Today's Times offers a less-than-glowing assessment of Times reporter Jo Becker's book Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality. Reviewer Adam Goodheart (who was a colleague of mine at the Harvard Crimson) writes, scathingly:
Ms. Becker paid too high a price for access. "Forcing the Spring" is riddled with the telltale signs of a reporter becoming too close to her sources. She does herself (and her subjects) no favors with fawning descriptions of Mr. Griffin's inner circle: one has "a face Botticelli might have painted"; another is "the kind of girl who might have once graced a 1950s pinup calendar."
More troubling, she suggests that earlier advocates of marriage equality had toiled in fruitless obscurity until this glamorous dream team swept in. It's a bizarre premise, since by the time the Perry case went to court, same-sex marriage had been fought for successfully in six states and the District of Columbia.
Now they tell us. If this book is so fawning and based on such a bizarre premise, why did the Times run an excerpt of it as the cover story of the New York Times magazine back on April 20? At least the Times could have done its readers the service of running the review before the magazine article came out, so as to save the readers the time and trouble of wading through the fawning, bizarre prose.
If this sounds familiar, it should. The newspaper pulled precisely the same stunt last year with staff reporter Michael Moss's book Salt Sugar Fat. The Times reviewer called the book "a bit wearying," and "a little like a plate of processed cheese: fresh, in its way, but behind the culinary curve." A few weeks earlier, the Times had run an excerpt as the magazine cover story.