{"id":1028,"date":"2005-02-24T10:15:31","date_gmt":"2005-02-24T18:15:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2005\/02\/on_the_record\/"},"modified":"2019-11-03T11:50:09","modified_gmt":"2019-11-03T16:50:09","slug":"on_the_record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2005\/02\/on_the_record.html","title":{"rendered":"ON THE RECORD"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jason Leopold, whom I don’t know, emailed me a while ago out of the blue: “Jan, Just wanted to\u00a0pass this along. Feel free to contact me and call my publisher for a review copy.” This<\/i> was\u00a0promotional material for his book, “Off the\u00a0Record,”<\/span><\/b><\/a> with blurbs from various authors and journalists. We all know how\u00a0hard it is for writers to get their books reviewed. I felt sympathetic. Plus, one of the blurbs was\u00a0from Greg Palast, who was quoted in the email and on Leopold’s\u00a0Website<\/span><\/b><\/a> as saying: “I love this book. I love Jason Leopold. When other US\u00a0reporters were licking Ken Lay’s loafers, Leopold went for Enron’s thieving throat. … Every\u00a0journalist in America should read this, then quit or riot.”<\/p>\n

Whoa! Is there another Hunter S. Thompson in our midst? I\u00a0messaged back (How could I not?): “Thank you for letting me know about OFF THE RECORD.\u00a0I was unaware of it. I’d love to have a look at a review copy.” I said I was duping the message to\u00a0the publisher’s publicist and added: “That’s quite a rave from Greg Palast.” Leopold replied:\u00a0“Thanks so much for getting back to me. I love your work. [Ah, flattery.] I will make sure a\u00a0galley is sent to you this week.”<\/p>\n

I considered messaging Palast<\/span><\/b><\/a> to make sure his blurb\u00a0was authentic. But then I thought, what the hell, I’ll read the book and make up my own mind.\u00a0The galley proof arrived. The subtitle promised “An Investigative Journalist’s Inside View of\u00a0DIRTY POLITICS, CORPORATE SCANDAL, and A DOUBLE LIFE EXPOSED.” I began\u00a0reading and kept wondering, where’s the inside view of dirty politics and corporate scandal? There\u00a0was almost nothing about that. The opening chapter teased me into believing there would be. The\u00a0closing chapter pretended there had been. Everything in between was about one subject only:\u00a0dirty, scandalous Jason Leopold, a conman who’d had a major story retracted and who bore no\u00a0resemblance to Hunter S. Thompson.<\/p>\n

It turns out “Off the Record” is the tale of a reporter investigating his own obsessions, not the\u00a0corruption at Enron or the dirty dealings of public officials, except tangentially, when they\u00a0concerned Leopold’s manic transgressions as a person and a journalist (two states of being which,\u00a0for him, were mutually exclusive). Where was the promised inside view of anything but his own\u00a0head? The book was compulsive reading, I’ll grant it that. It made me feel like a lookey lu who\u00a0can’t stop staring at the wreckage of a fatal crash. I kept watching the bodies being pulled out — in\u00a0this case just one body, Jason Leopold’s, sad victim of an ego still grandstanding to the bitter\u00a0end.<\/p>\n

Postscript: <\/b>This week’s Village Voice has a piece on Leopold and the book<\/span><\/b><\/a>, which concludes by “questioning\u00a0whether ‘Off the Record’ will make it to store shelves,” due to a potential defamation suit, or\u00a0whether “Leopold will suffer yet another retraction.” The book is listed for online pre-orders at
\nboth Amazon.com (linked above) and Barnes &\u00a0Noble.com<\/span><\/b><\/a> but hasn’t been released.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jason Leopold, whom I don’t know, emailed me a while ago out of the blue: “Jan, Just wanted to\u00a0pass this along. Feel free to contact me and call my publisher for a review copy.” This was\u00a0promotional material for his book, “Off the\u00a0Record,” with blurbs from various authors and journalists. We all know how\u00a0hard it is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1028","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-gA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1028"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36566,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1028\/revisions\/36566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}