Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (43 page)

41. Thorn Geier, “Eye on the ‘90s,”
U.S. News & World Report,
May 29, 1995, p. 21.

42. Susan Ferraro, “Author, a Hot Political Commodity, Hints at How He’d Repair the System,”
New York Times,
April 7,1995, p. 33.

43. Kevin Phillips, “Alleged Clinton Scandals Should Receive Closer Scrutiny,” NPR’s
Morning Edition,
July 22,1996, Transcript #1916-11.

44. James Warren, “Bork Blames Yale for Decline of Western Civilization,”
Chicago Tribune,
December 8, 1996, p. 2.

45. Ed Bark, “ ‘Adventures from the Book of Virtues’ Is a Gosh-Darned, Lofty “Toon,”
Buffalo News,
September 3, 1996, p. 5C.

46. “Undaunted History,”
News-week,
November 1996, p. 80.

47. “Washington Whispers,” 17.5.
News & World Report,
October 5,1998, p. 9.

48. David J. Lynch, “Major Best Seller,”
USA Today,
November 8,1999, p. 11 A.

49. Martin Arnold, “Making Books; Run It Up, See Who Salutes,”
New York Times,
May 18,2000, p. E3.

50. Bruce Fretts, “Talking Tall; TV Journalists Ted Koppel, Bill O’Reilly, and Larry King Share Their Innermost Thoughts. But Are They Fit to Print?”
Entertainment Weekly,
November 17, 2000, p. 115.

51. Richard Zoglin, “A Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy?”
Time,
January 28, 2002, p. 12.

52. Richard Bernstein, “A Publisher of Conservative Books Complains,”
New York Times,
July 19, 1993.

53. Ibid.

54. Anthony Lewis, “Abroad at Home: Sleaze with Footnotes,”
New York Times,
May 21,1993, p. A27.

55. Deirdre English,
“The Real Anita Hill:
The Untold Story,”
The Nation,
June 28,1993, p. 910.

56. David Streitfeld, “Writers of the Right.” (“If
Strange Justice
is lucky and sells 70 percent of its print-run, the net sale will be about 80,000 copies—significantly under the 115,000 achieved by
The Real Anita Hill.
”)

57. Matthew Flamm, “Right Makes Might; Books by Political Conservatives Are the New York Publishing Establishment’s Hottest Ticket,”
Newsday,
January 30,1995, p. B3.

58. Edwin McDowell, “As Book Companies Grow, They Seem to Become Timid,”
New York Times,
August 7,1989, p. D8.

59. Free speech-loving liberals such as Michael Harrington called Buckley’s book “fascist,” and Arthur Schlesmger Jr. called it “totalitarian.”

60. Martin Arnold, “Making Books; Run It Up, See Who Salutes.”

61. Walter Goodman, “He’s No. 1,”
New York Times,
February 21, 1993.

62. Martin Arnold, “Making Books; Best-Seller Lists Get a New Job,”
New York Times,
January 10,2002.

63. See, e.g., Matthew Grimm “Corridor Talk,”
Brandweek,
October 21,1991 (“The publisher gave Naomi Wolf a $600,000 advance for a follow-up to her
The Beauty Myth [Fire with Fire],
reports
Variety.
Wolf’s book blasted the continued stereotyping of post-feminist women.”); Chauncey Mabe, “Pulling No Punches Author Naomi Wolf Takes On the Hard-Core Leftists Who Alienate Those Feminism Should Embrace,”
Sun-Sentinel,
January 2,1994 (“And Wolf’s defense of sex—in her case, the good old, politically suspect heterosexual variety—is so strong that her next book
[Promiscuities]
is due to be a combination of sexual memoir and theoretical discussion of adolescent sexuality. She is reported to have received a $500,000 advance.”); Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson, “Naomi Wolf Talks About Her Role in the

NOTES,
pp. 104-108

Gore Campaign,”
ABC News This Week,
November 7, 1999 (Wolf said she “took a cut in pay to work for Al Gore” at $180,000 per year, referring to a book advance for
Misconceptions
of between $400,000 and $600,000.).

64. Naomi Wolf,
Promiscuities,
New York: Random House, 1997.

65. “You Ask the Questions: Naomi Wolf,”
The Independent
(London), September 12, 2001. (“She shot to fame in 1990 with the publication of
The Beauty Myth,
a scorching attack on the exploitation of women by the beauty industry, which was described by the
New York Times
as ‘one of the most important books of the 20th century’.. .”); Femail.com, www.femail.com.au/misconceptions.html,
“Misconceptions,
a new book by Naomi Wolf.” (“Naomi Wolf’s first book,
The Beauty Myth,
was named one of the most significant works of the twentieth century by the
New York Times.
Published in more than fourteen countries, it was an international bestseller.”)

66. “And Bear in Mind,”
New York Times,
May 26, 1991.
(“The Beauty Myth:
How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, by Naomi Wolf. [Morrow.] A sweeping, vigorous book about the ways women enslave themselves—and their bank accounts—to an industry that promises physical perfection.”)

67. Nancy S. Dye, “What Color Is Your Reading List?”
New York Times,
March 31, 1991.

68. Cited in Michiko Kakutani, “Books of the Times; Helpful Hints for an Era of Practical Feminism,”
New York Times,
December 3,1993.

69. “Notable Books of the Year 1993,”
New York Times,
December
5,
1993, p. 42.
(“Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century.
By Naomi Wolf. [Random House.] A rambunctious book calling for women to lay siege to America’s crumbling male-centered, male-controlled social structure, to claim the victory they have already won.”)

70. Laurel Graeber, “New & Noteworthy Paperbacks,”
New York Times,
September 18, 1994.

71. Geraldine Fabrikant, “The Media Business; Random House’s Evans: Big Spender, Big Sales,”
New York Times,
March 8,1993, p. Dl.

72. Franklin Foer, “Book Publishing,”
Slate Magazine,
December 6,1997.

73. Martin Arnold, “Making Books; Run It Up, See Who Salutes.”

74. See, e.g., Paul D. Colford, “A Voluminous Publishing Merger / Random House Valued at $1.3B in Planned Sale to Bertelsmann,”
Newsday,
March 24,1998, p. A43. In short, for every
Primary Colon
and
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,
both Random House runaway best-sellers, there is a costly disappointment, such as Kelly Flinn’s memoir
(Proud to Be),
which earned the former Air Force flier $1 million but barely registered on the sales meter. Elisabeth Bumiller, “Public Lives; Random House Editor Ready to Talk Books,”
New York Times,
April 3,1998, p. B2. (“One of her biggest flops is
Proud to Be
by Kelly Flinn, the bomber pilot forced out of the Air Force.”)

75.
Martin Arnold, “Making Books; Celebrity Books Lose Panache,”
New York Times,
December 10,1997.

76. “Art Hoppe; Almost the Last of a Generation of American Humorous Columnists,”
The Guardian
(London), February 10,2000, p. 24.

77. “Best Sellers: September 8, 1991,”
New York Times,
September 8, 1991, sec. 7, p. 36. (“And Bear in Mind [editors’ choices of other recent books of particular interest],
Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment,
by Anthony Lewis. [Random House, $25.] A
New York Times
columnist’s splendid account of a libel suit against the
Times
that resulted in one of the most significant of all press-freedom cases.”)

78. Frank Rich, “Journal: David Brock’s Women,”
New York Times,
January 6,1994, p. A21.

79. Alter is coauthor of
Selecting a President,
New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, and the coeditor of
Inside the System,
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. Neither book ever made any best-seller list.

80. Jonathan Alter, “Between the Lines Online: Back to the Battlefield,”
Newsweek,
May 24,2001. Referring to Ted Olson and “his relentless wife Barbara (the author of a hatchet book on Hillary Clinton).”

NOTES,
pp. 108-113

81. Bernard Weinraub, “Guatemala Exiles Assail Junta,”
New York Times,
June 3, 1982.

82. Larry Rohter, “Tarnished Laureate: A Special Report: Nobel Winner Finds Her Story Challenged,”
New York Times,
December 15,1998, p. Al.

83. See, e.g., Larry Rohter, “Tarnished Laureate.”

84. Ibid.

85. Anthony Ramirez, “The Nation: The Lock and Load Myth; A Disarming Heritage,”
New York Times,
April 23, 2000, sec. 4; p. 3.

86. Garry Wills, “Spiking the Gun Myth,”
New York Times,
September 10, 2000, sec. 7, p. 5.

87. “Arming America,”
New York Times,
October 1, 2000, sec. 7, p. 4.

88. Scott Veale, “New & Noteworthy Paperbacks,”
New York Times,
September 16, 2001, sec. 7, p. 32.

89. Lawrence Van Gelder, “Footlights,”
New York Times,
April 12,2001, sec. E, p. 1.

90. Robert F. Worth, “Historian’s Pnzewinning Book on Guns Is Embroiled in a Scandal,”
New York Times,
December 8,2001.

91. Kathy Sawyer, “Unfortunate Son: The Burglary, the Embezzlement, the Conspiracy to Murder?”
Washington Post,
March 19,2000.

92. Ibid.

93. Jenny Lyn Bader, “Publishing, the Moral Mirror of Politics,”
New York Times,
October 24,1999, sec. 4, p. 2.

94. Hatfield’s next publisher responded to questions about the author’s credibility by noting that Bush had spoken at Bob Jones University—”a place that’s basically, like, really really scary, Nazi-type Christians.” Bush spoke at Bob Jones so—as the
Times
had already concluded—it was his fault. Kathy Sawyer, “Unfortunate Son.”

95. Kathy Sawyer, “Unfortunate Son.”

96. Anthony Summers,
The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon,
New York: Viking Press, 2000.

97. Ralph de Toledano, “Insight: ‘Gay’ Edgar Hoover and Other Smears,”
Insight on the News,
March 26, 2001, p. 19. (Reviewing Anthony Summers,
Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of]. Edgar Hoover:
“The New York Post, when it was owned by socialist Dorothy Schiff, spent close to $1 million in the 1950s attempting to find even the most trifling evidence of [Hoover’s alleged homosexuality] and then gave up.... According to Summers’ fevered imagination, the FBI director showed up in drag at Mafia parties not once but twice. The ‘source’ was the disgruntled ex-wife of a man who allegedly had given the parties. The FBI director, Summers asks readers to believe, was mad enough to appear among his most vicious enemies dressed as a woman and seeking homosexual entertainment. And the Mafia, having caught Hoover so to speak in flagrante, didn’t whoop with joy and give the Hoover story to enemy Drew Pearson to be plastered all over the left-wing press.”)

98. John Greenya, “A Capital Book Town,”
Washington Post,
March 6,1988.

99. George F. Will, “Arid Lives, Lurid Falsehoods,”
Washington Post,
April 14, 1991, p.B7.

100. Maureen Dowd, “All That Glitters Is Not Real, Book on Nancy Reagan Says,”
New York Times,
April 7,1991, sec. 1, p. 1.

101. Maureen Dowd, “Liberties; Legacy of Lust,”
New York Times,
September 23,1998, sec. A, p. 29.

102. Connie Chung and Bernard Goldberg, “Just the Facts, Ma’am; Christina Hoff Summers, Author, ‘Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women,’ Discusses False Statistics That Are Released About Women and Men,”
Eye to Eye with Connie Chung,
August 11,1994.

103. See, e.g., Dan Ackman, “Air Travel Is Scary but Safe,” Forbes.com, November 13, 2001. “The number of auto crash fatalities was nonetheless 41,821 [including 4,739 pedestrians] in 2000, according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration.”)

104. Martin Arnold, “Making Books; Best-Seller Lists Get a New Job.”

105. Even if Christopher Ruddy’s
The Strange Death of Vince Foster
was considered a conservative hoax book, it was also conservatives who discredited it. The
New York Post
fired him

NOTES,
pp. 113-116

over the Vince Foster business. The
American Spectator’s
Byron York took apart Ruddy’s book in a series of articles and TV appearances. Regnery Publishing paid a liberal journalist, Dan Modea, an atypically large advance of $100,000 to write a book discrediting the conspiracy theories surrounding Foster’s death, resulting in
A Washington Tragedy: How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm.
See, e.g., Philip Weiss, “The Clinton Haters; Clinton Crazy,”
New York Times,
February 23,1997.

106. As a former FBI agent, Aldnch had been required to submit his manuscript to the FBI for pre-pubhcation review. Howard Shapiro, the FBI general counsel, immediately turned it over to the White House.

107. www.top9.com/news_media/politics_new_media.html, citing data from PC Data Online for March 2001. (“Sites appearing on the “Top9” listings are based on objective rankings; rankings cannot be purchased or influenced by outside factors or opinions.”) Other months listed have similar results.

108. top9.com/organizations_government/think_tanks.html, citing data from PC Data Online.

109. The Top 9 organizations and government Think Tanks as of December 2000: (1) heritage.org (The Heritage Foundation—conservative); (2) ncpa.org (Pete Dupont’s National Center for Policy Analysis—conservative); (3) cato.org (CATO Institute—libertarian); (4) aei.org (American Enterprise Institute—conservative); (5) rand.org (the RAND Corporation—politics unclear, but really, really boring: “RAND Classics: N. Dalkey, B. Brown, S. Cochran, “The Delphi Method, III: Use of Self Ratings to Improve Group Estimates,” RAND); (6) brook.edu (The Brookings Institution—liberal); (7) kci.org (Koch Crime Institute); (8) frc.org (Gary Bauer’s Family Research Council—conservative); and (9) nas.edu (National Academy of Sciences—nonpolitical).