Word: simonal
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...stir was triggered by 2,000 advance copies of the first 123 pages of McGinniss's book, which Simon & Schuster had been distributing to whet booksellers' interest. They contained a statement about McGinniss's extensive research, adding, "Some thoughts and dialogue attributed to figures in this narrative were created by the author, based on such research and his knowledge of the relevant people, places and events." When questioned, McGinniss admits that his subject granted him no interviews for the book; he also allows that he regularly inferred in his narrative what Kennedy might have been thinking. "I absolutely did that...
When a book makes headlines months before its scheduled release, the publisher and author can normally uncross their fingers and alert their accountants. Is such euphoria warranted even when the headlines are rotten? That question concerns Simon & Schuster and Joe McGinniss, the best-selling writer (The Selling of the President, 1968; Fatal Vision) whose forthcoming biography of Edward M. Kennedy, The Last Brother, has been prompting a blizzard of bad news. Biographic License? headlined the Washington Post. The New York Times put the matter, bluntly, on its front page: Kennedy Quotes in New Book Are Invented...
...spectacle, a classic Washington combination of cynicism and naivete, seems different this time. For one thing, the lead hectors are not Helmsian right-wingers but liberal Democrats, Senator Paul Simon and Representative Edward Markey. This time, too, TV executives are groveling a bit, making mea culpas. "It's hard not to believe we've had some role in this," says Howard Stringer, CBS's president. Ted Turner told one congressional committee that he and his peers are "guilty of murder." And so, this time, the broadcasters felt obliged to make some concrete concession: starting two months from now, programs that...
...impetus is the belief that if kids watch violent shows, some of them will become criminally violent. "An avalanche" of definitive, unequivocal research has proved this notion, Senator Simon said last week. For two decades the psychology establishment and do-gooders have repeated this mantra. In fact, the connections are murky. Studies that find no links between TV and violence -- and there have been many -- tend not to be published or publicized...
...scholarly corpus is not altogether compelling, and neither is the very problem: Where is this terrifying glut of TV ultra-violence? Senator Simon's galvanizing instance is a scene from a chain-saw murder movie he happened on seven years ago in an Illinois motel room; he doesn't know what it was or who was showing it, and he admits he hasn't watched a lot of TV since. It's true, during the ratings-sweeps periods, the networks each put on a few movies that include scenes of comparatively graphic violence. But those are anomalies, and as theatrical...