So News Corp. is canceling If I Did It–both the book and the TV show. From the AP, via the Washington Post:
NEW YORK — After a firestorm of criticism, News. Corp. said Monday that it has canceled the O.J. Simpson book and TV special “If I Did It.”
“I and senior management agree with the American public that this was an ill-considered project,” said Rupert Murdoch, News Corp. chairman. “We are sorry for any pain that this has caused the families of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson.”
Reporter David Bauder had a hard time finding a precedent, but managed to turn up something, sort of:
For the publishing industry, the cancellation of “If I Did It” was an astonishing end to a story like no other. Numerous books have been withdrawn over the years because of possible plagiarism, most recently Kaavya Viswanathan’s “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” but a book’s removal simply for objectionable content is virtually unheard of.
Poor Kaavya. Her own ill-considered project has now linked her via Google (753 hits and growing) to someone whose crimes were against more than the English language.
November 27th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
[…] In “If They Did It“–boy, we’re really wearing that out, aren’t we?–Rebecca Dana offers more postmortem on O. J. Simpson’s now canceled book and interview. Among the many details (some of them interesting, some of them arguable, such as Dana’s assertion that Barbara Walters is a “journalist”): Ms. Regan arranged a phone call between Ms. Walters and the book’s ghostwriter, Pablo Fenjves, a former co-worker of Ms. Regan’s at The National Enquirer who was also a witness for the prosecution in Mr. Simpson’s criminal trial—it was he who recalled the “plaintive wail†of what might have been Nicole Brown Simpson’s Akita on the day of her murder. […]
December 7th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
[…] Galleycat reports that, surprise, surprise, some copies of O. J. Simpson’s If I Did It slipped through the dragnet: When the publication of OJ Simpson’s now beyond-infamous “confession” IF I DID IT was canceled late last month, HarperCollins spokeswoman Erin Crum told the Associated Press that “some copies had already been shipped to stores but would be recalled, and all copies would be destroyed.” Looks like the definition of “all” is somewhat fuzzy because according to Nielsen Bookscan numbers released earlier today, 100 copies of IF I DID IT sold across the country in the week ending December 3. As one tipster put it, “not only are copies leaking out, but some bookstores are actually selling them.” […]
December 18th, 2006 at 11:37 am
[…] Judith Regan, she of the O. J. Simpson book imbroglio, has been sacked, allegedly for making anti-Semitic remarks. People who scrutinize the industry much more closely than I do have all sorts of theories about this. (And, as usual, you should read Galleycat. And also this interesting opinion in The New York Sun.) They examine the “real” reasons, factor in the personalities of the players involved, and so on. […]