Wilbert Rideau The Real Story

           I have been highly critical of the New York-based publishing house, Random House, for its failure to fact-check the memoir of former convict and award-winning inmate journalist Wilbert Rideau, “In The Place of Justice.” I have chronicled on this website not only blatant factual errors in Rideau’s memoir but a host of lies and misrepresentation that Random House fact-checkers would have detected with just a modicum of professional analysis (here and here).

            But this “giant” of publishing in the shaky literary field would rather publish books with a “million little lies” as it did in 2006 with Jams Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” than fact-driven books. And, once again just a cat’s hair of professional judgment would have detected all those “lies” in Frey’s so-called memoir. The literary fraud promoting publishing house had to ultimately quietly settle a lawsuit in connection with Frey’s repeated assault on the truth (here)

            And, again, Random House finds itself in yet another “literary fraud” crisis—this time involving Joe McGinnis, who doesn’t have a sterling history of truth-seeking as evidenced by his book, Blind Faith, about former Green Beret Captain Jeffery McDonald. McGinnis’ book, titled “The Rogue” is highly critical and possibly defamatory against the former Alaskan governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. According to ABC News, Palin’s family attorney, Joe Tiemessen, has written a letter to Crown Publishing Group, a Random House subsidiary, accusing Random House of “knowingly publishing false statements.”

            “The book was widely panned by critics for using unnamed sources to criticize Palin and her family,” reported ABC News. Tiemessen cities an email they have access to in which MsGinnis writes that attorneys from Crown Publishing told him ‘nothing I can cite other than my own reporting rises above the level of tawdry gossip. The proof is always just around the corner, but that is a corner nobody has been able to turn’ and that McGinnis ‘ran out of time’ to sufficiently source the book.”

            In this case Random House published a book it knew contained “false information” which amounted to no more than “tawdry gossip.” Of course, a Random House spokesman responded by saying “we are confident that the reporting in THE ROGUE is solid, reliable, and well-substantiated. We stand by our publication and our author.”

            Of course, they do—they have stood by Frey and Rideau also. What else would you expect from a publishing house with a commitment to selling falsehoods as truths, fiction as fact, and embracing the authors who engage in this scandalous behavior.

            Never thought I would be in Sarah Palin’s corner but I am in this corner hoping she will prove McGinnis the “scumbag” so many have called him in connection with “The Rogue” and prompt her legion of followers to boycott Random House.