BattleBlog

Tina BROWN on Vanity Fair |

Intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike love juicy stories. I don’t care if you have a Ph.D., at some irrepressible level you still want to read about Petraeus’s extramarital affair more than you want to read a piece that gets into the weeds of his counterinsurgency strategy. You want to know about Paula Broadwell more than you do about David Galula—the French military officer who was Petraeus’s strategic inspiration. The perfect example of that was when I sat next to Henry Kissinger one night in the eighties and he opened the conversation by saying, “I loved that piece about Debra Winger.”

There’s a tedious side to American media criticism that holds that if something is a good read—or a good read that’s accessible to a wider range of readers than a few Upper West Side or campus ­worthies—that it is therefore, somehow, unseemly. I cannot bear that strain in American journalism and have always fought hard against it. And yes, that’s the Brit in me.