After the September 11 outrage, Rupert Murdoch's publishing house HarperCollins pulled an upcoming book by left-liberal gadfly Mike Moore, for having the "intellectual dishonesty" to criticise George W. Bush, the Unquestionable Leader of the Free World. Existing copies of Stupid White Males were to be pulped, and Moore was instructed to rewrite it in a more patriotically-correct fashion, with costs coming from his royalties account. However, this decision has been overturned, and the book is set to come out in March. The reason for the turnabout is a campaign by librarians. (link via Reenhead)

(Why Moore still works with an authoritarian institution such as News Corp. is somewhat puzzling; the Murdoch empire have consistently shown themselves to be enemies of free expression, from pulling the BBC off their satellites at China's request to supporting draconian extensions to "copyright" laws to being the only agency outside the Chinese government to condemn and denounce the Falun Gong movement.)

Posted by: kenny | http:// | Tue Jan 8 17:27:37 2002

meybe it's a love-hate relationship of convenience, rather than be a crusader, moore's just found himself a nice gig. sort of like rushkoff talks about in coercion, where media outlets coopt so-called "trusted sources."

Posted by: Graham | http://grudnuk.com | Wed Jan 9 00:12:58 2002

"By any means necessary", i guess. What publisher did "No Logo" come out on?

Posted by: Jimbob | http://the-fix.org | Wed Jan 9 00:58:12 2002

No Logo's published by Harper Collins; Ms. Klein makes a point of stating who her publisher is in the book, and actually disses HC or whoever owns them at one stage, I think. I suppose you've got to get published somewhere; it might be possible to sell CDs as an indie, but I can't imagine it's too easy publishing books as an indie. Unless you do it through AK Press or someone like that.

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Wed Jan 9 03:50:53 2002

Is No Logo still in print? After 9-11, I'd have thought that HarperCollins would have cut short its print run because it's "unpatriotic" to criticise the corporations that make America great ("if you want to do that, why dontcha move to Afghanistan and join one of them flag-burnin' rallies") and because they need the resources to print patriotic books.

Still, if they do that, Naomi Klein owns the copyright and can take it to someone else, so this could be a big coup for Feral House or whoever.

Posted by: kenny | http:// | Wed Jan 9 23:48:42 2002

i was just thinking verso [http://www.versobooks.com/] or autonomedia [http://www.autonomedia.org/].

Posted by: kenny | http:// | Wed Jan 9 23:49:50 2002

damn!

Want to say something? Do so here.

Note to spammers: This comment system applies the rel=nofollow attribute to the poster's URL and all links. Posting links to this page will not improve their search engine rankings.

Display name:
URL:(optional)
To prove that you are not a bot, please enter the text in the image on the right in the field below it.

Your Comment:

Remember my details.

Please keep comments on topic and to the point. Inappropriate comments may be deleted.

Note that markup is stripped from comments; URLs will be automatically converted into links.