NOW THEY TELL US

On tonight's CBS Evening News, they add in a small tidbit they neglected last night on 60 Minutes: Simon and Schuster, publisher's of Dick Clarke's book, are owned by Viacom, owners of CBS. (You don't think that could possibly have anything to do with the fact that they were outed today by Drudge do you? Nah, that's being paranoid. Surely no one at CBS stoops to reading Drudge. But I digress.)

Why is this relevant information? Now, you could say, look, someone had to get the first interview with the guy, and in an age of media "synergy" it only makes sense that the publisher would insist that CBS get the interview even though Clarke himself works for ABC. Fair enough. Unless the interview is somehow rigged to make the book look more important, more attractive, somehow boost sales.

Well, now my complaints about Leslie Stahl's interview can be seen in an entirely different light, no? Since I ordered my book instead of rushing right out to buy a copy, I don't know whether this is a fascinating exploration of how America's counterterrorism policy failed as al Queda developed -- that is, from about 1988 to the present. Good sales, but not a blockbuster. Or whether this is a White House tell all that goes after this President and only this President, despite the fact that Clarke was running the al Queda portfolio for the eight years of the Clinton administration as the problem festered and grew. A book that says that an insider knows for sure that the man who is running on the grounds that he kept us safe after 9/11 did no such thing -- and maybe could have stopped it if he'd been paying attention. Now that's a blockbuster.

But the thing is, based on the questions you ask, you can make the first kind of book look like the second. Or, you can make a crank with a grudge (you know what I mean, the man is obviously not a crank, but it is increasingly starting to look like however valid his arguments are they are turbocharged with a serious case of axe to grind) by forgetting to ask certain questions or asking them in a certain way.

That's why I thought it was absurd to ask him straight up, "hey, are you a political hack?" What's the guy gonna say? "Why, yes, as a matter of fact this entire project was motivated exclusively by my partisan desire to see this president defeated, and I've manipulated everything in it to that end." If instead she'd tried to get at why he wasn't making claims about the somewhat feckless policies of the Clinton administration (or even asking what claims he was asking about the Clinton administration) that could have actually gotten us somewhere in terms of determining partisan motivation.

Am I right about this? Maybe, maybe not. But by knowing that there may have been a motive to sell more books, you could have been asking yourself these kinds of questions, asking yourself what kind of criteria was guiding the questions Stahl was asking -- and perhaps more importantly, what questions she wasn't asking -- as you watched their heavily hyped (highly unusual) double segment.

As Drudge points out, when was the last time something got a double segment? Another Simon and Schuster book: the Paul O'Neill tell all. What's more plausible, that they're highlighting Bush-bashing books, or that they're highlighting books that might make Viacom some money?

Update: I might add, by the way, in my own defense, that I did check to see who published the book. But each house now has so many imprints that simply looking up a publisher under Amazon is no longer sufficient. The book is listed as being published by "Free Press." Lots of luck Googling that.

Comments

[Dave Erwin]

Cori,
You are very right about the questions that are not asked.
Why is it that an interviewer can only go in one direction??
You don't suppose that the interviewer let her personal BIAS get in her way do you?
Just asking!

[Athena]

When I first read Simon & Schuster as the publisher, I immediately thought of the full-page ad that senior editor, Bob Bender, helped purchase in the NYT against the war a while back under the name "Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities."

[Ron Hardin]

The book ownership sounds like a trivial ``gotcha'' to me. The money involved doesn't matter at that scale. The motivation is the drama buzz from a media outlet. That sells not books, but audience. That's where the money is.

It is about money, just not that money.