CNN's New Day on Tuesday devoted a 23-second news brief to the death of author Joe McGinniss on Monday, noting that "McGinniss made headlines again in 2010, when he moved next door to Sarah Palin's Alaska home in order to research his book, 'The Rogue.' Palin threatened to sue him, but never did."
However, Tuesday's Today on NBC, which touted their interview of McGinnis in September 2011 by hyping his supposed "stunning allegations made about Sarah Palin in a bombshell book," omitted his passing on Tuesday. Anchor Savannah Guthrie gave the writer a platform during the segment to forward his unsubstantiated claims about the former Alaska governor:
Jonathan Yardley
By Matthew Balan | March 11, 2014 | 3:37 PM EDT
WashPost Book Critic Entertains Theory Bill Clinton's Adultery Made His Marriage More 'Functional and Productive'
By Tim Graham | September 9, 2012 | 5:41 PM EDT Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley reviewed a new book on Sunday by historian William Chafe called Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal. The book included this bizarre concept: "in the strangest of ways, Clinton’s reckless sexual behavior actually enhanced their personal ties. It made their relationship more functional and productive."
Yardley called this "a bit of a stretch." Just a bit??
By Tim Graham | December 4, 2011 | 5:30 PM EST
Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley took up the new book by Weekly Standard contributor Joseph Epstein on Gossip. Yardley complained that Epstein defined gossip with some "lame" words by John Podhoretz (instead of liberal Nora Ephron), but he deeply enjoyed how Epstein managed to take apart one Tina Brown, who is now the editor of both Newsweek magazine and the Daily Beast website.
Epstein identified how seemingly everywhere Tina goes, the magazine loses gobs of money but she build all kinds of "buzz," largely about herself:
By Tim Graham | October 18, 2010 | 7:51 AM EDT
The Style section of Monday's Washington Post has an enormous picture of Jimmy Carter with the simple headline "The Book of Jimmy." The Post is jarringly behind Carter's publicity curve for his latest book White House Diary, but reporter Manuel Roig-Franzia began with the usual goo from Carter's church in Plains, Georgia: "On those scattered weekends when Jimmy Carter isn't out enforcing Middle East harmony or slaying Guinea worms or compensating for presidential malaise with ex-presidential vim, the 86-year-old can be found in Sunday school."
Anyone who's paid attention to Carter would know that "enforcing Middle East harmony" is not the right description for someone who compares Israel to apartheid-era South Africa.
Readers who don't want a cavity from all that sugar might move on to the next story, but Roig-Franzia arrived at a sharper point in paragraph nine, after Carter has declared that America is the nation most committed to waging war in the entire world, and that the Iraq invasion was "horribly unnecessary" -- the reporter read Carter's book and finds that he's a preachy know-it-all:
By Tim Graham | April 6, 2009 | 3:33 PM EDT
Mark Lewis at Forbes.com wondered "is there anyone among the current crop of right-wing pundits who can bear comparison to" legendary columnist, critic, and curmudgeon H.L. Mencken? "Absolutely nobody," declared Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley, who edited Mencken's posthumous memoir My Life as Author and Editor.
By Tim Graham | December 2, 2007 | 7:02 AM EST
I enjoy reading long-time Washington Post book reviewer Jonathan Yardley, and one thing he does that’s interesting is write about reading a classic book a second time. This week, he revisited the 1931 book Only Yesterday, a very popular history of the 1920s by Frederick Lewis Allen.Yardley explained that his book had "a hint of Mencken in it, but Allen was his own man and resisted the mere apery to which so many tinhorn Menckenites of his day succumbed.