Hot Dog Oligarch, Shy German Theologian, and other media labels of the year
When it comes to beloved holiday traditions and enduring cultural touchstones that reliably deliver additional joy to the season, our sort-of-annual Media Label of the Year column surely isn’t one of them.
Yet we persist with this 100% un-awaited exercise in which we highlight the media’s ceaseless compulsion to pin newsmakers and celebrities with odd labels for reasons mostly inexplicable.
Though labeling is mostly the purview of headline writers, the people who couldn’t seem to decide when Barbara Walters died whether it was Pioneering TV Journalist Barbara Walters or Legendary News Anchor Barbara Walters, media labels can spring up from a range of often unexpected sources.
Deep within the pages of the best seller The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, for example, the sensational novelist James McBride conjures a character with the label Successful Budapest Hatmaker.
Like everything he writes, that’s an almost indefinable beauty in it.
Russian Sausage Tycoon
But can it compete for Media Label of the Year against such depressingly utilitarian constructs as Fired Unvaccinated Allegheny County Worker or Brazilian Drag Queen or Serial Fraudster, particularly when Serial Fraudster got itself affixed to someone who was not Donald Trump?
That’s the mission for this column, to identify the most creative and useful media label of 2023, and while the range of sources brought in a typical bumper crop, quality wasn’t great. In fact, perhaps aligning with global events, the whole discipline seemed to take a dark turn this year.
Russian Sausage Tycoon certainly appeared to be a worthy contestant, as did Billionaire Russian Warlord, but in both cases, the labelee met an untimely doom. The sausage guy, Pavel Antov, who also carried the media label
Hot Dog Oligarch, got defenestrated from the third floor of a luxury hotel. Though his death was officially judged a suicide, news accounts could not omit that he was a vocal critic of Vladimir Putin, who needs no media label. A somewhat similar fate awaited the billionaire Yevgeny Prigozhin, who’d somewhat ill-advisedly mounted a coup against the Russian president, only to have his private plane, according to one account, “abruptly plunge to earth while cruising at 28,000 feet.”
Bankrupt Conspiracy Theorist
Labels similar to Goebbels Quoting Indiana Republican and Nazi-Promoting Ex-Trump Staffer were ubiquitous, and when the 2023 labels weren’t grimly attached, they were too often unintentionally confusing. Readers shouldn’t need a search engine to distinguish a Charlottesville Tiki Torcher from a Divisive Trans Activist TikToker, is all I’m saying.
No one’s seen a Charlottesville Tiki Torcher since 2017, but some of those marching white supremacists were indicted only this August, about the time Dylan Mulvaney unwittingly caused a stir when Bud Light produced a can commemorating the trans journey of the young TikTok star. Not terribly impressed, Kid Rock joined the internet discussion by
turning an assault rifle on a perfectly good case of beer, which is when this column submitted what we thought was a highly useful media label for Mr. Rock: Rocker, Rapper, Brief Baywatch Babe Bridegroom and One-Time Waffle House Pugilist. You’re welcome.
For it’s part, the Post-Gazette again merely dabbled in media labelling, where it typically brings a conservative game plan. The late Lou Pappan, who passed in April, drew the solid Celebrated Beaver County Restauranteur, and the paper’s best attempt was probably Evicted Airport Concession Operator. Points subtracted for the fact that the evictee was an airmall management company rather than a person.
Jailed Iranian Activist, Bankrupt Conspiracy Theorist, Disgraced Sports Doctor, Amiable Seismologist, and the obscure label for the late Pope Benedict, Shy German Theologian, all were notable constructions in 2023, but none were of the superior rhetorical character of some of our past winners like West African Puppy Scammer, Hot Pocket Heiress and Stripper Turned Pharma Executive.
Drum roll, please
Our three finalists, however, might have taken media labelling
to a new level, whatever that means, and the first is Trusted Celebrity Facialist.
A facialist is someone who prepares faces for intensely public events, defined here as those requiring a red carpet preshow. Joanna Vargas, to whom we first noticed this label attached, has done this for celebrities such as Julianne Moore and Maggie Gyllenhaal, so obviously she’s trusted.
Not to be pedantic, but always go with a Trusted Celebrity Facialist, as opposed to, say, a Goebbels Quoting Celebrity Facialist.
Another finalist is Oleaginous Clickbait Monkey, chosen mostly for its swashbuckling etymology, in this case by Rick Wilson, the Lincoln Project agitator, to describe Utah Senator Mike Lee.
Our winner though, because somebody’s gotta do it, is one of many media labels attached to flailing presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, whose Navy career included stints as a physical fitness trainer, a recruiter and, as he was sometimes known, Assistant Urinalysis Coordinator Ron DeSantis.
Have a great holiday everybody.