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The Cultural Gab Fest and Elliot Mess. This is the daily podcast from Slate.com for Wednesday, March 12th, 2008. I'm Andy Bowers.

Our newest podcast feature, The Cultural Gab Fest, is back just in time to take on the colossal fall from grace of New York Governor Elliot Spitzer.

Our critics also weigh in on famous fabulists and a website so white, you'll need SPF 100 just to listen.

Now here's your host, Stephen Metcalf. Hello, and welcome to the third cultural gab fest. I'm Stephen Metcalf, Slate's critic at large, and joining me today are Dana Stevens. Hello, Dana. Hey, Steve. You are Slate's movie critic, in case you forgot. And John Swansberg, one of Slate's culture editors. Glad to be here. Welcome, everyone.

Today we're going to talk about memoir fakery, white people, and we can't avoid it.

Elliot Spitzer, the Mr. Killeen, governor of New York, as we all know, was apparently caught in a prostitution sting, soliciting sex from a very high-priced call girl. The political Gab Fest,

no doubt, is going to take this ball and run and run and run with it. But we're going to talk a little bit about the coverage. It struck me that just to start large a little bit, that there

are two kinds of immediate responses to something like the governor of New York being caught

with a prostitute,

which is this is so serious is the cable news response.

And this is so funny, which is the late night comedian response.

And both of these are enshrined in American life now.

You just sort of sit back, turn on your television, microwave the popcorn, and wait for both to sort of wash over you. So the three of us watched the coverage last night, and I'm very curious to hear what you guys took away from it. Dana, what struck you watching cable TV in the wake of this scandal? Well, I love what you just said about this is so serious and this is so funny.

And what was great about the late-breaking nature of this scandal? I mean, the press conference happened, what, at 4 p.m. or something like that? So obviously, the late-night comedians were madly scrambling to get even one joke written about this. Meanwhile, the 24-hour cable channels, which, you know, would represent the serious side of the equation, we're desperately trying to fill 24 hours with talk of a one-minute press conference. So actually the serious and the funny just converged gloriously yesterday in a way that, you know, obviously start to separate itself out as more comes out about the scandal. But I thought the cable channels were just as funny as any of the late-in-touches. And Chris Matthews is just, he's in his element in this kind of thing.

He's just, he's never happier than when it's a tabloid headline to talk about. Oh, that's funny. I missed

Chris Matthews on this. Yeah, what did Matthews do? I missed it as well. I mean, he just, Chris Matthews is the best free associator on cable news. I can't bring up any specific jokes for you. I don't think he had the level of guests that the CNN shows had.

But it's just Matthews himself. He just lets himself go. And I always want to hear him first when something like this breaks.

By the way, I should mention we're recording this on Tuesday, merely a day after this scandal broke. No doubt the salacity is only going to increase.

And the number of gory details are going to start coming over the transom in the next 24, 48 hours by the time you actually listen to this.

But, John, what struck you? You were watching Dan Abrams.

Right. Well, one thing that struck me actually is apropos to what you just said, which is namely that by the time people listen to this podcast, it'll probably be hopelessly, you know, behind the times in a way. Hopefully we'll do our best to make it memorable and immortal in its own way. But, you know, it was funny watching Colbert and The Daily Show and Leno and Letterman to see, you know, as Dana said, they had such a small window of time to make these jokes. And Colbert's joke was, you know, I call dibs on a certain headline for the New York Post. Slate had already used that headline. Two or three other websites had used that headline. I saw it on CNN. CNN used it. Elliot Mass was the headline, which was sort of inevitable. But I thought that was funny. And Letterman was that much better than Leno. I mean, you might argue that Letterman is that much better than Leno anyway.

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