Tuesday's New York Times, following up Amanda Gordon's reporting for Bloomberg (here and here) without giving her appropriate credit, reported on Stephen A. Schwarzman's 70th birthday party:
In the age of Mr. Trump and his famed golden penthouse, Mr. Schwarzman's party has largely been ignored except for a bit of chattering by Town & Country and sniping among the schadenfreude-loving Acela Corridor Crowd.
Perhaps Mr. Trump has normalized conspicuous consumption. On Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, there were a few smuggled snapshots of the Schwarzman party passed around, but not much in the way of great viral outcry. A small band of protesters who tried to picket the party on Saturday night did not get anywhere close to it, nor was there much media pickup on the group's message.
The collective yawn may say something larger about the shifts in the way parts of the country think about great wealth — and perhaps how they have always thought about big money.
Then the New York Times reported on the party a second time, using an anonymous source: "A person familiar with the planning who was not authorized by the host to speak on the record estimated it at between $7 million and $9 million."
A Times update last year on anonymous sourcing policy said, "granting anonymity allows us to reveal the atrocities of terror groups, government abuses or other situations where sources may risk their lives, freedom or careers by talking to us. In sensitive areas like national security reporting, it can be unavoidable." How the price tag of a birthday party fits that description escapes my understanding, but maybe I am missing something.
Today the New York Times reports on the party for yet a third time:
So Steven A. Schwarzman throws himself a 70th birthday party complete with camels, a gondolier, a 12-minute fireworks display and a performance by Gwen Stefani — with an estimated cost ranging from an improbable $20 million to a more likely $7 million to $9 million — and the tsk-tsking can be heard from coast to coast, as it is cited as one more example of the wretched, over-the-top excess of the new Trumpian era.
So which is it?
Was the Schwarzman party, as the Times claimed on Tuesday, "largely...ignored" and greeted with a "collective yawn," a sign that America has grown more accepting of conspicuous consumption? Or was the Schwarzman party, as the Times claims Thursday, greeted with "tsk-tsking ...heard from coast to coast, as it is cited as one more example of the wretched, over-the-top excess of the new Trumpian era"?
It seems difficult for both these assessments, diametrically opposed as they are, to be true at the same time. Perhaps the Times may claim that the two different takes are explained by the elapsed time — the tsk-tsking emerged on Tuesday and Wednesday as the world observed the business-section-front fireworks photograph by Ms. Gordon, my former New York Sun and Forward colleague, that accompanied the business-section-front column about how the party had been largely ignored. Or perhaps both "hot takes" are in a way phony, attempts to pretend there is some deeper cultural meaning in what really is just an attempt by the Times to generate some web traffic from writing about a party that reportedly featured fireworks, camels, a pop star, and members of the Trump family and administration.