It could be a great summer for reading. Lots to choose from. Great new novels, fascinating biographies, insightful works of investigation…
…and then there’s the swill that Chapters/Indigo is featuring in the most prominent spot on its front page: the wildly misnamed The Truth About Hillary.
As the folks at MediaMatters.org have made pretty clear, the book is a hatchet job on Senator and former First Lady Hillary Clinton. (The publisher’s political agenda is very clear: to “do to Clinton what the Swift Boat Veterans bestseller did to Kerry,” according to their spokesperson quoted in the New York Post.)
From gay-baiting innuendo to outright factual inaccuracies, it sets a new low in American political discourse.
How bad is it? Bad enough that many U.S. conservatives – not known for their aversion to a good smear – are putting a lot of distance between themselves and this tome. Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan (who recently tried to pin the Khmer Rouge’s mass murders on newly-unveiled Deep Throat Mark Felt) called it “poorly written, poorly thought, poorly sourced“. Fox News and Bill O’Reilly are calling it a smear – and O’Reilly refuses to invite Klein on his show. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough retracted his invitation; “After learning the stories were inflammatory, the sources were weak, and the book’s relevance was less than zero, I canceled the booking.”
I have no problem with quality political commentary from the right being flogged as vigorously as Indigo/Chapters (Indipters? Chindigo?) wants to. And I’m not asking them to take the book off its shelves.
But when you decide what books get the spotlight, and which get relegated to the inside pages, you’re exercising discretion — and imposing some pretty powerful influence on what gets read and what doesn’t.
Honestly — was there nothing better they could have profiled?
