Naïveté dot com

Taking issue with the Times' Amazon exposé-that-wasn't. Plus, Christopher Hitchens shows guts -- and gets disemboweled.

Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy

There was something touchingly naive about New York Times reporter Doreen Carvajal's February 8 front-page story on Amazon.com.

In tones that suggested great surprise, if not shock, Carvajal reported that the online bookseller has begun charging big bucks -- as much as $10,000 -- to publishers who want a premium location on Amazon's Web site. Even more scandalous, such prime real estate runs under headings such as "New and Notable" and "Destined for Greatness," which imply at least some measure of editorial independence.

Carvajal's story got results. The very next day, Amazon announced it will take the full-disclosure route: starting on March 1, any paid-for display will be clearly labeled as such.

A victory for consumers, right? Well, yes and no. Yes, because it's always better to know something's bought and paid for than not to know. No, because the Times, whether it intended to or not, made the ridiculous proposition that Amazon should be held to a higher standard than, say, Wal-Mart. Context, as always, is everything. Companies regularly pay extra to retailers for advantageous placement, whether the product is corn flakes or, more to the point, magazines and books. The Times story pressured Amazon -- which is already losing millions of dollars -- into a policy that may prove less lucrative in the long run.

The lack of context in Carvajal's story led to some truly ludicrous assertions -- none more so than the one by Jonathan Bulkeley, chief executive of Amazon's archrival, Barnesandnoble.com, who was allowed to get away with claiming that his Web site would never, ever stoop to anything so crass as running unlabeled advertorials. He even accused Amazon of "messing with the consumer's brains."

Three years ago, though, the Times ran a front-page story by Mary Tabor reporting that Barnes & Noble -- the bricks-and-mortar chain, not its cyberspace cousin -- was doing precisely that. Using money from publishers called "cooperative advertising allowances," Barnes & Noble, as well as other big national chains such as Borders, charge for premium display space in their stores.

Tabor learned that B&N even takes money to display books on its "Discover Great New Writers" shelves without doing anything to let customers know they are actually looking at books by Great (or Not) New Writers Whose Publishers Were Willing to Shell Out $1500 a Title. Indeed, in the nonvirtual world bookstores charge publishers for everything but the doormats on which customers wipe their feet. (Come to think of it, the Washington Post's David Streitfeld once reported that Books-A-Million does charge publishers for doormats that are imprinted with a promotional message.)

Of course, we're used to such commercial considerations in a capitalistic society, and stories such as Tabor's and Streitfeld's tend to be met with world-weary resignation. It's interesting, then, that when an e-commerce company such as Amazon.com does exactly the same thing, we react with such indignation.

"This is the first sign of a loss of innocence about the Web," says Elizabeth Manus, who covers the publishing industry for the New York Observer. "As one publisher said to me, `Amazon has been going around like Caesar's wife, and then you find out Caesar's wife is a slut just like everyone else.' "

The Times is hardly alone in applying different standards when reporting on the Web. Indeed, after the Amazon story appeared, the first reaction of two online columnists was not to stick up for Amazon but, rather, to question the Times' ethics. The reason: neither Carvajal's original story nor her follow-up mentioned the fact that the Web edition of the New York Times Book Review contains interactive ads for Barnesandnoble.com.

"Surely this little fact deserved a brief mention in a major negative story about Barnesandnoble.com's chief competitor," wrote Salon's Scott Rosenberg. Added Scott Shuger, who writes the "Today's Papers" column for Slate: "[I]sn't the arrangement similar enough to the one at Amazon to have warranted mention? And isn't this especially important since Barnes and Noble is an Amazon.com competitor?" To add to the intrigue, both Salon and Slate have similar deals with Barnesandnoble.com. (Slate also runs noninteractive ads from Amazon.) Rosenberg, at least, noted that fact in his commentary, but Shuger must have forgotten. Shuger did not respond to an e-mail asking about his apparent oversight.

Rosenberg and Shuger both raise an interesting point, but how far is the Times supposed to go in playing the disclosure game? After all, no one would demand that the Times reveal how much advertising money it got from Ford if it were to publish a negative story about General Motors. Why should Web advertising be considered different?

One answer to that question is that the Web, because of its interactive nature, is so much more powerful than print. For instance, each review in the NYTBR Web edition (as well as in Salon and Slate) is accompanied by a button or a link that lets you instantly purchase the book at Barnesandnoble.com. Obviously, you're more likely to click if the review is a positive one. The B&N Web site, in turn, contains some content provided by the Times.

Rosenberg, in an e-mail exchange, also noted that interactive point-of-purchase ads typically require the advertiser to fork over a percentage of each sale. "It's simply a much closer relationship, involving a lot more working together than simply the placement of an ad," Rosenberg says. (NYTBR editor Charles McGrath referred a question about the Times' financial arrangements with B&N to Times Company spokeswoman Nancy Nielsen, who did not respond to a request for comment.)

It's possible to get carried away with disclosures. For instance, let me disclose right here that (a) I used to be a regular contributor to Salon, (b) Shuger and I exchanged some nasty e-mails a couple of weeks ago after I disparaged a column of his, and (c) I run a Web site for a nonprofit organization that is working out a cooperative deal with Amazon.com. But it's hard to see how those disclosures shed any light on my motives for writing this column.

Anyone who's ever been to the NYTBR Web site is well aware of its relationship with Barnesandnoble.com. And, as McGrath observes, there's a big difference between Amazon.com's content and the NYTBR's. "Amazon is a retail environment, only it happens to look like journalism," he says. "They are booksellers, not book reviewers. Our Web site is editorially pure. Barnes & Noble has no input whatsoever in what books we choose to review."

The real shame isn't that Amazon tried to take money for its display space without telling its customers. It's that all of the big bookstores -- Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-A-Million, and others -- have transformed what used to be the realm of people who truly loved books into just another way to rake in profits.

Richard Howorth, president of the independent American Booksellers Association and the owner of Square Books, in Oxford, Mississippi, calls the chains' pay-for-play arrangements "deceptive, mendacious, and basically evil." Unfortunately, they're also now standard operating procedure.

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Certainly journalist Christopher Hitchens isn't going to win any friend-of-the-year honors for his betrayal of White House aide Sidney Blumenthal. He may not even have been factually accurate when he claimed that Blumenthal had once told him Monica Lewinsky had stalked Bill Clinton. New York Observer columnist Joe Conason, to name one critic, thinks Hitchens is just plain wrong.

Even so, there's something perversely admirable about Hitchens's refusal to play the Washington-insider game. Let's be clear: Hitchens did not commit the cardinal sin of giving up a confidential source, because Blumenthal's lawyer had publicly released reporters from any secrecy deals. Rather, Hitchens's was a very personal act, one that will cost his ex-friend much in legal fees -- and, theoretically, his freedom, since Blumenthal apparently denied peddling the Monica-as-stalker line when he was hauled before the grand jury. Famous recent exceptions aside, grand-jury perjury is generally considered a serious offense.

But Hitchens has given up plenty, too. An expatriate Brit who writes for both the left-liberal Nation and the glossy Vanity Fair, Hitchens loathes Clinton. He has written copiously about the president's sleazy exploitation of Lewinsky, as well as about such larger political misdeeds as his fundraising abuses, his bombing of the Sudanese pharmaceutical plant, and his sellout on welfare reform. Surely Hitchens, more than anyone, understood the consequences of giving a signed affidavit to Clinton's right-wing enemies on the House Judiciary Committee. But given a chance to shed light on what he believed to be a White House-directed smear of Lewinsky (a smear that might have worked had Lewinsky not saved The Dress), Hitchens chose truth over friendship. It could not have been an easy choice.

Hitchens is taking it with both barrels from his colleagues at the Nation. In the current issue, alongside his own effort to defend himself, is a scathing piece by Katha Pollitt that compares Hitchens to former leftists who sold out their ex-comrades during the McCarthy era. (That line was taken by Todd Gitlin in the Los Angeles Times as well.) An editorial also condemns Hitchens's betrayal, and adds ominously: "In the weeks ahead there will be ample opportunity here to discuss these matters." Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn, in his newsletter CounterPunch, goes so far as to characterize Hitchens as a drunken lout and closet right-winger who's been itching to play Judas for some time. (Both Hitchens and Cockburn have Clinton books coming out later this year, Hitchens's titled Ask Not, Tell Not, Cockburn's The Joy of Sex: Bill Clinton and the Conquest of Puritanism.)

At the same time that Hitchens is being called out by his ideological allies, he's also being shunned by his friends on the social circuit. As wickedly portrayed by Lloyd Grove in the Washington Post and William Powers in National Journal, Hitchens's violation was primarily one of etiquette, in which the media and political figures who gather for lunch and dinner parties simply aren't supposed to talk about matters that could hurt one another. It makes you wonder what else they know that we don't.

One of the few outright expressions of admiration for Hitchens came from the New York Observer. In an editorial headlined THREE CHEERS FOR HITCHENS, the paper observed: "Like so many slick careerists in Washington, he could have chosen to look the other way when faced with sleaze. Instead, he confronted what he believes to be a lie."

Maybe Hitchens should have refused to answer questions from the Judiciary's goon squad. Maybe he should have placed a higher value on his long-standing friendship with Blumenthal than on his animus toward Clinton.

But what he did took guts, and he at least deserves credit for that.