[ Posted Friday, March 7, 2003 ]

An Open Letter to Eric Alterman
William McGowan, author of Coloring the News, takes on Alterman and his recent What Liberal Media?

A little more than a year ago, William McGowan published Coloring the News, which makes the neocon-ish argument that the politically correct quest for racial and ethnic diversity within America's news organizations has had a detrimental effect on the quality of reporting produced on hot-button issues like race, gay rights, and immigration. The book was generally well received—respected if not always agreed with, it won a National Press Club award in 2002—but there was some question about how and why McGowan's project had moved from the respected Free Press imprint of Simon & Schuster to a then-virtually unknown publisher, Encounter Books. Eric Alterman's recent What Liberal Media? suggests that, contrary to popular belief, America's elite media are in truth more conservative than liberal. In that book, he addresses McGowan's move from the Free Press to Encounter. McGowan says Alterman got it wrong, something they'll surely discuss when they both join Arianna Huffington and Janeane Garofalo for a panel discussion about media bias sponsored by The Week magazine, to be held Monday. In advance of that panel, McGowan writes an open letter to Alterman, arguing his case. (Read a mediabistro.com Q&A with Eric Alterman, and buy Coloring the News and What Liberal Media? at Amazon.com.)

Dear Eric Alterman:

Yesterday's New York Times op-ed page featured an ad for your book, What Liberal Media?, and for a debate you want to arrange between you and Bernard Goldberg and Ann Coulter. The ad copy says that your book shows that both of these authors "rely on unfounded assertions" and use "low invective." Isn't it ironic, then, that you've done the same thing?

I say this having read your account of the fraught history of my book, Coloring the News, with its original publisher, the Free Press imprint of Simon & Schuster. Your account is quite at odds with the facts of the matter and is edged with considerable jaundice. I suggest that the next time you want to do a hatchet job on someone or his book, you should do more than a clip job—or at least consult more than one clip. I'd also suggest that you even try a little actual reporting.

On page 112 of What Liberal Media? you say that my eventual publisher, Encounter Books, falsely claimed that Coloring the News—which argues that the crusade for diversity in America's newsrooms has had a corrupting effect on the quality of American journalism—had been rejected by a new regime at the Free Press owing to the Free Press's "fear of publishing such a controversial issue," and that this represented a dishonest attempt to "create a media scandal" as part of Encounter's publicity campaign for the book. You also say that "The new (Free Press) editorial team was, in fact, eager to publish McGowan's book when he delivered it in 1999, but he was no longer so eager to have it published by an imprint that did not share his own ideological proclivities. As McGowan later admitted, the only problem was that he feared they 'wouldn't have supported it the way I wanted them to.'"

Your footnotes suggest that these claims are based on nothing more than a single February 2002 Washington Monthly book review by Seth Mnookin, who is now at Newsweek. Mnookin attempted to do some original reporting for his review, but, as it turned out, his reporting was filled with mistakes, misrepresentations, and malice, and it impugned my personal and professional honesty.

In the Washington Monthly piece, which ran under the headline "Yellow Journalism," Mnookin wrote that "McGowan acknowledges that the Free Press was willing to publish his book; it was the author who balked," before going to a new publisher, Encounter Books. This is completely untrue, flipping on their heads both what I told Mnookin and the truth of the matter. I never acknowledged that the Free Press was willing to publish my book because they were in fact not willing to do so, for reasons which were entirely political and in no way connected to the manuscript's quality. He quotes an offhand comment I made to him, about the Free Press not supporting the book had I stayed, which was raised in an entirely hypothetical manner and wrenched completely out of context.

As I told Mnookin, shortly before I delivered my manuscript, in November 1998, the Free Press replaced the editorial director under whom my contract had been issued, Adam Bellow, with Liz Maguire, who initiated a substantial shift in editorial vision. (It's worth pointing out that Maguire is now publisher and vice-president of your publishing house, Basic Books. Conveniently, though she played a key role in torpedoing Coloring the News, you say almost the exact opposite.) I gave the Free Press exactly the book it had originally contracted for, but the new team no longer wanted it. This became clear when I received an editorial letter outlining the problems the editors said they had and the changes they wanted, most of which were clearly bogus. This Free Press letter was not a simple request for revisions to a manuscript, which of course I expected and would gladly have worked with. Rather, this was apparently classic "kiss-off" letter. I consulted with a variety of people who know how this business works—two different agents, a publishing consultant, and a literary attorney—and I learned that this is a standard publishing technique, to request such significant editorial changes as to drive the writer away, all the while preserving legal advantage if the writer comes back at the house with a suit for breach of contract—as well as avoiding embarrassment for betraying an author.

I was quite dismayed at receiving this letter, and sincerely wanted to be published by the Free Press, a major trade house with a long history and reputation. But I realized that my book would likely never see daylight there, and that I therefore needed to take it elsewhere. I did this, reluctantly. Why would any author willingly leave such an established place as the Free Press, an imprint of the venerable Simon & Schuster, and go to a then-fledgling like Encounter Books? And to leave with the Free Press still owing me the second half of my advance, which was not a small sum? It makes no sense.

I had urged Mnookin to contact former Free Press editorial director Adam Bellow, who clearly believes Coloring the News was purged for ideological reasons. Instead Mnookin relied on the sole opinion of the former second-string editor, Mitch Horowitz, who said it was a "complete fabrication" that the Free Press had backed out. Mnookin makes no mention that Horowitz had left the Free Press many months before I delivered my manuscript, had never laid his eyes on my manuscript, and had absolutely no awareness of what had transpired in the editorial back and forth between me and the new regime. Horowitz confirmed all this to me when I spoke with him about it after the Mnookin piece ran. Horowitz also maintained that what he said to Mnookin was said in completely hypothetical terms—speculation, if you will—reflecting "what would have been the [the Free Press's] response based on the time I was there"—i.e., before the Bellow regime was purged and before Horowitz left the imprint. This is hardly an authoritative source or an authoritative account. It would seem to me, Eric, that a reputable journalist writing on this incident would have wanted to speak with Bellow, and with others, who could have shed more light on what transpired.

After all, you should have known this had been a controversial issue, that there were questions surrounding Mnookin's claims. My rebuttal to Mnookin was printed in the April issue of The Washington Monthly, and has also been posted on my website for more than a year. To ignore this publicly available information, and to fail to reach out to me for my side of the story, seems selective or sloppy---maybe both. Like the Mnookin piece it relies on so exclusively, your description of Coloring the News is long an attitude but short on evidence and basic honesty. It's also snide and insulting, somehow suggesting that my "ideological proclivities" tend toward works you deem "racist and dishonest." This is mud that even Mnookin didn't throw. How did you come to this lowball conclusion, which is nothing but a rank smear? It's particularly shocking that you felt comfortable leveling that charge without any reporting of your own to support it. I would expect that your sense of professional integrity will require you to correct the mistakes in your book regarding Coloring the News at the very first opportunity you have to do so, perhaps on your website and certainly in future editions of your book.

I would also expect that you desist from making untrue claims about Coloring the News when discussing it in public. Since most of what you said about the book's background rests on misrepresentations, shoddy—or, rather, nonexistent—reporting, and what seems to be malice, I think it is in your professional interests to oblige.

Sincerely,

William McGowan
author, Coloring the News

William McGowan previously wrote Only Man Is Vile: The Tragedy of Sri Lanka. He has reported for Newsweek and the BBC and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, and other national publications. A regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal, he is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. The views expressed here are McGowan's and not those of mediabistro.com or its employees.