Two Ways Of Misunderstanding The Spitzer Scandal

When the Spitzer scandal first broke on Monday, all the headlines said that there was proof he was "involved" with a prostitution ring. In retrospect, that makes journalistic sense: there was proof that he wired a shit-ton of money to the Emperors Club, but the papers couldn't claim as fact that the money was used as payment for sex.

But when I saw the headline Spitzer Had Ties To Upscale Escort Agency, my mind didn't immediately go to "john." At first I thought it was another tempest in a teapot..like, someone had discovered he co-owned a condo that was used for a rendezous, or he had invested in a modelling agency run by a friend, not knowing the true nature of the business.

Then, when I clicked over to Google News, and saw that basically every newspaper in the world was reporting Spitzer Involved In Prostition Ring, I thought it meant that Spitzer was RUNNING the prostitutes. And I was busy, had a lot going on, so I actually spent most of the day thinking that.

Here's a fun thought experiment: how would the past week have been different if the world saw the lights of the Goodyear blimp and it said Governor Eliot Spitzer's a pimp?

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Moving on to the prostitute in question, it's weird that most media outlets are going with the worst picture of her...the one where she's giving a backwards peace sign with her black fingernails:

http://gothamist.com/2008/03/12/spitzers_kriste.php

Or they go with the second worst picture of her, the one from her MySpace page:

http://www.myspace.com/ninavenetta

(I have no idea how long that last one will be up. Also, even by the standards of MySpace, the comments on her site are PRICELESS.)

She's clearly an attractive girl--though after an exhaustive inspection of the Emperors' Club website cache, I can say she wouldn't have been my first choice if I had $5000 burning a hole in my pocket--but she doesn't seem very photogenic.

In fact, she seems really, uh, masculine in those pictures, and this caused my second misunderstanding of the Spitzer scandal: for about ten minutes, I wondered mightily if the real story was that Spitzer had hooked up with a transvestite, and--like the "involved with" and "tied to" issue above--the newspapers couldn't actually SAY that.

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Talking about this today, nearly a week too late, is really just a way for me to link to this interesting FAQ about the scandal, put together by the New York Times:

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/the-times-answers-spitzer-scandal-questions/index.html

Note that they clear up the cause of my first misunderstanding. (They maintain their silence on the tranny issue.)

I wish the Times would do this for all big news stories. Hell, I wish there was a site that just compiled these.