Apparently I was wrong last night when I said Bob Woodward regularly plugs his books on Dateline NBC even though his publisher, Simon & Schuster, is owned by CBS's parent company, Viacom. Woodward did appear on CBS's 60 Minutes to promote his last book, Bush at War. But he went to Dateline NBC on June 23, 1996, for The Choice and on June 16, 1999, for Shadow; also, here's an ABC News online chat he did in 2000 for Maestro. And, of course, he's a semi-regular on Larry King Live on CNN (owned by Time Warner, parent company to Warner Books and Little, Brown).

Drudge won't let this go (see links below left), but it's absurd: If it's all about synergy, why was Al Gore on 60 Minutes when he was promoting a non-S&S book, or Michael Moore as he was just releasing his Bowling for Columbine DVD (MGM) and a new book (Warner Books)? Why does Andy Rooney write books for the non-Viacom PublicAffairs?

I'm not saying synergy didn't cross anyone's mind -- but if CBS hadn't done a story on Clarke, another network would have.