Earlier: Time to Assess Patrick Gavin’s Dress

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Patrick Gavin and Jeff Dufour, those pretty gossip boys over at the Examiner, have penned a second item in less than a month on Jeff Gannon’s book, which, according to our own reporting at Radar, has been selling less well than Gannon has hoped. So! The question begs to be asked: Are Gavin and Dufour in bed with Gannon?

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Examiner’s Yeas and Nays column has gone on hiatus for two weeks:

Yeas & Nays will be off for the next two weeks, returning on Aug. 27 with more people, power and politics from inside the Beltway. Thanks for reading during our first year, and enjoy the rest of your summer!

Expect more blogging at FishbowlDC from Patrick Gavin who takes credit for half of the Examiner’s column each day along with his partner in crime Jeff Dufour.

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Wonkette likes to use that silly “gossip” moniker, but this morning they simply rehash a fun WaPo Reliable Source brief about the Allbritton family’s purchase of a swank gazillion dollar Georgetown mansion. Pathetic. Shouldn’t Wonkette be finding new gossip to report? Like Gawker does  in NYC?

Speaking of the Reliable Source column, Amy Argetsinger and Roxanne Roberts, its authors , appeared on Tucker Carlson’s MSNBC show on Friday (supplanting Carlson’s usual dirt-mongers Jeff Dufour and Patrick Gavin from the DC Examiner), and, boy did they look cute. Amy in a pretty pink blouse and Rox in a sleek black sweater.

Apparently, Amy had been super hyper mode all last week thanks to her reporting on director David Lynch’s recent visit to DC (ironically, to talk about his new meditation book). Rox had to tell Tucker that he was actually getting a much more “mellow version of Amy” than she’s been dealing with lately. Everybody’s jittery all of a sudden — we don’t get it! 

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What were we thinking in actually analyzing a whole Yeas and Nays column earlier today? Even Jessica Cutler doesn’t have time for the rag:

Last week, I was asked to rank the attractiveness of this year’s Congressional challengers for the Washington DC Examiner, but I didn’t have the time to look at any of the photos because I was busy moving. So I told Jeff [Dufour], “none of them are hot anyway,” but I didn’t mean it. I was just making excuses for my laziness.

We shall never make this mistake again. And we’re gonna get a helluva lot lazier, too.

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Let’s use the Examiner’s Yeas & Nays column today to dissect a gossip column, shall we:

Item 1:  ”Senate candidates: The cream of the crop”: In which Patrick Gavin and Jeff Dufour ask readers to rank the hotness of Senatorial candidates on the Examiner Web site (They did the same thing yesterday with House candidates). We’ve seen this before. It’s called Gavin’s annual “Hottest Media Types” contest that he does for FishbowlDC at the height of the dog days of summer. It’s boring when journos are the main course and equally so when politicos get the attention. The columnists even quote a non-amused Jessica Cutler for the item (which has never been done before), saying, “Besides, none of them are hot anyway.” Radical!

Gossip value:  

Item 2: “Figurine fetches big dough on eBay”: An item focused on the selling of a Mark Foley figurine with trousers around its ankles. Yes, no new gossip about the real Mark Foley — let’s leave that to the news department, right? Instead, let’s write about figurines of him. Like Wonkette already did the day before. 

Gossip value:

Item 3: “Shell Oil honcho denies price-fixing on his watch”: Short piece on John Hofmeister speech at the National Press Club on Monday, in which he denied suggestions that oil prices have dropped “to improve the Republicans’ lot in November.” Might there have been time after the talk for the fellas to really grill him on the issue? Sure, but instead they focus on the question, ‘”In 15 years … what kind of gas will fuel your car?”‘ Fart gas, perhaps, because this is stinky.

Gossip value:

Item 4: “Will Redbirds help Dems convert red states to blue ones?”: The Cardinals versus the Tigers spawns a rather lengthy item (comparatively) on the old legend of the World Series as a predictor of midterm election winners. However, the legend hasn’t even always proven true, as the boys point out. We predict this isn’t gossip.

Gossip value:

Item 5: “Media mix”: In which the kiddos e-mailed Spencer Abraham, a former Senator from Michigan, last week for God-only-knows what reason. Maybe they prodded him to give some pithy one-liners, as DCist’s Sommer Mathis has revealed Gavin instructed her to do when being quoted for the paper? Didn’t work, if so. Sample: Q: “What are you listening to on your iPod right now?” A: “The Beach Boys.” Yawn.

Gossip value:

Item 6: “Speakeasy”: They actually turn to an editorial in The Ledger of Lakeland, Fla. in order to achieve the one funny quote in today’s column: “Katherine Harris’s bid for the U.S. Senate bears more resemblance to a Monty Python skit than a campaign for high public office.” Yes, a Washington newspaper that’s trying to compete with WaPo turns to a tiny circ Florida paper for humor, instead of gathering some fresh, fun material itself. Shame. Pure shame.

Gossip value:

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From Sommer Mathis’ October 5, 2006 blog post:  

Today my first ‘witty quip’ appeared in the Examiner’s Yeas and Neas (sic) Column, which I’ll be contributing to from time to time. Basically Patrick Gavin sends out a single question and you’re supposed to send back a funny one-liner. I clearly failed to achieve comedy in this first outing, but perhaps you can at least get a laugh out of my being lumped in with Norm Ornstein and Alexander Dryer.

Um, Gavin, your commenters are “supposed” to send back funny one-liners? Can’t they simply be witty without the prodding? Where are the ethics in this crazy world of gossip? 

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Update, 12:30 p.m.: Gavin’s still trying to make sense of Grove’s op-ed. Ha. Patty, we thought you were so confident that Grove would return to DC. (Until Big Head Rob got the scoop that you couldn’t, straight from the source.)  

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9:42 a.m. entry: Laughed our asses off when we read Patrick Gavin’s triumphant link to Lloyd Grove’s LA Times Sunday opinion piece on being a gossip columnist. Wrote Grove:

The most satisfying gossip column offers a dollop of drama, conflict and misbehavior, along with a dash of hypocrisy and humor. It views this complicated world through the prism of personality – and makes things, if temporarily, accessible and comprehensible…

We think it might be called ironic, or something, that the so-called “gossip” site FishbowlDC – mainly a site that links to other sites and one that tends to break no real gossip — would even dare to bring attention to Grove’s very true words.

Gavin himself performs somewhat better at being a gossip with his the help of his colleague, Jeff Dufour, at the Examiner’s Yeas and Nays, but why doesn’t any of that ethic wear off on the Mediabistro fishstick enerterprise? Where’s the fuckin’ beef?

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A keen-eyed reader has pointed out that Express’ Mike Grass provided a pictorial of him cooking spinach this week (don’t ask), but he must have forgotten that he attended a rival daily rag’s party just days ago. In the pic, a bottle of Examiner’s Yeas and Nays wine — vintage cheap — can can clearly be seen. The drink was offered as schwag at the column’s big launch event last week. Isn’t this kind of cross-promotion Express-ly illegal?

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Step 1: To any newsroom naysayers, say “Screw ‘em” (via Big Head Rob, of course); sit idly by, watching Mediabistro pick up the news.

Step 2: Make a dashing appearance on CNBC’s Donny Deutsch show; talk about not getting molested when you were a Congressional page.

Step 3: Revisit Big Head Rob, and do something that other bigtime District gossips say they would never do: give props to someone else’s gossip column. (You can start paying attention now Patrick Gavin and Jeff Dufour). Yes, U.S. News’ Paul Bedard says he’s a big fan of the Examiner’s Yeas and Nays, calling it “must reading.”

“I regularly steal their quotes for my Out Loud section — with attribution, of course — and think that they are often at least a day ahead on gossipy stuff than their competition,” he told us last night. “And these guys work. I’ve run into them at boring political breakfasts and at nighttime events.”

But, like us, Bedard thinks that the picture of the dudes that accompanies each column is a tad overdone. “Please ditch the six inch photo,” he quips. “Or at least change the wardrobe once in a while…”

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