Simon & Schuster: Forget About The Facts

Once upon a time—only a decade or two ago—big time New York publishers like Simon & Schuster actually cared whether or not the nonfiction books they published contained real facts.

No more.

That period ended when these publishers were absorbed by great conglomerates like CBS. Now the only thing anyone really cares about is how much money a book can make.

Surely FCP exaggerates? I do not.

The latest and most dramatic evidence of this mind-set is Obama Nation, the new book by Jerome R. Corsi, just published by Threshold Editions, a division of Simon & Schuster headed by Republican hatchet-woman Mary Matalin. Corsi is the proven fraud previously most famous as the co-author of Unfit for Command, the book that libeled John Kerry so successfully four years ago.

Media Matters for America has done a splendid job of assembling all the flat-out lies and unsubstantiated charges in Corsi's great new work—which, naturally, is debuting at number one on this Sunday's New York Times bestselling list. Among the most ludicrously false (and instantly checkable) mistakes are the following:

"If you want to write a nostalgic piece about the old days of publishing," said the Simon & Schuster spokesman, "go right ahead."• "Obama did not dedicate Dreams From My Father to his mother, or to his father, Barack Senior, or to his Indonesian stepfather. Missing from the dedication are the grandparents who raised him in Hawaii." Actually, on page XVII of the book, Obama wrote: "It is to my family, though—my mother, my grandparents, my siblings, stretched across oceans and continents—that I owe the deepest gratitude and to whom I dedicated this book."

• Corsi repeats a false report from newsmax.com that Obama had been in Trinity United Church of Christ on July 22, when the Reverend Jeremiah Wright preached a sermon in which he blamed the "white arrogance" of America's Caucasian majority for the world's suffering, especially the oppression of blacks. Even Bill Kristol acknowledged way back in March that this is false: the Obama campaign has proven that the candidate was actually in Florida that day.

• Corsi wrote that "The transcript of the question-and-answer session clearly shows the [Chicago] Tribune staff had a hard time believing Obama" when he described his real estate dealings with Antoin Rezko. In fact, the Tribune ran an editorial afterwards saying "U.S. Sen. Barack Obama waited 16 months to attempt the exorcism. But when he finally sat down with the Tribune editorial board Friday, Obama offered a lengthy and, to us, plausible explanation for the presence of now-indicted businessman Tony Rezko in his personal and political lives. The most remarkable facet of Obama's 92-minute discussion was that, at the outset, he pledged to answer every question the three dozen Tribune journalists crammed into the room would put to him. And he did."

• Corsi says Obama has "yet to answer" whether he "stopped using marijuana and cocaine completely in college, or whether his drug usage extended to his law school days or beyond." Actually, Obama states explicitly in his autobiography that he stopped doing drugs when he was an undergraduate at Columbia.

And so on.

This morning's New York Times features a lengthy story about all this on the front page by Jim Rutenberg and Julie Bosman. The front page portion noted that "Significant parts of the book, whose subtitle is 'Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,' have already been challenged as misleading or false in the days since its debut on August 1." But you have to wait until the jump inside to learn that there are incontestable errors: "Several of the book's accusations, in fact, are unsubstantiated, misleading or inaccurate."

Bosman and Rutenberg also write, " "Fact-checking the books [like this one] can require extensive labor and time from independent journalists, whose work often trails behind the media echo chamber."

The Times also quotes the book's editor, Mary Matalin as saying that it "was not designed to be, and does not set out to be, a political book," but "rather, a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that'"—a statement for which I hereby bestow upon Ms. Matalin the FCP Chutzpah Award of 2008.

However, the Times reporters don't seem to have asked Matalin whether she made any effort to fact-check the book before she published it. When I asked Rutenberg if he had asked Matalin if she had hired a fact-checker, he replied, "Matalin stood by the accuracy of the book. Julie Bosman interviewed her and went over some of the things we found, and she stood by the accuracy of the book." Ms. Bosman did not respond to an e-mail or a voicemail from FCP requesting comment.

Carolyn Kroll Reidy is the President and CEO of Simon & Schuster. Since her official biography at the S & S website boasts that the creation of Threshold Editions was one of the "numerous strategic moves" she has made to insure that S & S "publishes to every segment of the marketplace," I thought Ms. Reidy would be the right person to ask about Mary Matalin's latest triumph at Threshold.

Unfortunately, Ms. Reidy is on vacation today, so her office referred me to her spokesman, Adam Rothberg.

I asked Mr. Rothberg if Ms. Matalin had hired a fact checker for Mr. Corsi's book. Mr. Rothberg laughed. There was a pause. Then he said, "I think I see where you're going, so I'm not going to comment."

FCP persisted: "Is anyone at S & S concerned that the publication of a book like this will tarnish the S & S brand?"

"We publish all kinds of books on all kinds of subjects," Mr. Rothberg replied.

"Yes," I said, "but there was a time when Simon & Schuster preferred to publish nonfiction books that were actually factual."

"Well," said Mr. Rothberg, "If you want to write a nostalgic piece about the old days of publishing, go right ahead."

Mr. Rothberg is absolutely right: at Simon & Schuster today, FCP's obsession with nonfiction books which are based on actual facts is hopelessly out-of-date.

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