Monday, March 03, 2008

Dumping on the Times

Margaret Seltzer, the author of "Love and Consequences", a memoir of growing up in the slums of South Central Los Angeles, has admitted that it is a fabrication, that she is white, and that she grew up in prosperous Sherman Oaks. Her editor, Sarah McGrath, purported to be dumbfounded. Logically McGrath was the person who should have been responsible for ascertaining the accuracy and bona fides of her author.

Here is the comment I appended to the story in the New York Times:

I find it telling, or maybe just funny, that the person responsible for fact-checking was Seltzer's editor, Sarah McGrath. McGrath was so certain that what was politically correct was necessarily also factually correct that it didn't occur to her to check it. Sarah McGrath is immersed in, and indeed a product of, a political culture so smug and sure it has a monopoly of truth and a complete description of reality, that it has long ago stopped honestly examining its beliefs and even its facts.

Where could Ms. McGrath have imbibed such a culture? The answer is embedded in the article we just read. She learned at her father's knee, from her father Charles McGrath of the NEW YORK TIMES.

The NY Times stumbles from journalistic scandal to journalistic scandal and still lamely claims to be the Newspaper of Record, long after no one believes it. At the same time, the Washington Post, just as liberal a paper, has gone from past triumphs of unseating Nixon to modern ones of exposing the Walter Reed Military Hospital scandal. The WashPost has never to my knowledge had a journalistic scandal. Maybe the difference is that, unlike the Times, the Post's writers are not such arrogant bigots that they don't check their facts?

— jack kessler, San Francisco

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous4:33 AM

    Mcgrath is the author's editor, not her agent.

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  2. Hi Anonymous,
    Speaking of the need for fact-checking....

    Which makes McGrath far more culpable. An agent is responsible in a general way for the value of the goods she is selling to the publisher. The editor's job is specifically to establish the accuracy of the manuscript. The editor is to go hand-to-hand with the text.

    McGrath's having failed to notice that the whole document was a fraud suggests an even greater degree of ideologically motivated self-delusion than I had supposed.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I seem to have literary agents buzzing in my brain while not caring a fig for editors.

    Thanks to anonymous for pointing out my error. I have corrected it in the blog entry.

    ReplyDelete