From its pompous East Coast perch on high, the New York Post this morning slammed Orange County's women as “brain dead.” Columnist Adam Buckman writes that Bravo channel's new “The Real Housewives of New York City” is an “obnoxious” show that “in no way represents the vast majority of women” in Manhattan. According to Buckman, folks around the nation will now believe wrongly that his city is on “breast implant and face- lift” par with Orange County.
“Thanks, Bravo, for bringing this great city, with its more than 8 million residents representing every known corner of the globe, down to the level of brain-dead Orange County, Calif.–the land of lookalike McMansions where the first ‘Real Housewives’ series was spawned,” Buckman huffs.
Dear Bucky: Okay, OC isn't the intellectual capital of the nation. Folks here would rather go to the movies than read a book. We've got too many McMansions stuffed onto tiny lots. Our government, though uniformly conservative, is just as wasteful as any in more liberal strongholds. Traffic sucks because everybody wants to drive alone. Some segment of people–just like in NYC–obsess about boob jobs and face lifts.
But we're not a place dominated by bimbos or, the other tired stereotype, dope-smoking surfers. For example, 30 percent of our population (same as Manhattan, by the way) is foreign-born. We have large, thriving Latino, Vietnamese, Japanese, Central American, Chinese, Korean, Middle Eastern and Cambodian communities. Don't tell television producers, but we also have just as many poor white neighborhoods as wealthy. (Thanks to Cops, Riverside gets all that equally unfavorable publicity.)
After nailing OC and its women, Buckman did what lazy journalists are prone to do: He gave himself an out.
“Were they [Bravo producers] fairly representative of Orange County's 'real' housewives?” he wrote. “I wouldn't know. I don't know Orange County from the Orange Bowl.”
Thanks for the informed insights, pal.
— R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.