Fact Massage Puts Public Trust Through the Wringer

It is a truth universally acknowledged that in contemporary media sex trumps substance nearly every time.

Case in point: The most disturbing fact to emerge from the scandal now afflicting the prestigious Harvard Business Review has been all but lost in a torrent of semi-salacious reportage and comment.

Two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that the review’s editor, Suzy Wetlaufer, 42, had been forced to kill an interview she had conducted because she had become romantically involved with her subject, former General Electric chairman Jack Welch, 66. Two other editors were assigned to conduct a new interview with Welch, and it was published last month. Friday, Wetlaufer resigned her editorship as part of a settlement negotiated by a lawyer selected and advised by Welch. Wetlaufer will take a six-week leave of absence and then return as editor-at-large.

The problem is that Harvard Business Review editors quoted in initial accounts of the affair let drop the fact that Welch, like the other subjects of the publication’s widely read interviews, was allowed to edit and amend his responses to their questions. In other words, CEO interviews in Ameri- ca’s leading academic business publication are carefully manicured public relations exercises.

Why does that matter?

The Harvard Business School is one of a handful of institutions that act as finishing schools for the international managerial elite. Last April, Wetlaufer proudly told the Harvard Business School Bulletin that “as the Economist [magazine] says, HBR single-handedly sets the agenda for business in the world today.” Failure to disclose that its interviews are actually collaborations is, if not deceitful, sly. The message is that information, like inventory or liability, is something to be managed and packaged to suit the ambitions of the executives involved.

That is a dubious notion to propagate at a time when the need for accurate, candid information on business and industry has never been more critical. Over the past two decades, the vogue for employee stock ownership and the flight of more and more corporations from conventional pension plans have conspired to draft tens of millions of average Americans into the equity and bond markets. Anyone who doubts the obligation of corporate executives to provide truthful, comprehensible information about their businesses should ask people stuck with shares in Global Crossing or Enron how they feel about the question.

Salinger Maintains Silence: A number of Web sites, including Amazon.com, were forced this week to pull items anticipating the November appearance of a long-awaited book by the famously reclusive J.D. Salinger, who has not published anything for 40 years. The novella, “Hapworth 16, 1924” is based on a story that appeared in the New Yorker in 1965 and recounts another chapter in the life of Salinger’s fictional Glass family.

However, when journalists began phoning Phyllis Westberg, Salinger’s agent, and his small publisher, Virginia-based Orchises Press, both said no publication was imminent.

In its posting, Amazon seemed to anticipate uncertainty, warning that “there can be unexpected delays in the publication process, especially with a title that is generating as much demand as this one.... Orchises notes that all backorders will be honored and assures us that the book is really being published.”

This is the second time “Hapworth” has flashed on and off the literary radar screen. In 1997, Westberg and Orchises confirmed rumors that a book-length version of the story existed and soon would be published. Anticipating the return of “The Catcher in the Rye’s” celebrated author, a New York Times critic reviewed the 32-year-old short story. But the critic, Michiko Kakutani, found the piece a “sour, implausible, and, sad to say, completely charmless story.”

When the new book failed to appear, many Salinger fans blamed the review for their idol’s retreat into silence.

What They’re Working On: Michael Ignatieff, the Carr professor of human rights at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, is a frequent television commentator and documentary film presenter. He is also the author of “A Just Measure of Pain,” a study of the origins of modern penology; a biography of Isaiah Berlin; and, most recently, “Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry.”

“Since 9/11 I have been thinking a great deal about the ethics of the war on terrorism,” he says. “I was particularly struck by how quickly some people began to discuss the legitimacy of using torture to interrogate suspected terrorists and their accomplices. So at the moment, I’m actually writing a long piece about Algeria, terror and interrogation. I think there possibly is a scary parallel between what occurred there and what some people are proposing now.

“The last democratic society to try using torture as a form of counterterror was France in Algeria in the 1950s. What their record there seems to show is that counterterror torture appears to work short-term, but that you win the battle and lose the war. So the historical record is worth looking at. You really don’t want to become the thing you are fighting, and there is a real danger of that in a war on terror.”