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Fact check, says Bob Thompson in the Washington Post. It’s not really all that hard. Especially when the possible hoax doesn’t involve a few lines here or there, but the entire basis for the book. A couple of phone calls could be all it takes.

But Colin McEnroe of the Hartford Courant doesn’t think the latest scandal — about Love and Consequences — is over yet. Not when the book editor responsible for the memoir is the daughter of Charles McGrath, editor-at-large of the New York Times. And the Times happened to give Love and Consequences some splashy coverage, a connection that Gawker.com was first to harp on.

Ummnm, sorry, but it’s an unlikely sequence of events, says New York magazine.

About Jerome Weeks

Jerome Weeks is the Senior Arts Reporter/Producer for KERA. Previously at The Dallas Morning News, he was the book columnist for 10 years and the drama critic for 10 years before that. His writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, American Theatre and Men’s Vogue magazines. View more about Jerome Weeks.

COMMENTS

cholmondoley

New York Magazine is spinning this… Michiko Kakutani and Chip McGrath are in fact quite friendly, and there are many precedents for Kakutani reviewing a book on McGrath’s request.

Reporter Motoko Rich, who has written the two damage control stories (so far), sits right next to Chip McGrath in the New York Times office–making her uniquely qualified to spin this embarrassing story and to ‘interview’ Sarah McGrath about her supposed surprise about all this. (Oddly, Sarah McGrath seems to be on the kind of maternity leave from Riverhead which precludes her from speaking to reporters, except the reporter who sits next to her father and confers with him on a daily basis.)

Did the Times run its story because it feared another paper was going to break it and expose all these incestuous goings-on? Why did Motoko Rich call McGrath the paper’s “editor at large,” ignoring his eight years at the helm of the Book Review? If New York Magazine is going to talk about the way things really work at the Times, at least start reporting the seating arrangements and the friendships, and the precedents for this kind of log-rolling. In point of fact, McGrath still calls a lot of the shots around the office. It’s difficult to discount the notion that McGrath’s influence triggered these positive reviews of Ms. Seltzer’s book.