Last night Alec Baldwin made his guest appearance on Law & Order: SVU playing a reporter for a paper very similar to his media nemesis: The NY Post. While his character wasn't exactly the kind of reporter that Baldwin himself has butt heads with in the past, there were hints at the actor's troubles with the tabloid.
Baldwin played Jimmy Mac, a tabloid monster making big headlines to sell papers and maintain a modicum of celebrity. He also sports what seemed to be a symbolic cough, one that confusingly makes a couple of appearances and seems to represent The Reporter's Rotting Soul. Anyway, while there were no paparazzi in the episode, Baldwin's Mac does have some lines that mirror his real life sentiments regarding media. Namely, in his last scene, when he turns a new leaf and redeems himself (a classic Baldwinism!).
While discussing his final story (a takedown of the episode's real Bad Guy), he tells Detective Olivia Benson: "I already posted it on the web. Every time that kid's name goes into a search engine, this story will come up. He can hire all the reputation managers he wants... he's toast."
Last year, following an incident that had the press labeling Baldwin a racist, he told us, "The internet has killed forgetting. Sometimes forgetting is a good thing, we need to be able to forget things to move forward. Or set them aside and put them in a logical place in the past. The internet has killed that, things live on, everything you've ever done, everything I've ever done, it's just right there. Like a whole channel of it on TV, if you will. And that's a really difficult thing. I have to deal with a Google page now that says I'm a racist."
But don't cry for Baldwin, as he says in his parting SVU words: "Don't cry for Jimmy Mac. I said my peace, now the whole world knows I got balls the size of Jupiter again." Okay.
