Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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(Full disclosure: Before coming to NRO full-time, I worked for a wire service where I often wrote for the Boston Globe. I know some of the paper's editors, and like them. They always treated me well, which undoubtedly influenced my opinion - which is that the Globe has covered Kerry as well, as tough, as thoroughly and as fairly as any newspaper has ever covered its hometown presidential candidate.

I never met or dealt with Michael Kranish, the Globe reporter who is now in a controversy about his contribution to a book about Kerry's policies.) The story so far:

The Swift Boat Vets came out with their ad. Kranish interviewed one of the vets, Lieutenant Commander George Elliott, and reported that he appeared to retract his criticism of Kerry, reporting Elliott said he had made a "terrible mistake" in signing an affidavit suggesting Kerry did not deserve to be awarded the Silver Star.

Then Elliott released another affidavit Friday backing away from his comments this week to the Globe, saying Kranish misquoted him.

Globe Editor Martin Baron released a statement saying "the Globe stands by the article. The quotes attributed to Mr. Elliott were on the record and absolutely accurate."

Then Drudge reported that Kranish, a 20-year Globe veteran, had written the introduction to a Kerry-authorized campaign book, "Our Plan for America: Stronger at Home, Respected in the World."

Baron noted that earlier this summer Kranish worked with PublicAffairs — the publisher of the Boston Globe biography of Kerry, "John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography by the Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best" — to write a short introduction to a second project: an independent, unauthorized review of publicly available documents dealing with the platform and policy statements of Kerry and Edwards. That project was in no way connected with the Kerry-Edwards campaign, Baron said.

Want to see something that complicated this issue? When Kranish was contracted to write the introduction, the in-progress book was issued an ISBN, or unique machine-readable identification number, of 1586483145.

According to the publisher, Public Affairs, when it struck a deal to publish the campaign's platform, it dropped its plans to publish the book with Kranish's introduction.

Then they published Kerry's campaign book. As a FreeRepublic reader has noted, the Kerry-Edwards campaign book, has an ISBN of...

...1586483145.

The upshot? The publisher, Public Affairs, has just created a big headache for the Globe and Michael Kranish, by initially touting an independent book with a reporter covering Kerry involved, and then publishing Kerry's campaign book under the same number. Now Amazon has the new book with the old cover and Kranish is being called a Kerry campaign shill.

Kranish may have misquoted Elliott — in fact, it seems pretty clear that Kranish interpreted some of Elliott's statements about wishing to reword the specifics of his affidavit about Kerry as a recanting of his entire criticism — but he's not a paid operative of the Democratic campaign.

[Posted 08/09 01:54 PM]