, but it all seems mundane in comparison. Could we ever be in the middle of an event where we could feel like McCaffrey? Or perhaps the television detective Bergerac, working on an island?
   The FedEx Global Access Fashion Award gave us a chance to come to an event where the company behind the awards kept enough secret to make Saturday a mystery journey of sorts.
   Keeping some mystery in the fashion business is nothing new. We come across designers keeping mum on locations at Fashion Week, to surprise us when we are driven there. However, I had not come across one that involved a ferry crossing.
   Media were asked to travel to Waiheke Island, along with the finalists for the awards. A FedEx sign was clearly erected and we were issued our tickets to board the ferry, which turned out to be one of the most enjoyable events in the business.
   Sitting with Marc Moore and Steve Dunstan of Stolen Girlfriends’ Club and Huffer, we joked about what might await us at the other end, and those of us in the media who I heard from likened the journey, inter alia, to an ‘Agatha Christie’ novel. Actor Karl Urban was on board the same ferry, and I took the opportunity to say hello to him—we had not seen each other for 24 years, since our school days—and caught up on some recent events. Former game show hostess and registered nurse Jude Dobson was also present on the crossing.
   Sadly, Urban was not part of our group, and was heading to Waiheke for another matter. But the journey was mostly uneventful save for a journalist and a photographer who asked to take our photograph.
   Reaching Waiheke, we were greeted by a bus driver who, we had to surmise later, was hard of hearing. He had had a few details wrong, not least the spelling of FedEx on his board, but it played into the hands of our inner Cal McCaffreys: it was fairly easy to deduce which was the driver for our group, and this contributed to the mystery the event had built up.
   Word has it that this proved too difficult for at least one of the media representatives, who gave up after the ferry crossing, and apparently went home. Maybe some of us have had it too easy.
   Held at a modernist home on the Island, Sián-Pearl Going of AP Group, which organized the event, announced that the five finalists—Nom D, Huffer, Lonely Hearts, Stolen Girlfriends’ Club and Zambesi—were in the running to win a total prize package of NZ$35,000, which included NZ$10,000 in cash. It was also tied to a 2010 consumer event called Style Series, details of which were promised by Going in January 2010. The designers could, at their option, show at Style Series, scheduled for March.
   The prize, by our reckoning, would be the largest given in New Zealand fashion in recent memory, and Denise McCamish, one of FedEx’s managers who handed out Wilson footballs (a reference to the Tom Hanks movie Castaway, where FedEx was very present), was delighted to have been part of the mystery tour with the rest of us. Designers were also encouraged to sign cards with pairs of Crocs for a charity event in Fiji in early December.
   Guests were treated to Zumwohl cocktails. Zumwohl stepped in when another alcohol brand failed to honour its commitments to the event, and most agreed that this was in fact a stroke of luck. The Schnaps from Zumwohl ranked above, rather than Below, the other brand’s, in the estimation of the guests who had sampled it.

Above Sián-Pearl Going announces the finalists as FedEx’s Denise McCamish and her three children look on. Below Enjoying Zumwohl Schnaps.

   The drinks, and the rather lavish lunch laid on for us, helped create the sort of intimate atmosphere where we could chat to the designers and to our media colleagues. It was the sort of intimacy that is often missing from events. A home, we had to conclude, was far better than any official venue such as a hotel lobby or hall. Provided the home was suitably flash.
   The only hitch, it seemed, were our colleagues who were so keen to take our photograph aboard the ferry. It turns out that they were with a foreign-owned tabloid and had not been invited, and made use of a personal, non-transferable invitation sent to someone at their office. But at least they lasted a tad longer than whomever had given up at the Waiheke terminal.
   Call us genteel and old-fashioned, but snapping photographs inside someone’s home when you aren’t invited doesn’t rate well in our book, and I seem to remember this is as a no-no in the world of journalism here. The invited colleagues I spoke to agreed.
   The mystery solved, the designers enjoyed themselves, especially Nom D’s Margi Robertson and Zambesi’s Elisabeth Findlay: the two sisters welcomed the opportunity to have a reunion. Steve Ferguson and Amy Farlane at Lonely Hearts, well familiar to readers of our print edition, were delighted that Going was wearing one of their designs, while Dunstan and Moore comfortably looked the part of footballers as they posed.

I will be writing a few more details of recent events, such as Style Christchurch and the Massey University end-of-year show (great photos on the way for both of these), and a recent Sunglass Hut do, but believe the rather entertaining events of Saturday to have made a sufficiently lengthy entry. More soon.

Elle’s best-dressed list for 2009 has US First Lady Michelle Obama in first place in the ‘politique chic’ category, with France’s own First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy in second.
   French Sports Minister Rama Yade came third, followed by HRH Princess Letizia in fourth place and French presidential candidate Ségolène Royal in fifth.
   While the political list got the most international media attention, there were numerous others announced by the magazine that were largely ignored.
   Scarlett Johansson got the jury’s vote for the ‘Sexy Bombe’ category. Valérie Lemercier was its choice for ‘Black Addict’. In the ‘Stylista’ category, Tilda Swinton was chosen; Penélope Cruz was best dressed on the red carpet. Elettra Wiedemann is Elle’s ‘New It Girl’, Natalia Vodianova took the ‘Fashion pointue’ category. Alexa Chung was the best dressed Brit.
   The annual list’s jury, which was led by Nathalie Rykiel of Sonia Rykiel, gave Mrs Obama the top place in part based on her uniqueness.
   Olympia Le Tan, Catherine Rousso (chief fashion editor of Elle), Sophie Fontanel, Bertrand Burgalat, Thomas Lélu, Felipe Oliveira Baptista, Farida Khelfa and Simon Liberati are with Mlle Rykiel on the jury.
   Khelfa praised Mrs Obama for her risk-taking when it came to fashion.
   It is the second time Mme Sarkozy has come second in the Elle list: last year, she was beaten by Asma Assad, the First Lady of Syria.

Above Jean Shrimpton, a.k.a. the Shrimp, as photographed by Bailey in British Vogue.

A selling exhibition, Pure Sixties, Pure Bailey, of David Bailey’s iconic images of the 1960s will be hosted by Bonhams at 101 New Bond Street from March 7 to April 7, the company announced yesterday.
   In celebrating the 50th anniversary of the start of the ’60s, Bonhams approached Bailey to put together an exhibition.
   Bailey, whose work typifies the new energy of the era, began working at British Vogue in July 1960 and was famously quoted as saying, ‘When Vogue offered to pay me to photograph beautiful women all day I thought I was on a dream-boat.’ Amongst the many faces he captured were Jean Shrimpton, Penelope Tree, Catherine Deneuve, Brigitte Bardot and Raquel Welch.
   Bailey also photographed other headline-makers, including the Rolling Stones, Andy Warhol, Rudolf Nureyev, Cecil Beaton, Michael Caine, the Beatles, David Hockney, Roger Vadim, Kenneth Tynan, the Who and the Kray brothers. Many of the images he shot were very direct, closely cropped portraits.
   He continues to be active and has two shows planned, along with an exhibition of his sculpture.

The Oprah Winfrey Show will broadcast its final episode on September 9, 2011, according to sources.
   Oprah Winfrey’s company, Harpo, Inc., officially announced the end of the show on Thursday. A public announcement will be made on the show on Friday in the US.
   Winfrey, 55, is tipped to focus on her cable network, OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network), a joint venture with Discovery Communications, according to The New York Times.
   The final show will coincide with its 25th anniversary, although it will be taped six months prior.
   Presently, The Oprah Winfrey Show attracts some seven million viewers a day in the US and is still the top among syndicated talk shows. Winfrey herself was listed at number 45 on Forbes’s ‘most powerful people’ list this year.

American readers will get to see Oprah Winfrey interview Sarah Palin today, in what is widely tipped to be a casual, feel-good special to promote the former governor’s book, Going Rogue.
   Some media have tipped this as the launch of ‘Sarah Palin 2·0’, one who is now free from the Republican Party machine and can speak her own mind. Palin needs it, too: after the hammering the media gave her during the campaign trail, and the lampooning by Saturday Night Live, she needs to distance herself from the image of the right-wing political neophyte.
   Much of the coverage, as this publication mentioned at the time, was biased, leaving aside whether we liked what Sarah Palin stood for or not. As with Hillary Clinton, American media questioned whether Palin could be a fit mother and a politician, even if they never realized they never asked whether Barack Obama could be a fit father and the president. Her policy positions, many of which were out of kilter with the many Americans who voted for Obama, were not attacked with the vigour one might have expected had she been a man. Instead, things got personal and even familial, something which fans of CBS’s resident cranky old man, David Letterman, know full well.
   Yet as many opponents of Sarah Palin know, her time as Alaskan governor was not without imperfection. Any other politician would have been given a dressing-down for the things that went wrong there: the disputes with the oil companies and the reality behind her relationship with them, for instance; or the claims about ‘the bridge to nowhere’.
   An easy point of attack, for those who disagreed with her, might have been Gov. Palin’s view on abortion: she was against it, even in cases of rape, one which only, according to polls at the time, a minority of Americans agreed with. It is certainly a position universally panned by staff I asked at this magazine.
   The venom that was released instead seemed hard to believe. Most Palin positions were ignored for the simplistic picture that Saturday Night Live popularized: here was a right-wing country gal from Idaho who somehow fluked in to the gubernatorial position in Alaska and came second in a beauty pageant along the way.
   Was it, we thought, due to sexism? It’s a charge that we levelled at some of the American media then, certainly: one which we in New Zealand can feel smug about after having two prime ministers, two governors-general and a chief justice who happened to be women. At one point, the legislative, executive and judicial were helmed by women; something which, even in the time of Thatcher, Britain could not claim. The US is, after all, a country that took far longer for a woman to break the glass ceiling on a job as relatively trivial as who reads the nightly news on a big three TV network. (Connie Chung had to share her duties with Dan Rather officially; not counting that experience, Americans had to wait till the twenty-first century and Katie Couric’s emergence.) A female in the White House? It seemed harder to fathom than the Obama miracle.
   There was an extra element, however: the insistence by media (not just American) that the general population is stupid. That the simplistic Saturday Night Live version was easier to swallow than debating the Governor on any of her policy positions. Why? Because she might actually have been able to defend them, when ill-informed journalists enquired into the dealings of the 50th state for the first time.
   Never mind that the Governor is sometimes not fluent in her interviews or even some of her speeches—she makes my long sentences seem stunted in comparison—the media chose not to fight. They chose to ridicule.
   Let me be quite clear: Americans are not stupid. It doesn’t matter what walk of life they are on, they want to be informed and treated with respect.
   We hear all the time in the media business that newspapers target their reading to the level of an 11-year-old (I used to hear 12 and recently I even heard nine, and the number seems to fall by the decade), and I think this is daft. Lucire’s policy, certainly with the print magazine, is to present as intelligent a view as possible, because even if the level is above the average reader’s (and I wonder if we are that far above), it gives one something to aspire to. Remember being in the first grade and looking enviously at the kids in the fourth, and the much cooler books they seemed to be assigned?
   So the fact that nearly a million people have joined Sarah Palin’s Facebook fan page—she beat Oprah Winfrey’s total a very long time ago—might not mean outright agreement with her. It might not even mean outright opposition to President Obama’s policies. It could mean, to some Americans, redressing the balance created by media that failed in their objectivity. In her ranks, they receive her Facebook notes, some of which take dubious positions, but why should they trust the media after last year? Even lovers of Fox News might be suspicious, after it initially blamed Palin for the GOP loss last year, before becoming her cheerleader the week after.
   And her numbers might swell when Going Rogue is launched on Tuesday.
   However, is this really Palin 2·0? While she has softened on her positions in terms of the media image—her Hong Kong conference speech, behind closed doors, painted her as a small-government conservative who supported business—one wonders if these are different from the positions she believed in the first place. Frankly, we never clearly heard much about them.
   Her business element was there in parts last year, even if her love of drilling bordered on environmentally hazardous and made one wonder about Palin’s own connections to the oil business. Both major political parties—even President George W. Bush himself—have talked about alternative energies, a direction which Lucire happily endorses. Good decisions are never easy, and one which continues a gas-guzzling lifestyle cannot be, for a leader, wholly responsible. ‘Drill, baby, drill,’ is not a catch-cry with visionary appeal. ‘Death panels’, meanwhile, play to those who view the Obama administration with suspicion—the Murdoch Press among them—and who cannot be bothered reading s. 1233 of the America’s Affordable Health Choices bill for themselves.
   Of course, part of the negative image fell on her own shoulders: Palin 1·0 was happy taking on the gun-toting, moose-hunting image to capture “heartland” voters, even if such a generalization of their lifestyle is inaccurate and unfair on those who live in what were termed ‘red states’ (a.k.a. ‘blue states’ for the 2012 elections). She did, by all accounts (even her own), botch her interview with Couric. It wasn’t enough for those who wanted to see her destroyed.
   Yet having simplified the argument to the level of a comedy sketch, some are now on the defensive. Going Rogue will be analysed to shreds, in the hope that the smart-arse positions of the campaign can be maintained. It ignores the million that Palin has captured on Facebook, indicative of even wider support in the US.
   We are not saying that the million needs to be pandered to—but alienating them further is unwise. Educating and reporting seem smarter.
   What Americans might want to see this week, as Oprah Winfrey kicks off some form of mainstream acceptance of Sarah Palin, is Media 2·0: one which acknowledges that accurate and fair reporting serves the United States’ best interests, and lets Americans judge the former governor for her policies, not for her parodies. Getting down and doing one’s journalist duty is preferable to sensationalizing for the sake of sensationalism. Failing that duty will see more head toward blogs and read what they think the media have hidden from them—when some bloggers often hide facts to suit their views.
   Some media have begun to give Palin a fair go, realizing that she is not going away any time soon. For those of us who enjoy national health care, for example, some of her writings on the American debate seem far-fetched, to say the least. That is something Americans must determine for themselves, intelligently and with all the facts. And we should let Sarah Palin fall on her own sword if she is wrong.
   Her ideas may still fail if they are outside what Americans want, but at least that is a fairer way to go than being their forever imprinted with images of a Tina Fey impersonation.