Not That We're Harping On This, But...

David Folkenflik considers how many times Simon & Schuster authors have appeared on 60 Minutes without any disclosure that a Viacom lovefest is in action--five out of six books in the last two years. The Baltimore Sun piece gets the CBS part of the story right, but doesn't venture out further, as well it could...

"The problem with this kind of synergy is that it has political overtones," Fox News Channel media critic Eric Burns said on the air Sunday.

Meanwhile, hisnetwork was running all sorts of promos for Michael Bergin's "first cable news interview" about what it felt like to be Carolyn Bessette Kennedy's booty call, and just like the New York Post, failed to mention he was a Regan Books author. And though his interlocutor, Greta Van Susteren, hasn't put up the transcript yet, so who knows if she disclosed the connection then, but she certainly didn't in her breezy online remarks. (She also seems to expect brownie points for having read a book by somebody she interviewed, which is just plain dumb.)

And don't think because it's a celebrity sex book that it doesn't have political overtones...Ask yourself this: apart from the obvious commercial benefits, what other motive might the various publishing arms of Rupert Murdoch's corporate empire have to simultaneously release not just a direct slam at the memory of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy by a jilted ex-lover but also Sons of Camelot, in which professional Kennedy clan chronicler Laurence Leamer details everything every male in the family has done wrong since 1963 and pointedly ignoring the positive accomplishments of the family's female members?