Joe McGinniss’s Attempt to Smear Palin Backfires; Media Ridicules His Book

Posted by Dana Loesch Sep 16th 2011 at 4:58 am in Featured Story, Mainstream Media, New York Times, Palin

Ouch.

Ten pages into “The Rogue” he has already blown his cover, printing a map to the Palins’ isolated house. He describes having gone to the Palin door with a signed copy of his book about Alaska, “Going to Extremes,” and exploiting this encounter to engage the family’s older son, Track, in conversation. But had Mr. McGinniss been a good neighbor, he would have delivered that book without showing up unannounced.
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Although most of “The Rogue” is dated, petty and easily available to anyone with Internet access, Mr. McGinniss used his time in Alaska to chase caustic, unsubstantiated gossip about the Palins, often from unnamed sources like “one resident” and “a friend.”
And these stories need not be consistent.

And they’re not. The Miami Herald’s newsroom erupted into a civil war over whether or not to print the yellow claims made in McGinniss’s tawdry book.

McGinniss moved in next door to the Palins and could spy on them from his deck.

The McGinniss pile on continues.

Brad Hanson, a former business partner of Todd Palin’s, refuted a claim in The Rogue that he had an extramarital affair with Sarah Palin.

Hanson said in a statement:
This is the same old story that went around in 2008. It is a complete and outright lie. Todd and Sarah Palin have been good friends for many years, and in fact we still own property together.

We sold a former joint business venture for business reasons, nothing more. These attacks are shameful and those making them seem to be out only to destroy good people and make money doing so.

Politico's Molly Ball

The NYT’s The Caucus calls McGinniss’ credibility into question. When an accused murderer questions your character, that’s a problem:

Mr. McGinniss won wide acclaim for writing about politics with his first book, “The Selling of the President 1968.” But his later career as an author of mostly true-crime books has featured a series of controversies. Jeffrey MacDonald, an army doctor accused of murder who had cooperated with Mr. McGinniss for a book about the trial, accused him of dishonestly coercing him and later betraying him in the book. He was accused of plagiarism after his 1993 book about Senator Edward M. Kennedy, “The Last Brother.”

The NYT also previously accused McGinniss of making up quotes for his biography on Edward Kennedy:

Mr. McGinniss — a best-selling author who has been involved in controversy before — interviewed neither Senator Kennedy nor Mrs. Shriver. Although “The Last Brother” is called nonfiction, much of the dialogue and internal monologues are compelling enough to be fictional — and they are.

 The proprietor of Say Anything calls McGinniss a “slimeball” after he attempted to bully him into giving dirt (which didn’t exist) on the Palin/Heath family. It’s a disgusting account of how McGinniss attempted to victimize a family — who were already dealing with their daughter’s victimization at the hands of a pedophile — to further his smears on Palin.

The Atlantic's Scott Stossel

Even more: Stream of Jim reports that McGinniss not only has a problem with writing things that are true, but also struggles with actually writing his own words. He takes down Business Insider on their asinine Palin-had-an-affair smear:

McGinniss has been accused of plagiarism by author William Manchester and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and his publisher settled a dispute over his book Fatal Vision rather than continuing in court. For a writer that William F. Buckley said used ‘elaborate deception’ – these things can help the reader to understand some sense of the how people have viewed his work in the past.

In light of these damning details on McGinniss’ character, NY Daily News (known for their classy covers) reported on the matter as though it were based in any real fact. No mention was made in their article of McGinniss’s reputation — in fact, the irony is that a book on McGinniss’s legitimately sketchy reputation would prove a far more interesting read than the drummed-up Palin falsehoods. An ego-manicial author who can’t author his own thoughts, who plays Peeping Tom next to her daughter’s bedroom window in his obsessive quest to publish the equivalent of bathroom gossip material and get his name in the headlines.

Another man attempting to siphon off Palin’s fame to make a name for himself. Manly.

That any media outlet would give this failed writer more print than it takes to ridicule his unintentionally comical existence says more about the publication than it does him — which is why there are so few media outlets doing so. They don’t want to look silly for taking falsified bait.

Big Journalism