Yesterday, Salahi had alerted the news media that she “may have been kidnapped or abducted and being held under duress” and called upon the public to “be on the look out for her, and if found please contact the authorities and please approach her and contact the authorities to intervene and that she may be forced to say she is okay, when in fact she is not and being held under possible abduction.”

Salahi’s worst fears were unfounded, but much to his chagrin, she was in the company of Schon in Memphis.

According to Good Morning America, “Hours after (Tareq) made a public plea for help in finding his wife, whom he believed had been kidnapped Tuesday, Virginia’s Warren County Sheriff’s Office released a statement saying authorities had spoken with Michaele Salahi and she was “fine” and “where she wanted to be.””

“Tareq is devastated but he is relieved to know that Michaele is safe and is okay,” said Tareq’s attorney, David Silek on GMA Thursday.

He added that divorce talk was premature, and won’t stop believing that the Salahis can work things out. “If there’s an opportunity for reconciliation, that’s something they can and ought to explore.”

Watch the segment below, courtesy of ABC News:

From TMZ:

“Tareq has issued a statement saying, ‘We are reaching to the public pleaing [sic] desperately for your help.’

He continues, ‘It is our belief as of last night, that Michaele Salahi may have been kidnapped or abducted and being held under duress and forced to tell persons, including authorities she is okay.

We are asking the public to please be on the look out for her, and if found please contact the authorities and please approach her and contact the authorities to intervene and that she may be forced to say she is okay, when in fact she is not and being held under possible abduction.

The Salahi family can be reached at 540-635-9933.’”

Hopefully this is all a misunderstanding and Michaele will turn up safe and sound.

Yep, Michaele Salahi has been kicked out of Celebrity Rehab after show host Dr. Drew Pinski decided she was just too darn healthy. From E! News:

“‘The treatment program that Celebrity Rehab documents is intended for individuals with serious substance abuse and addiction issues,’ VH1 said in a statement to E! News. ‘Prior to the taping of the current season, producers were advised that Michaele Salahi met the criteria to be treated in this setting. However, professional assessments spanning from that time to the present, found that she did not meet such criteria.

‘As a result, she is no longer participating in the program.’”

Now, in all fairness to Salahi, it would appear she never claimed to be an addict (someone from the show contact me if I’m wrong).

Her husband Tareq Salahi explained to Radar that she was actually there to deal with her stress following the White House scandal as well as Multiple Sclerosis.

“Tareq adds that Michaele takes her condition seriously and that it was the show that wanted her to pretend to be something she wasn’t. Tareq says he now has plans of exposing the makings of reality shows on national television.

‘My wife takes her health situation very seriously, she has a real diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis. You know, we can show you a bunch of emails about what they wanted her to pretend to be, therefore, but that’s going to come out later on with one of the major networks.’”

Ah, good. They’re going to be doing huge interviews about this.

You know, maybe Dr. Drew made her leave because he discovered she actually was addicted but that she was addicted to meaningless fame. If so, he probably kicked her out so that his camera men wouldn’t be her dealers.

In a totally unrelated note, the clip below ends with a statement from the Salahis’ lawyer once again stressing that they were invited to that White House party.

Here’s how it apparently went down, from Gossip Cop:

“Goldberg was not in the segment, but as the conversation went on and on between Joy Behar, Sherri Shepherd, and the D.C. Housewives, Goldberg stepped onto the show’s set, lightly tapped Salahi’s back, and told her, ‘Excuse me, can you get back to the White House, please,’ meaning she wanted Salahi to return to the subject of how she and her husband Tareq crashed President Obama’s state dinner last fall.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

Later, after hearing that Salahi was claiming she had “hit” her, an exasperated Goldberg went backstage to a room where the Salahis were, and got into a screaming match with the crashers.”

The Salahis are now accusing Goldberg of attacking Michaele. This is the official ABC response:
“At one point during Michaele Salahi’s appearance on The View on Wednesday, Whoopi lightly touched Ms. Salahi to get her attention and said to her ‘Excuse me, can you get back to the White House, please?’, meaning could Ms. Salahi return to the original subject of the conversation. After the show, Ms. Salahi and her husband accused Whoopi of hitting Ms. Salahi. As the broadcast clearly shows, the accusation was completely unfounded and erroneous. After the show and after being told she was being accused of hitting Ms. Salahi, Whoopi proceeded to defend herself verbally from this baseless claim in a heated exchange with the Salahis.”

I like how, after Michaele discussed her absurd made up drink throwing drama with her vapid castmates and after Goldberg gives her that quick jab, the other hosts let their displeasure with the White House crasher be known and Salahi uses the same condescending response she used on Lynn Berry a few months ago. “Have you ever been to the White House?” What lovely people the Salahis are.

Goldberg will be responding to the accusations on today’s show.

UPDATE: Check out Goldberg’s response here.

Today they were on MSNBC to talk about their latest run in with the Secret Service. Considering all the rumors that the Salahis will be starring in a series on MSNBC’s sister network Bravo soon (coincidence!: they also showed up on the Today show this morning), the Salahis were probably expecting a puff piece interview. But that is not what MSNBC’s Lynn Berry gave them. Things got very uncomfortable, very quickly.

Since I’m going to assume that many of you could care less about what the Salahis have to say (blah blah blah, it’s all a misunderstanding, it’s the media’s fault for blowing it up, blah blah), I suggest that you instead use the interview as a demonstration in what happens when public personas begin to slip. Watch as Lynn Berry’s cheerful TV facade gives way to the hatred of this couple buried underneath (probably beginning around the point when Michaele condescendingly tells her she doubts that Berry’s ever been to a big fundraiser before). Then delight as the Salahis begin to lose their heavily rehearsed friendly exterior (starting right after Berry has the gall to ask a follow-up question). My favorite point is the withering glare that Berry gives them right around the 6:07 point of the video below. Seeing it, I’m personally shocked that the couple didn’t melt right there on the spot.

Normally I’d say that the Salahis were the losers of this segment. However, they did get on television and, in the fame-hunting game, the standards for victory are very low.

“Considering the White House’s hulking, media-rich Web site, its Facebook page, photo galleries and podcasts on iTunes, the presidency seems less threatened by the incursion of a reality show than running an administration that is in danger of becoming one.”

– David Carr, New York Times media columnist, describing the ” all-Obama, all-the-time” era “that concluded in a reality-program couple crashing a state dinner at the White House.”

David Carr’s latest New York Times column, “Reality TV’s Glare Hits High Office,” has more zingers than Obama has photo ops, as he suggests the president scale back on the “oversharing.”

Carr accuses the “Celebrity in Chief” of dumbing down the role of a leader, creating “the impression that the leader of the free world is part of a milieu that is more TMZ than C-SPAN.” His evidence is largely pop cultural: Big Brother, Oprah, Vogue, Facebook and, of course, the White House-crashing Salahi couple and the Real Housewives of D.C. “Perhaps the Salahis were just taking the president at his word when he promised a new era of openness,” Carr suggests.

It’s just not special anymore, Carr argues, to see Barack Obama acting like a normal person, and it just might be bad for his presidency. But intuitive quotes from a VH1 exec and West Wing producer don’t do anything to support Carr blaming Obama, himself.

The Kennedys, Carr writes, balanced politics and celebrity correctly, and he quotes Jackie O saying, “I want to live my life, not record it.” But in the forty-plus years since JFK’s presidency, the press has become insatiable and Carr’s column avoids pointing the finger back at the cable news stations with 24-hours to fill, the struggling but celeb-obsessed magazine world, or yes, even the New York Times.

Last month, Mediaite’s Glynnis MacNicol suggested that politics are our new national pastime, and that media organizations were left scrambling as the 2008 election ended, with nothing compelling left to cover. “The answer increasingly appears to be that they will merely find other elections and/or turn everything into a race,” she wrote. That, or a reality show, apparently. And that’s not to say that the Obamas are not themselves complicit, but in Carr’s column one suspect — the media itself — gets off surprisingly unmentioned.

Responding to the story last night on Twitter, NYU professor and press critic Jay Rosen wondered about the assumption that the press know “what the right level of exposure is.” And if so, “How?” Salon’s editor-in-chief Joan Walsh put it thusly: “They’re blaming Obama for their bad, shallow, celebrity focused coverage of him.” That is, “it’s self-correction for the way they sold the Obama ‘brand’ (shallowly).” And though Carr’s column is indeed zingy, it might also be self-incriminating.

The Social Media Presidency [New York Times]

(photo)

I’ve been reading and re-reading the story of the “crashers”  and all of the related stories about Reality TV.

Something just isn’t right.

While the couple is described as auditioning for a Bravo TV series, and Bravo goes out of their way to say that, there won’t be final casting decision for “months”. That just isn’t how Reality TV works.

First, a bit of history.

I know about this business. While I’m happy to say that I’m not in the current crop of Reality TV shows, I both produced and executive produced many of the early shows that evolved into Reality TV.  Among them,  ‘Dog Days‘ for Animal Planet, ‘iWitness‘ for CBS eye on people,  and ‘Real ER‘ for Discovery.

Reality began as documentary, telling real stories with real characters.  Then as the importance of the genre grew there began to be the concept of ‘casting’  for documentaries.  For those of us who came from the pure documentary genre – the idea was pretty abhorrent.  But for cable execs the idea that there were attractive ‘characters’  that could make your documentary more appealing seemed harmless enough.

Flash forward,  and we have families staging fake emergencies of their children being taken aloft in a balloon. This  seems entirely predictable if you go back to Paddy Chayefsky‘s remarkably prescient film ‘Network‘.

For those of you who’d like a brief reminder (if you haven’t seen the movie, you MUST stop reading this post and find a copy or download it at once – it is beyond significant…)

Network – written by Paddy Chayefsky

In the farmhouse of the Ecumenical Liberation Army in one of the film’s most outrageous scenes, lawyers and agents are discussing lengthy, legalese contracts regarding their interpretations of production fees with Great Ahmed Khan and Lauree Hobbs. Exploding in anger, Laureen refuses to lower her distribution charges. When Mary Ann Gifford (Kathy Cronkite) and Laureen are embroiled in an argument and Gifford yells “You f–kin’ fascist!”, Khan fires his pistol into the air to silence both of them: “Man, give her the f–kin’ overhead clause!”

Diana Christensen (UBS Network Programing Exec: “Look, we’ve got a bunch of hobgoblin radicals called the Ecumenical Liberation Army who go around taking home movies of themselves robbing banks. Maybe they’ll take movies of themselves kidnapping heiresses, hijacking 747′s, bombing bridges, assassinating ambassadors. We’d open each week’s segment with that authentic footage, hire a couple of writers to write some story behind that footage, and we’ve got ourselves a series.”

George Bosch: A series about a bunch of bank- robbing guerillas?

Max Schlesinger (aging Network Executive): What’re we going to call it –the Mao Tse Tung Hour?
Diana: Why not? They’ve got Strike Force, Task Force, SWAT — why not Che Guevara and his own little mod squad? Listen, I sent you all a concept analysis report yesterday. Did any of you read it? Well, in a nutshell, it said the American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered on all sides by Vietnam, Watergate, the inflation, the depression. They’ve turned off, shot up, and they’ve fucked themselves limp. And nothing helps. Evil still triumphs over all, Christ is a dope-dealing pimp, even sin turned out to be impotent. The whole world seems to be going nuts and flipping off into spacelike an abandoned balloon. So– this concept analysis report concludes — the American people want somebody to articulate their rage for them. I’ve been telling you people since I took this job six months ago that I want angry shows. I don’t want conventional programming on this network. I want counter-culture. I want anti-establishment. [She closes the door] Now, I don’t want to play butch boss with you people. But when I took over this department, it had the worst programming record in television history. This network hasn’t one show in the top twenty. This network is an industry joke. We better start putting together one winner for next September. I want a show developed, based on the activities of a terrorist group. Joseph Stalin and his merry band of Bolsheviks. I want ideas from you people. And, by the way, the next time I send an audience research report around, you all better read it, or I’ll sack the fucking lot of you, is that clear?

(later in the film) The narrator describes further developments regarding the Mao Tse Tung Hour “The Mao Tse Tung Hour went on the air March 14th. It received a 47 share. The network promptly committed to fifteen shows with an option for ten more. There were the usual contractual difficulties.”

This is 1976 – and more than 30 years ago – and already the idea that networks could exploit the real world activities of fringe groups – and provide them with an incentive (ie:  a Network TV series)  to rob banks seemed far fetched. Or not.

But the idea that networks don’t have a very active role in what happens in front of their cameras is simply naive.

Which brings me to The White House Gate Crashers – Michaele and Tareq Salahi.

Something about the story doesn’t add up. Half Yard Productions,  the contractors who were working for Bravo claim they were auditioning – unless there’s been a huge change in the way reality shows are cast – no network is putting up funds to shoot live auditions of potential cast members… the daily cost of crews would make this kind of full blown test shooting a budget buster.  More to the point,  at some moment during the shoot it became clear to the crew that  the Salahi’s didn’t have an invite.

The New York Times reported that Mrs. Salahi went to the posh Erwin Gomez salon to have her hair done, followed into the salon by a BRAVO camera crew. This is the same salon that did her hair and makeup for her wedding. She has yet to pay a tab for thousands of dollars to the salon for that event and seems to feel that the salon should comp her service. The salon’s creative director, James Packard-Gomez, asked Mrs. Salahi to show him her White House invitation and she could not produce it.

This should have been a clue to the Bravo Crew that they were likely to be videotaping the commission of a crime (Trespassing)  and perhaps their cameras were helping to create the illusion.  After all,  would the salon have comped her if they’d been told they were ‘auditioning’  rather than being videotaped for broadcast on Bravo?  NBC reported more than two months ago that casting had been completed and that filming had begun,  with  Mrs. Salahi in the ‘cast’.  Politics Daily confirmed the casting back in October.

As long as networks reward outrageous and illegal behavior with the exposure and stardom that comes along with Network Television exposure,  you’re going to see more and more people willing to do anything for their 15 minutes of fame.  While news crews routinely witness and record criminal behavior without crossing the line into aiding and abetting criminals,  where is the line for entertainment producers? Do they have a responsibility to turn the camera off or call the authorities when it becomes clear that their presence is encouraging or dangerous and potentially criminal behavior?

I’d bet money that Michaele and Tareq Salahi will be arrested for trespassing.  Balloon dad Richard Heene and his wife Mayumi have been arrested for perpetrating a hoax.

But those who encourage or even instigate this behavior have so far remained unnamed and untouched. Perhaps with the White House Gate Crashers – that may change.

Back to 1976-  and as the network executives face Howard Beale’s declining ratings:

Frank Hackett (Network CEO): Well, the issue is: Shall we kill Howard Beale, or not? I’d like to get some more opinions on that.
Diana Christensen (UBS Head of Programing): I don’t see we have any options, Frank. Let’s kill the son-of-a-bitch.