By Steve Friess
WHHSH = Nails On A Blackboard
Not long ago, my biggest irritation with the national media as it pertained to Vegas was the knee-jerk insistence on inserting gambling and neon-jungle references into every story no matter how irrelevant. Somehow a sentence in a story I wrote about a 10-year-old HIV patient came out the other end with this phrase tacked onto the front of it: “In the shadow of the Las Vegas Strip…”
Now I’d long for that kind of problem. My newest complaint is what I refer to on my other blog as “WHHSH Shame.” That is – and it almost pains me to actually have to write it out so I’m only going to do it one time: “What Happens Here Stays Here.”
You know WHHSH. That tired old saying that was repurposed to brilliant effect to capture the essence of the naughtiness and alternative reality of why people love Las Vegas. As an ad campaign, R&R Partners has done smashingly on behalf of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority to promote the destination. In a blink it became a pop culture moment that rose to the level of being deployed by Billy Crystal on an Academy Awards telecast.
No quarrel with that. But in recent months I’ve started to notice that WHHSH is now the crutch of choice for journalistic hacks everywhere. And frequently, it’s not even used in a way that’s accurate. Example: An Associated Press piece on the mini-Vegas built at Legoland began, “What happens in Legoland Las Vegas will stay in Legoland Las Vegas -- if the designers have anything to say about it.” Not just unclever, but untrue. The Legoland folks want word of their $1 million exhibit to get out, don’t they?
Try this one on: The sheriff and undersheriff in San Mateo, Calif., were arrested in Vegas in a prostitution sting in April. It's a sensationally tawdry tale and the cops' denials are painful and silly, but San Francisco Chronicle scribe John Cote deserves to be jailed, too, for beginning his juicy story with: "What happens in Vegas doesn't necessarily stay in Vegas after all." It’s worth noting that the slogan is WHHSH, not WHiVSiV. And please don’t make me spell that out for you.
Out of town papers aren’t the only guilty parties here, which makes me even sadder. The Las Vegas Review-Journal committed two almost identical WHHSH violations in recent months. In April, atop a Corey Levitan piece about how the Internet is being used to embarrass, entrap and otherwise observe Las Vegans, the headline read: "What happens in Vegas ... goes on the Web.” And on June 2, the front page headline over an Omar Sofradzija piece about Google’s new street-level Strip photo tour read: "What Happens Here is Now on Google.” In the second case, like the instance with Legoland, it’s a lie: Google took snapshots at one moment in time – before the Stardust implosion, in fact -- and there’s nothing in any of those pictures that anyone would reasonably view as showing something “happening” unless by “happening” you mean people waiting for lights to change.
There are signs this affliction will get worse before better. Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz will star in "What Happens in Vegas," described by the Hollywood Reporter thus: "Following a night of debauchery in Vegas, two strangers (Diaz and Kutcher) discover they have gotten married and one of them wins a huge jackpot with the other's quarter. In trying to determine the rightful beneficiary of the winnings, the duo embarks on a series of plots to undermine the other, falling in love along the way." (Isn't Diaz a little young for Ashton?)
I know I’m fighting a losing battle when, like that AIDS story mentioned earlier, my own work is being perverted in this way. The headline over a New York Magazine piece I have running in the June 18 issue about why Broadway is failing here reads: “What opens in Vegas closes in Vegas.”
I fought as hard as I could without offending my high-paying editors. And I lost. But hey, at least it’s true.
Steve Friess is a Vegas-based writer who contributes regularly to Newsweek, USA Today, The New York Times, Vegas and many others. Contact him at [email protected].