Word: kelleyism
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...Kelley weathered the weeklong storm by fielding increasingly aggressive questions in TV interviews. "You just spend your time digging up ugliness about people," one audience member scolded on Sally Jessy Raphael. "I don't know how you sleep at night." Kelley's perky, predigested reply: "I didn't live the life. She did." Pressed about the Sinatra/Nancy encounters at the White House, Kelley let the innuendos speak for themselves: "I only take you up to the bedroom door." To the growing chorus of denials from principals in the book, she professed unconcern: "People are going to step forward...
...center of this tornado? First, while Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography may be mean-spirited, it is no mean achievement. The book is exhaustively researched, packed with quotes (a surprising number of them with names attached), anecdotes and detail. To be sure, much of this is not new: Kelley mixes original quotes indiscriminately with recycled material from other books and articles, and fudges the notes at the end so the reader often cannot tell which is which. Still, much of the portrait -- Nancy's difficult relationship with her children, her obsessive attention to detail as a White House hostess -- rings...
...problem is that in marshaling her case against the former First Lady, Kelley's book is so slanted that its credibility is called into question at every turn. She uses a variety of techniques that would not pass muster with most reputable news organizations. Some examples...
Print the quote, whatever the source. For Kelley, all sources are treated as equal. The recollections of an unnamed secretary repeating thirdhand gossip are given the same weight as on-the-record comments from actual witnesses. (And sometimes more weight.) This ascribes far too much authority to what may be nothing more than idle gossip or office chitchat. It also fails to account for sources who may have their own axes to grind...
...example, Kelley quotes at length Shirley Watkins -- identified as "one of Mrs. Reagan's secretaries" -- describing the cynical way in which Nancy Reagan and her advisers tried to mold her public image. When it was suggested that Mrs. Reagan meet with a little boy dying of muscular dystrophy, Watkins recalls that a top aide replied, "Absolutely not. The First Lady doesn't want her picture taken with some drooly kid on a respirator. It's too disgusting...