Decline and Fall

As a longtime fan of the New York Times’s Corrections column, The Scrapbook can attest that the Times, like any human institution, makes its share of mistakes—some of which are beauts, by any measure. But the error uncovered in the August 23 edition of the New York Times Book Review goes well beyond mere beaut status and rates some category of its own. 

It begins with a review, by novelist Joshua Cohen, of Mario Vargas Llosa’s latest book, Notes on the Death of Culture: Essays on Spectacle and Society. The 2010 Nobel laureate’s volume may be summarized, very briefly, as an all-purpose gripe on the decline of cultural standards, most of which first appeared in a Spanish newspaper, El País. Cohen detects irony in this, since (in his words) “Vargas Llosa’s cranky, hasty manifesto is made of the very stuff it criticizes: journalism.”

Of course, Cohen is fully entitled to dislike Vargas Llosa’s book—The Scrapbook has not yet read it—and is equally entitled to dislike Vargas Llosa, who is very much a public figure with strongly held political views. But the review ends on a curiously personal note, pointing out that the 79-year-old Vargas Llosa recently left his wife of 50 years for a 64-year-old woman named Isabel Preysler, who happens to be the mother of pop singer Enrique Iglesias.

All of which is true, but then Joshua Cohen piles on: “Vargas Llosa announced their relationship on his official Twitter account, and sold photos and the ‘exclusive’ story to Hola! magazine, reportedly for 850,000 euros.”

Well, as it turns out, Vargas Llosa did no such thing—and as he pointed out in a letter to the Times, “I have never had a Twitter account, and I have never posted and never will post anything on any Twitter account. I have never sold a photo or story to Hola! magazine or any other outlet in connection with any relationship or personal matter.” To which the Times responded, in its characteristic tone: “In reviewing this complaint, editors determined that the reviewer had based his account of these matters mostly on information from an article about Vargas Llosa in the Daily Mail, but neither the reviewer nor editors independently verified those statements.”

The Scrapbook, aware of human frailty, will refrain from drawing any conclusions from this incident, except to make a few casual observations. First, as any reader of Evelyn Waugh’s novels must know, it is never a smart idea to take stories in the Daily Mail, or any Fleet Street tabloid, strictly at face value. (Our complimentary paperback edition of Scoop is on its way to Joshua Cohen.) And second, while the Times editors don’t mention it, the Book Review’s dereliction precisely represents what Vargas Llosa is complaining about. A sensational, and decidedly slanderous, assertion is made about a Nobel literature laureate—and no one at the New York Times can be stirred to verify it? 

That’s journalistic, if not cultural, decline.