The New York Times now hires reporters who have a demonstrated commitment to inaccuracy. Digby:
Hullabaloo: A while back I wrote about the recent media tour of James B Stewart, the author a recent book called Tangled Web: How American Society is Drowning in Lies about the culture of lying in America. I commented because this is a person who knows a lot about lies since his book Blood Sport was filled with them. I quoted this passage from Conason and Lyons' The Hunting of the President....
Still other celebrated journalists continued to predict the first lady's probable indictment as the election year began, most notably Pulitzer Prize winning author James B Stewart. Published by Simon and Shuster in 1996 to the accompaniment of a multimedia publicity campaign, Stewart's book Blood Sport claims to be the inside story of "the president and first lady as they really are." Set forth as a sweeping narrative, it includes dramatized scenes and imaginary dialog purporting to represent the innermost thoughts of individuals whom the author had in some cases never met, much less interviewed. "Scenes that Mr Stewart could never have observed first hand," complained New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani, "are recounted from an omniscient viewpoint. Mr. Stewart rarely identifies the sources for such scenes not does he take into account the subjectivity and oftens self-serving nature of memory. The reader never knows whether the quotes Mr Stewart puts into the mouth of an individual... are from a first or second hand source."
I read Blood Sport when it came out. I don't think that the New York Times can burn its credibility any faster than by hiring Stewart.
