THE PUBLIC EDITOR
The Report, the Review and a Grandstand Play
By DANIEL OKRENT
Published: June 27, 2004
....CHIEF book critic Michiko Kakutani's review of Bill Clinton's "My Life," published in last Sunday's paper, was brutal. For any author, it would have been the review from hell, the one from which a career (much less the book at hand) could never recover. Of course, Bill Clinton isn't just any author, and early reports indicate that "My Life" might be the fastest-selling nonfiction book in United States history....
***
Needless to say, Clinton supporters were displeased. Some wrote to say the review was another ambush in a Times anti-Clinton vendetta that began when "Whitewater" referred just to rafting conditions. Many wondered why Kakutani was allowed to include in a review her judgments not just of the book but of the Clinton presidency itself. Others chastised her for failing to mention the book's criticisms of The Times. And quite a few took her to task for the reference in the review's closing sentence to "Lies about . . . real estate." They argued that the failure of the Resolution Trust Corporation or the Office of the Independent Counsel to charge either of the Clintons with any Whitewater-related deceptions proves that the "lies" comment is a calumny.
I don't buy the vendetta charge; it suggests that the different parts of this newspaper operate in sync, when my seven months here have convinced me that the various departments are as carefully coordinated as Manhattan traffic in a thunderstorm. Kakutani herself doesn't seem party to any kind of Kill Bill campaign, as she demonstrated last year in her evisceration of Nigel Hamilton's full-frontal attack, "Bill Clinton: An American Journey." I can't for the life of me come up with a rule that would limit what a reviewer should be allowed to comment on in a review, and I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't keep personal opinions of a presidency in mind while reading the president's memoirs....
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But it was a different threshold that this review crossed: the sanctity of the front page as an opinion-free zone. Executive editor Bill Keller told me that "the voice of a brilliant critic was something we could add to the coverage that was uniquely ours." As far as I know, the only other time the paper put a book review on A1 was almost exactly a year ago, for Harry Potter. But Bill Clinton is no Harry Potter; his role in the ever intensifying political debate remains substantial, and in some ways might even be determinative. The front page is the home for news, and arguably for analysis, but if it's also the home for unbuckled opinion about figures on the public stage, then you could argue that editorials belong there, too. Managing editor Jill Abramson believes that the review "was every bit as interesting and newsworthy as the front-page stories disclosing its contents." But if Michiko Kakutani's opinions are news, it would be just as logical to write a story about them, or about especially strong columns by William Safire or Maureen Dowd. And that's a logical step too far for me.
I asked both Keller and Abramson whether they would have run the review on Page 1 had it been an unqualified rave, suspecting as I do that anything overly sunny and positive might seem almost promotional in so prominent a position; both said they would have.
I'm sure they believe it. I'm not sure I do....
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/weekinreview/27bott.html?hp
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