Same Shit, Different Day @ New Millennium

The Washington Post reports* on New Millennium publisher Michael Viner's claims that the Times is waging a vendetta against his big spring release, namely the Jayson Blair apologia (or non-apologia, if you believe what you read in the papers). Apparently, now Viner's directly accused outgoing book review editor Charles McGrath of leaking his review copy to the newsroom so they could break the press embargo; McGrath calls that a ridiculous smear while the Times sticks by the story that it managed to buy a copy from Amazon over a week before the official publication date (which I find utterly plausible).

* ridiculously long registration required, but just make stuff up if you don't want them knowing where you live and what you do for a living

New Millennium general counsel Ed Reilly said that even if Amazon mistakenly released a few copies for sale, the Times should not have published when it did. "It was wrongly obtained, and the New York Times knew that before they printed their story," he said.

Ed Reilly's a bad bluffer. A book's scheduled publication date isn't some legally binding landmark; if the publisher delivers copies to the bookstore, they can tell the bookstore when they'd like to have the book laydown, and most stores will go along with that, but it's not as if selling a copy before then is a crime; nor is buying it from that bookstore. New Millennium may certainly want to revisit their relationship with Amazon, but they're out of luck as far as the Times is concerned.

Of course, Viner has broader complaints, e.g., ""Lots of people, including presidents, have lied and made up stuff and they're still taken seriously. Why shouldn't Jayson Blair have a second chance?" Look, Michael, you signed an author whose only claim to fame is that he's a liar. If you didn't want to deal with credibility problems on this story, you shouldn't have offered Blair all that money.