Ken Morris' Article at the Alaska Dispatch - "I'm Not Gonna Sue Joe...... Unless" - Updated

I'm paraphrasing  (don't want to get sued).

The Alaska Dispatch is hosting a sort of diatribe by author Ken Morris, who, along with Jeanne Devon, co-authored Frank Bailey's Blind Allegiance.  You can read Ken's entire article here.

I commented at the AKD post:

Mr. Morris,

From my experience, it helps any book's marketability when it is written with a sense of tone, an ease of flow, and a narrative that reaches beyond what one might feel reluctant to assign to a class above the 8th or 9th grade level. Blind Allegiance has many faults, none of them attributable to Mr. McGinniss. An honest assessment of just a few of them was published by author Geoffrey Dunn in the Anchorage Press last month, in his detailed article, Palin Redividus.

Interestingly, the same author published an assessment of Mr. McGinniss' book's media reception by the New York Times at my blog and at firedoglake last week, an article titled Blood in the Snow: Maslin’s NYT Review of The Rogue Is Intellectually Dishonest.

You write:

Along with McGinniss’s recent assertion that the mainstream media conspired to unanimously issue his Palin book scathing reviews, he has insulted everyone’s intelligence more than enough.

You're mischaracterizing what McGinniss has actually said. He has been critical of the book's reception, but his description has been of a captive mindset that produces reviews like the first one in the NYT, the Truthout piece you reference, and others, not of a "conspiracy" per se.

I am not defending McGinniss' February action. I never have. However, I also regard the handling of material that undoubtedly passed through your hands during the creation and composition of Blind Allegiance to be open to question, as Andree McLeod has so fully done, and is continuing to do. She contends that you, Devon and Bailey knowingly violated Alaska’s public records, retention and preservation laws.

Indeed, Dunn going in a slightly different direction than McLeod, wrote in the Anchorage Press:

But there are also bigger problems. Like Palin in Going Rogue, Bailey leaves out some critical information in Blind Allegiance - information that he had most certainly access to, because it's information that involved him. And in so doing, he made me realize that Blind Allegiance, for all its inside revelations is, in fact, a second, albeit more subtle, cover-up involving Troopergate.


At some point subsequent to completing my book, I had a couple of "smoking-gun" documents leaked to me anonymously from Anchorage related to Palin's checkered career. I have no idea who sent them. The documents were records of statements given during the Petumenos investigation by Bailey and his sidekick Ivy Frye, and, taken with the findings and conclusions of the Petumenos report, point to a conspiracy of sorts in framing the collective response by Palin's inner circle to the Troopergate investigation in the late summer and early fall of 2008.

You write:

As for the media covering this man in recent days, I find it saddening that nearly all of you ignored Joe McGinniss’s career-swagger through questionable ethics, yet again. Not one interviewer asked him about leaking competing authors’ work while on his recent media tour, yet many of you were the same folks who gleefully read from the leaked copy of that manuscript back in February, thereby helping to diminish its marketability. Shame on you.

First, I'm not aware of any time this same media you castigate having asked you, Bailey or Devon a serious set of questions related to McLeod's and Dunn's concerns.

Second, you regard McGinniss' present stance as being a "career-swagger through questionable ethics." I see no less in how you are approaching this announcement about not intending to take legal action against McGinniss.

Third, as to the alleged "marketability" of Blind Allegiance, I've contended since struggling through it, as have many, many others, that it just wasn't and is not very marketable.

Update: Jesse Griffin all but concurs with my assessment, Ken. In his recent post on a Canadian review that compares The Rogue and The Lies of Sarah Palin, Griffin concludes:

I could not concur more. If you can ONLY afford two Palin books this year, then these two wonderfully written books are your best choice hands down.

Good luck on your next book, Mr. Morris!