Vanity Fair's December cover was, by all accounts, a score: a gorgeous, doe-eyed shot of a winso... Kate Moss on VF: With so ma

Vanity Fair's December cover was, by all accounts, a score: a gorgeous, doe-eyed shot of a winsome, un-strung-out looking Kate Moss with the coverline: "Kate Moss: The Inside Story of the Cocaine, the Boyfriend, the Shattered Career. Can She Come Back?" Readers could be forgiven for thinking that Vanity Fair had scored an interview with the supermodel. It had not.

At the Globe & Mail, New York columnist Simon Houpt raises an eyebrow at Vanity Fair's inability to score an interview with its subject. He recalls interviewing Graydon Carter who said of his subjects: "Most of the time, we figure out who we want, and then we just get them." Case in point: the bestselling Jennifer Aniston September cover by Leslie Bennetts.* Case not in point: Vicky Ward's December cover story on Kate Moss, which cobbles together factoids from the public record with comments from her friends (we're to trust that these people are friends and not "hangers on" as friends of Moss boyfriend Pete Doherty are described).

Ward's write-around glosses over the lack of access, never specifically alluding to any attempt to contact Moss or even whether she had an official spokesperson (at one point she cites Moss' lawyer Gerrard Tyrrell, but it's unclear whether she spoke to him or lifted from the public record). Ward does write that Moss "has rarely given interviews -- and then usually only to top magazines, such as American Vogue." I'd say snap, but can you snap yourself?

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