Roth, Grisham and the fake Italian interviews (The New Yorker)

[Jackeens]

Last month, Paola Zanuttini, a journalist from La Repubblica, the progressive Roman newspaper, interviewed Philip Roth about his latest novel, “The Humbling” .....

The real scandal revealed by the interview, however, came at the end, when Zanuttini 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 (who is embroiled in his own sex scandals with much younger women). “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.

......“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.” (“Last year’s enthusiasm is remote now,” Grisham allegedly told Debenedetti. “People are angry with Obama for having done little or nothing and having promised too much.”)

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.”

More: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/04/05/100405ta_talk_thurman

[Cha]

1. Good to know..although,

I hadn't heard the fictional bad news before..I just have to shake my head at how propaganda against the American president gets started.

Rec for clarity~

[tanyev]

2. Berlusconi media hard at work?

[Cha]

3. Yeah, like the US corporatemediaWhore

network.