COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

A "smart" piece of journalism would be to tie these stories and more together and point out the relevance of these "private" stories to the larger pandemic without igniting new and existing cultural and class wars currently smoldering. Ideologies from Friedman, Lippman and even Reagan-Thatcherism and the neoCons would be relevant to make this all clearer and perhaps "obvious". To focus on Liebovitz is to merely point out a symptom and ignore a larger cancerous disease.
It's easy and very useful for publications like NY Mag (its rather carniverous or more accurately cannibalistic when one notes that NYMag is owned by CondeNast?-which i believe is correct given the links on the masthead). The real story is not about Leibovitz.

Notes below from the NYmag article:

Leibovitz has begun to think of herself less as a celebrity artist leading a charmed life and more as a single mother of three fighting to keep a roof over her head and food on her family’s table.
Leibovitz once described her portraiture method as “get ’em somewhere where they’re bored shitless and there’s nothing to do except take pictures.” From there, she would work her subjects to the point of exhaustion, a state that could lead to revealing moments of vulnerability.
to photograph Whoopi Goldberg in a bathtub full of milk, she could now dispatch a staff to buy and warm dozens of gallons of milk.
Soon, Leibovitz and Sontag were a couple. Sontag was sixteen years older, and while she had had female lovers, neither woman identified herself as a lesbian. Still, they were romantically involved.
Sontag, whose 1977 monograph On Photography is required reading for most photography majors, gave Leibovitz, who believed the label of “celebrity photographer” was demeaning, a new kind of credibility.
Leibovitz’s housekeeper, Sookhee, would clean Sontag’s place, too, and Leibovitz’s personal chef would bring meals to Sontag. Sontag once called Paris “the alternative capital of my imagination”; Leibovitz bought an apartment for the couple to use overlooking the Seine. In 2001, at 51, Leibovitz gave birth to a daughter, Sarah. (Leibovitz also had twin daughters, Samuelle and Susan, born via surrogate and named after her father and Sontag, in 2005.)
Leibovitz’s relationship with Sontag was not mentioned in Sontag’s New York Times obituary, and Leibovitz did not speak at Sontag’s memorial service.
The New York Times critic Roberta Smith dubbed the portraits “professional but pedestrian.” “It is hard not to feel that Sontag functioned a bit like Ms. Leibovitz’s own personal celebrity,” Smith wrote, “enabling her to share a fame that she found more authentic than her own.”
Last year, Rieff [Sontags' son] published Swimming in a Sea of Death, a memoir of his mother’s battle with cancer. He mentions Leibovitz’s name exactly twice in the book, once to describe her pictures of his dead and dying mother as “carnival images of celebrity death.”
In 1990, gallery owner Mary Boone paid Leibovitz $197,000 to take five portraits of artists she represented to promote her gallery.
It was the Range Rover, the trips to Paris, the chef and housekeeper, the handyman, the personal yoga instructor, the terrace gardener, and the live-in nanny. There was only one man Leibovitz deemed qualified to work on anything involving air-conditioning or ductwork at either residence, and he lived in Vermont.
“Photographers aren’t professional athletes, recording artists, or supermodels,” the source says. “Compared to 99 percent of the world, she makes a vast fortune. The problem occurs when a person becomes so famous that they start feeling that they’re more in line financially with Oprah or Madonna.” The cover featured a Leibovitz picture of Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette in a towering wig. Leibovitz was probably too consumed to see any irony in the fact that she and a slew of assistants—as well as the documentary film crew following her—had traveled all the way to Versailles, the site of Marie Antoinette’s last stand, to get their shot.
“Goldman Sachs owns a portion of the loan underwritten by an affiliate of Art Capital to Annie Leibovitz, but we have no involvement in the current sales-agreement dispute between Art Capital and Ms. Leibovitz. We have proposed to Art Capital that we terminate the current loan agreement with their affiliate so that we can work directly with Ms. Leibovitz to help her resolve her financing needs.”
Paula Leibovitz thinks it’s time for her sister to start over. “As a person from California, I’ve been trying to get her to move out here,” she says. “I keep telling her, everyone’s really nice in California.”