Mainstream Media Silent on Bush Book

Tim Arango - International Herald Tribune

Jul 07, 2008

As a prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi was perfect in murder cases: 21 trials, 21 convictions, including the Charles Manson case in 1971.

As an author, Bugliosi has written three No.1 bestsellers and won three Edgar Allen Poe awards, the top honor for crime writers.

But what happens when a big-name author, who more than 30 years ago co-wrote the best seller "Helter Skelter," publishes a book that the mainstream press has shied away from?

Bugliosi's latest, a polemic with the provocative title, "The Prosecution of George W. Bush For Murder," has risen to best-seller status with nary a peep from the usual outlets that help sell books: cable television and book reviews in major daily newspapers.

Internet advertising has been abundant, but ABC Radio refused to accept an advertisement for the book during the Don Imus show, said Roger Cooper, the publisher of Vanguard Press, which put out the book.

Bugliosi, in a recent interview by telephone from his home in Los Angeles, said he had expected some pushback from the mainstream media because of the subject matter - the book lays a legal case for holding Bush "criminally responsible" for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq - but did not expect a virtual blackout.

His publisher and publicist said they expected Bugliosi's credentials to ensure coverage. He is, after all, fairly mainstream. His last book, a 1,612-page doorstop on the Kennedy assassination, "Reclaiming History," which was published last year, sought to debunk the conspiracy theorists and is being made into a 10-hour miniseries by HBO and the actor Tom Hanks.

Bugliosi said that bookers for cable television, where he has made regular appearances to promote books, have ignored his latest offering. MSNBC and Comedy Central were two outlets Bugliosi thought would show interest, but neither did.

"They are not responding at all," he said. "I think it all goes back to fear. If the liberal media would put me on national television, I think they'd fear that they would be savaged by the right wing. The left wing fears the right, but the right does not fear the left."

A spokeswoman for Comedy Central declined to comment. A representative for MSNBC said: "We get many pitches to interview authors, and very few end up on our programs."

The editor of Newsweek, Jon Meacham, said he had not read the manuscript, but he offered a reason why the media might be silent: "I think there's a kind of Bush-bashing fatigue out there."

"If it's selling well," Meacham said, "it's another sign that the traditional channels of commerce have been blown up. If a dedicated part of the Internet community wants to move something, it doesn't need a benediction from the mainstream media, and might benefit from not having one."

The book was published in late May by Vanguard Press, a division of Perseus Books Group - which recently published a memoir by a former White House spokesman, Scott McClellan - and has sold about 130,000 copies. Last week it was No. 12 on The New York Times best- seller list. The book is under consideration for review, said Robert Harris, the deputy editor of The New York Times Book Review.

For the Bush book, the equation for success seems to be this: Bugliosi's reputation plus talk radio plus the viral nature of the Internet.

Sara Nelson, the editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly, said, "130,000 copies is an enormous number of copies of anything."

"You should never underestimate the power of a brand-name author to circumvent the normal publicity and marketing channels," Nelson added. "Somebody was very smart to see that something subversive like this is best marketed on the anonymous and youthful medium of the Internet."

Nelson said that if the book became successful, "the same people who didn't want to give him publicity in advance would give him publicity after the fact."

Cooper of Vanguard Press said, "We publish books on all sides of the political fence, and all kinds of political thought." Indeed, the company has also published one of Bush's favorite writers: Natan Sharansky, the onetime Soviet dissident whose book "The Case for Democracy" is said to have influenced Bush's foreign policy agenda.

Of Bugliosi's book, Cooper said, "I expected there would be people who would choose not to talk about it. But I thought some would."

Bugliosi has had more than 100 radio interviews about the book, and Vanguard was behind an aggressive Internet campaign that included ads on liberal blogs.

"It's been frustrating on one hand, but exhilarating on the other," Cooper said. "Using the Internet has been an integral fact in the success of this book. I feel terrific about the sales of this book."

While Bugliosi's Kennedy book got the star treatment from Hollywood, he had to look outside the United States to find money for a film on his Bush polemic. Jim Shaban, a theater owner in Windsor, Ontario, financed a documentary on the book that is almost complete. The movie, directed by David Burke, does not yet have a distributor.

"We may not be able to work with a mainstream company," said Peter Miller, of the PMA Literary and Film Agency, who has represented Bugliosi for about 25 years.

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