469:, replete with distortion and omission, Lelyveld avoids mentioning how that fabricated "scandal" led into the Lewinsky affair. He praises Didion's able dissection of the Isikoff–Starr version, an unreliable narrative concocted by prosecutors and their helpers in the press. He doesn't dispute her observation that Washington's "self-interested political class," including the media, "smelled blood, Clinton's." And he forthrightly agrees that the real story was the independent counsel's "headlong attempt" to bring down an elected president, adding that Hillary Clinton's famous remark about a possible conspiracy "was too easily discounted."
524:, December 21, 2001. ("It's striking that Didion finds the capstone for her argument about a narrative-shaping political class permanently estranged from the country in the media splurge—let's resist the temptation to call it an orgy—of the Lewinsky affair. This 'self-interested political class,' as she here lambastes it, smelled blood, Clinton's. It was sure the President would have to resign or face impeachment. The country was mildly titillated, not uninterested in seeing how
423:. "For the sheer exuberance of the savaging, Joan Didion on the methodology of Bob Woodward's books is itself worth the price of admission." He calls the book both a demonstration of how "in the end something like a narrative is foisted on the land" and "the freshest application of an acute literary intelligence to the political scene three decades." In
440:. He worries that readers regard him and his colleagues as part of a 'self-serving, self-satisfied, self-enriching establishment' that conspires in the creation of a trivial and misleading narrative of our national life. And most surprisingly, he suggests that there was substance behind suspicions of a '
483:
The question he is uniquely qualified to answer, but does not, is why that fascinating and salient story was so assiduously ignored by the mainstream media, including the Times, for so many years. Lelyveld cannot quite bring himself to be candid on that sensitive topic, which is, ironically, the same
528:
or Leno would exploit the scandal, but resolutely unwilling to accept it as a constitutional crisis. Noting that
Americans now, on average, become sexually active about a decade before they marry and that extramarital sex is one of the big reasons for a high divorce rate, Didion finds wonderment and
281:
She implies that this shift to a more purely performative, logistically cynical, media-narrative determined politics is a functionally emergent, if possibly only semi-consciously intentional strategy to mask the
American voters' disenfranchisement. As she mentions in the book's foreword, "We'd
277:
Didion evolves this into a close dissection of how the press casts and shapes the news, and helps promote a scandal. It is, as Didion writes, a story of "that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life." The narrative, she writes, "is made up of many
282:
reached the zero-sum point towards which the process had been moving, the moment in which the
Republican's determination to maximize their traditional low-turnout advantage was perfectly matched by the determination of the Democratic Party to shed any association with its low-income base."
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noted, "It turns out that the man who used to run the Times is quite troubled by the quality of journalism during the era when he was in power, though we learn that circuitously, through his endorsements of many of Didion's complaints. He is plainly contemptuous of his old rivals at
330:. Adapted from three essays: "Shooters Inc." (first published on December 22, 1988), "'Something Horrible' in El Salvador" (first published on July 14, 1994), and "The Lion King" (first published on December 18, 1997). "Shooters Inc." was also included in
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480:, that reached into both the Paula Jones defense team and Starr's office," he writes. Students of the subject will recognize how inadequate that description is, but it is apparently the best he can do.
409:, Jessica Lee Thomas wrote, "The scariest point Didion seems to be making is not simply that politics is a nest of lies, but that we buy into 'the story' like any good novel." In his 2001 essay in
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What
Lelyveld says next amounts to a confession of sorts. "Very late in the game, reporters started tracing the network of lawyers in the conservative
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executive editor Joseph
Lelyveld discussed "Didion's great virtues as a political writer," noting particularly her examination of the journalism of
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kind of intellectual failure excoriated so passionately and so precisely by Joan Didion. It is astonishing, nevertheless, that he even tries.
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wrote, "Didion is on pure Zen target when she tells us that
American democracy has been abducted," and called the book "a splendid sermon."
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includes a foreword by the author and eight essays, all written between 1988 and 2000 and initially published in
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self-serving political calculation in the ability of politicians and journalists to act so shocked.")
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understandings ... to overlook the observable in the interests of obtaining a dramatic story line."
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Conason, in his brief essay, examines implications in
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work. First published on
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The evolution of
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233:, as well as the works of journalists
650:Conason, "Remembering the Bad Times."
502:Lueck, Thomas J. (20 February 2002).
274:provide the book's central material.
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198:on the American political process.
392:About the role of religion in the
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461:Although he oversaw most of the
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