SCRIBBLE SCRIBBLE: The Media According to Nora Ephron

Scribble scribble, indeed. From March 1975 to July 1977 Nora Ephron entertained the readers of Esquire with word that: Dorothy Schiff was what was wrong with the New York Post; People magazine was ""a potato chip"" (it ""makes me feel that I haven't read or learned or seen anything""); Brendan Gill's Here at the New Yorker was ""one of the most offensive books I have read in a long time""; Bob Haldeman took CBS for $50,000 (those feeble, self-serving interviews) and Richard Goodwin maneuvered Esquire out of $12,500 and an apology--in the process demonstrating, Ephron contends (in a piece that ran in [MORE] after Esquire refused it), that everything charged against him was true. There are also personality pieces, curiously complementary, on the silly, insular Palm Beach Social Pictorial and the cozy, insular Ontario Apartments newsletter. What most of these media phenomena have in common, besides Ephron's contempt for them, is that they had no merit or standing B.E. Two exceptions are a discerning low-key interview with Russell Baker and a funny piece on ""Uncle Art"" Ephron the TV carpet campaigner. The pity of it is, she knows better: every damning thing that can be said about this compost heap, Ephron says about one or another of her trashy subjects (and, covering her tracks, about herself for having written about them). Including ""Nobody really cares.