If you hear that a famous writer (or any other intelligent person) is anti-Obama, and it sounds a bit dubious - it probably is.
Quoting...
Last month, Paola Zanuttini, a journalist from La Repubblica, the progressive Roman newspaper, interviewed Philip Roth... and asked Roth why he was so “disappointed” with Barack Obama. She translated, aloud, remarks attributed to him in an article by a freelance journalist, Tommaso Debenedetti, that was published last November in Libero, a tabloid notably sympathetic to Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy. “It appears that you find him nasty, vacillating, and mired in the mechanics of power,” Zanuttini said.
“But I have never said anything of the kind!” Roth objected. “It is completely contrary to what I think. Obama, in my opinion, is fantastic.” He had never heard of Debenedetti, or of Libero.
The interview, with its bitter judgment of Obama’s banality, failure, and empty rhetoric about hope and change, was a complete fabrication....
Libero’s editor grudgingly expressed embarrassment, and its Web site took down the interview. Debenedetti turned off his cell phone and dropped out of sight.... Roth, however, was curious about him. “I went online to do some research,” he said. He discovered that Debenedetti had claimed to possess recordings of their “telephone conversation,” but, Roth said, “he couldn’t find the tapes.” An op-ed piece in Corriere della Sera, Italy’s newspaper of record, had praised the frankness of Roth’s critique of Obama, contrasting it to the pusillanimity of Italians in calling their own leader to account.
“But what I was really looking for,” Roth continued, “were other interviews by Debenedetti, and I found one, with John Grisham, that was published in three newspapers”—Il Resto del Carlino and La Nazione, both conservative, and Il Giorno, which is centrist.
"They contained the same sort of denunciations, which sounded implausible to me.”Roth asked his agent, Andrew Wylie, to contact Grisham’s agent, David Gernert, and,
sure enough, the Grisham “interview” proved to be another hoax.Like Roth, Grisham took the trouble to double-check his press contacts, and found no record of Debenedetti. “I was more shocked than angered,” he wrote in an e-mail. Having read the text in translation, it wasn’t, he thought, “a bad piece of fiction.” As for Obama, both Grisham and his wife, Renée (a Hillary Clinton superdelegate), were, after the nomination, “on board, and still are.”
“You have to wonder what the guy was thinking,” Roth concluded. “The best explanation I can find is that this obscure freelancer had hit upon a way of selling articles by attributing anti-Obama sentiments to famous American writers. It was a good gimmick, and he probably had fun. But I can’t imagine what he’ll do now—surely his career is over.”
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/04/05/100405ta_talk_thurmanAnd then there is the follow-up:
Quoting:
Yesterday...I had uncovered a third fabrication—a fake interview with Gore Vidal.
Last night, in the online archives of Il Piccolo, a local paper published in Trieste where the Vidal Q. & A. first appeared, I found more than twenty additional interviews under Debenedetti’s byline purporting to be conversations by telephone or in person with some of the most eminent figures in world literature. The earliest was from 2006; the most recent was published last month. More than half of his subjects were Nobel laureates.
I began contacting these writers and their representatives. As of this afternoon:
* Toni Morrison denies ever having spoken to Debenedetti.
* E. L. Doctorow told me that the language and, in particular, the imagery, attributed to him are “impossible.”
* Philip Roth was amused to hear that Debenedetti had published a second interview with him, from 2009.
(Similar denials from V.S. Naipul, Nadine Gordimer, Amos Oz, etc.)
...I finally reached Debenedetti in Rome, on his cell phone. Debenedetti said he was completely “shocked and saddened” that all these writers would have denied the veracity of his reporting. When I asked him about the interviews with Roth and Grisham, he flatly denied having invented them, and told me that Roth and Grisham were lying for “political” reasons—because their views on Obama would make them unpopular with left-leaning intellectuals. Roth, he added, might have decided that it was impolitic to express hostility toward Obama because it might spoil his chances for the Nobel.
(Yeah, right.)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/04/more-counterfeit-interviews.html
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