Martyrs for the cause of journalism

Sometimes it's just orthodoxy that ends a piece's life. Todd Gitlin's "The Clinton Legacy and America," a review of Hillary Clinton's "Living History" and Sidney Blumenthal's "The Clinton Years," was commissioned and then killed by the London Review of Books last year. Editor Mary-Kay Wilmers did the executioner's duties, saying, "It reads like a review in an American paper." The irony is that the point of Gitlin's piece is that no review like his had run in any American paper. Blumenthal's book, fiercely critical of the press for stoking the fires of Whitewater with no evidence, was reviewed by the very people he took on.

Joseph Lelyveld, former executive editor of the New York Times, under whose watch Times reporter Jeff Gerth filed discredited stories on both Whitewater and Wen Ho Lee, was given the job of reviewing Blumenthal's book for the New York Review of Books. Not only couldn't Lelyveld get the facts of Whitewater right, he also accused Blumenthal of leaving out salient facts that were right in his book, raising questions whether Lelyveld had read the book at all. (Full disclosure: Blumenthal is now Salon's Washington bureau chief. I have met him exactly once, at a party for his book's publication.) The orthodoxy involved here was most likely, as Gitlin surmises, that the London Review of Books couldn't bear to go against conventional left thinking about Clinton and run a piece praising the accomplishments of a centrist presidency.

There are pieces in "Killed" spiked for more perfidious reasons than Gitlin's. But the situation Gitlin is talking about in that piece -- the nearly universal derision that greeted Blumenthal's book and the failure of the press to do even basic reporting on the motives and connections of the players in the Clinton impeachment -- is one that speaks urgently to the problems with American journalism. In a culture where the New York Times indulges in public breast-beating about the deceptions of Jayson Blair and brings in to clean house a former editor (Lelyveld) who had published shoddy reporting on two major stories under his own watch, what standards are less-venerated publications operating by? (Michiko Kakutani's preemptive strike on Bill Clinton's autobiography a few weeks back, placed not in the book section but on the front page, didn't even bother to mention her own paper's collusion in hyping Whitewater.)

"Killed" is both heartening (there are journalists out there still hungry to do good work) and depressing (the odds against those journalists are more stacked than they ever were). It's not just an entertaining compendium but a valuable one. And in order to maintain its value, it should be the first in a series.

Here's what I propose: "Killed" should become, along with "The Best American Short Stories," et al., a yearly staple. The release of the book should coincide with an awards banquet (let's call it "the Tinas," in honor of the editor responsible for killing the largest number of stories featured in the inaugural volume) to benefit the National Writers Union, at which plaques are handed out for most craven appeasement of sponsors, most extravagant celebrity ass-kissing, most fearful of printing a strong opinion without accompanying balance -- and other awards to be determined. The winners will have their unlisted home and cellphone numbers distributed to a rotating committee whose job, during the next year, will be to call them at inopportune moments (say, 3 a.m.) and play audiotapes of Edward R. Murrow into the phone. Fellow writers -- join me in making this dream happen! We have nothing to lose but our incomes.

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