Sunday, July 10, 2005

NewsMax gives its right-wing readers yet another reasohn to hate The New York Times:

Edward Klein's book "The Truth About Hillary" has made the New York Times best-seller list for the second week in a row - a development that has the Times book review spitting mad....

The liberal Gray Lady apparently doesn't like the fact that one of its own - Klein is former editor of the New York Times Magazine - penned a biting biography of one of the paper's icons, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The Times has yet to review the book, but took the unusual step in Sunday's book section to publish a disclaimer attacking the book from pillar to post in a sidebar column adjacent to the best-seller list....

The paper's vitriol against Klein contrasts with its first-class treatment of Kitty Kelley's works, including her recent hit book on the Bush family....


Fine, except here's the "first-class treatment" Kelley's book received at the hands of the Times's lead daily reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, on September 14, 2004:

Kitty Kelley's catty new book about the Bush family is a perfect artifact of our current political culture in which unsubstantiated attacks on Senator John Kerry's Vietnam War record and old questions about President Bush's National Guard service get more attention than present-day issues like the Iraq war, the economy, intelligence reform or the assault weapons ban.

It is also a perfect artifact of a cultural climate in which gossip and innuendo thrive on the Internet; more and more biographies of artists and public figures dwell, speculatively, on familial dysfunction and disorder; and buzz -- be it based on verified facts or sheer rumor-mongering -- is regarded as a be-all and end-all....

Though Doubleday is promoting Ms. Kelley as "a master investigative biographer," she lavishes all too much of her admirable energy on trying to ferret out personal peccadilloes, ranging from drug and alcohol binges to temper tantrums, from weight problems to bad taste in gift-giving.... Ms. Kelley's relentless concentration on these matters, often to the exclusion of far more serious issues, makes for a tacky, voyeuristic and petty-seeming narrative....


(And in today's Times book section, the lead piece is a glowing review of a proudly right-wing, liberal-bashing book about Rudy Giuliani published by Peter Collier's conservative-foundation-funded Encounter Books. Er, what liberal media?)

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