Martyrs for the cause of journalism

Some of the pieces in "Killed" were never published because of fear of legal action. That can be a legitimate excuse if the survival of an entire publication could be wiped out by one lawsuit. But what does it say that two of the three pieces here most likely to have attracted lawsuits were both commissioned by Vanity Fair? The Condé Nast organization, a fantastically successful magazine empire, can hardly cry poverty. Then editor Tina Brown made one of her notorious last-minute decisions to spike Ann Louise Bardach's 1992 "Moonstruck: The Reverend and His Newspaper." The piece was about how Sun Myung-Moon (I'll call him "Reverend" the day I refer to "Minister" Farrakhan -- or "President" Bush, for that matter) was attempting to exercise editorial control over the Washington Times, the paper funded by Moon's Unification Church. Even worse was Vanity Fair's decision to kill John Entine's "The Stranger-Than-Truth Story of the Body Shop," an exposé of how Anita Roddick's worldwide chain of "green-friendly" cosmetics stores screwed over its own employees and put near-toxic products on the market. Vanity Fair caved after Roddick hired the same law firm that used Britain's ludicrous libel laws to scare off exposés of the late press baron Robert Maxwell.

Depriving the public of the Entine piece meant depriving them of information about a company that put out products that, contrary to its advertising, did rely on chemicals and animal testing, and, in one case, tested 1,000 percent above industry standards for bacteria, including E. coli. This is not even the most egregious example cited in "Killed." One of the pieces not provided for the book was an investigation that showed the lax standards for abortion practitioners in some states and named some providers whose practices had actually injured patients. The editor of the women's glossy this was written for killed it because she worried it would harm the pro-choice movement. In other words, she kept quiet about women being butchered in the name of preventing women from being butchered. The writer pulled the piece from "Killed" for fear of reprisals from his employers, fearing he could lose 15 percent of his income.

Of course, advertising played a hand in some of these pieces never seeing the light of day, like a 1996 Details piece by Erik Hedegaard on rocker John Mellencamp continuing to smoke after his heart attack. Hedegaard reports: "The ad department had only one thing to say: that the story would never, under any circumstances, ever see the light of day in the pages of Details." At which point the head of the ad department should have been summoned to the editor's office and shown the door a few minutes later with his balls nailed to his forehead.

What may be even more alarming about the cases that "Killed" brings to light is that many of these pieces didn't even need the pressure of an advertising department to be killed. Many were done in by the trivialization of American journalism. T.D. Allman's 1999 "Living Well Is the Best Revenge" is a wonderful profile of three young Chinese men Allman had met during the Tiananmen Square uprising 10 years earlier (including the one who had conceived the enormous Goddess of Liberty seen in the square during those days). The piece does a fine job of charting the enormous changes that had come over China in that time. GQ killed it in favor of a profile of Steve Forbes who, by 1999, was little more than the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question.

You certainly can't imagine Mark Schone's "Unfortunate Con" not finding a home in a magazine culture that cared anything about good nonfiction writing. It's a long, fascinating and sad piece about James H. Hatfield, the Arkansas writer who claimed to have uncovered witnesses who told him a sympathetic Texas judge had quashed George W. Bush's arrest for cocaine possession. When Hatfield's criminal past came to light, and when nothing in his story checked out, his Bush bio, "Fortunate Son," was pulled by St. Martin's Press. Hatfield ended up killing himself shortly after the book was reissued by Soft Skull Press.

Rolling Stone, which commissioned the piece, was apparently disappointed that Schone disproved the conspiracy theories that suggested Hatfield was murdered by dark GOP forces. Editors told Schone the piece was too long and too "depressing." Schone sums up the situation faced by writers like him, as well as the decline of a once-great magazine: "In an era when 'hot' lists are feature articles, and Hollywood publicists pick cover shots, there just aren't that many major magazines around that will assign a story like this one, much less publish it."

Next Page: How violating left orthodoxy about Bill Clinton doomed a book review

• View blog reactions