Defending Hillary
I've been so busy that I haven't really had time to keep up with the brouhaha over Ed Klein's new book about Hillary, which I'm not going to link to as I wouldn't want anyone to actually buy it. But reading up on the controversy, I am amazed that anyone published this book. It sounds vile.
David Brock's organization, Media Matters for America, has compiled a list of the mistakes and inaccuracies in the book that is remarkably damning.
(Brock, by the way, is the author of a slightly dull but surprisingly balanced—surprising given Brock's politics at the time—biography of Hillary,
The Seduction of Hillary Rodham.)
Here's one line of Klein's that jumped out at me:
"[Hillary] said she was passionately in love with her husband, but many of her closest friends and aides were lesbians."
I mean, where to begin?
Here's another interesting story, by journo Michael Tomasky, about how Klein lifted a quote from a book Tomasky wrote and changed it to make it more sensational.
The Media Matters chart of inaccuracies goes on so long it's almost overwhelming. Can anything about this book be trusted?
It's possible that Ed Klein has done what I wouldn't have thought possible: take Swift Boat sleaze one step further; to take it so far, in fact, that he's delegitimized it (not that it was every particularly legitimate).
But Klein's book does point up a larger issue: publishers don't fact-check. They pay libel lawyers to go over the material for potentially defamatory statements, but otherwise, they don't much care if a book is accurate. Accuracy, it turns out, usually doesn't have enough of an impact on sales to justify the expense of paying fact-checkers.
Writers who care about accuracy have to hire their own fact-checkers, which is an expensive proposition when you're reviewing an entire book. But it's worthwhile. I hired fact-checkers for both my books, at a cost of a few thousand dollars each time. A few minor mistakes crept by nonetheless; they always do. But no one challenged the fundamental accuracy of either work, which, given how controversial they both were, is something I'm proud of.
Did Ed Klein factcheck
The Truth About Hillary? It's hard to believe he did. It's like that old journalism saying: some stories are too good to check. Or, in this case, too bad.
