That Star Jones completely lacks credibility as host of her new Court TV show comes as no surprise. She was, after all, a buffoon during her nine years on "The View."
Trying to sell her show to TV critics last month, Jones faced a tough task. We'd seen her embarrassing herself on TV for years.
She couldn't articulate what the "Star Jones" show was going to be. (Seen weekdays at 4 p.m. on Court TV, it's an hour of an overmatched Jones treating real issues and celebrity fluff equally. And ineffectively.)
And she was just short of openly dishonest with a room full of journalists. Making her way back into the limelight some 150 pounds lighter, she dodged, weaved and refused to answer questions about the obvious, turning the press conference unnecessarily nasty and confrontational.
Honestly, it was like talking to someone who had an ax sticking out of her head who refused to discuss how the ax got there.
Jones could have just said two words — gastric bypass — and gotten on with it.
When she told us she intended to "interrogate" some of her guests, a colleague said, "I want to interrogate you. Do you realize the public-relations damage you've done by being coy?"
"You really think it's public-relations damage?" she said, sounding either incredibly naive or incredibly, well, dumb. And she looked surprised when a chorus of yeses arose from the critics.
She insisted that she wanted to talk about her weight loss "in a way that's open and fair and honest," adding, "This is not the format to do it."
Because we were closed, unfair and dishonest, perhaps? She's a public-relations genius.
What Jones seemed incapable of understanding was that she was there to promote her show. We were there (at great expense to our respective publications) to report on the television industry.
She wasn't refusing to discuss her weight loss because of any high-minded purposes. She'd talk about her opinions of the likes of Paris Hilton. She'd talk about the appearance of her show's set. But she wouldn't talk about the weight loss.
And she was utterly disingenuous, insisting that anything we wrote about a show called "Star Jones" should not focus on Star Jones.
After some badgering, Jones admitted she wouldn't talk to us because, "There is one reporter who would be very annoyed with me."
Which led to a series of silly questions almost forced upon us by her own ridiculous behavior.
"Is it Barbara Walters?"
"Larry King?"
"Is it me?"
Real life was surreal.
After a bit more badgering, Jones admitted that nobody interviewed her — that she wrote a first-person article.
So that would make that comment about "one reporter who would be very annoyed with me," um, a lie?
The air went out of the room when Jones admitted she had written a column for Glamour magazine.
More and more surreal.
Yours truly wrapped up this memorable/useless press conference with what seemed to me to be an obvious question:
"If, on your show, you have a guest appear and there's an obvious question to be asked from that person sitting right in front of you and that person refuses to discuss it — goes off in another direction, begs off — how will you handle it?"
"I hope to handle it with the same sort of gentleness that you've handled me," Jones said — by far her best answer of the hour.
It's that sort of wit that's not in evidence on her show.
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com