Names and faces
MSNBC’s Joy Reid apologized again for past blog posts, including one that had an image of Sen. John McCain superimposed on the body of a campus killer and another where she urged people to watch a conspiracy film tied to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Reid said this weekend that there are things for which she is embarrassed and regretful about a blog she began writing in
2005. Buzzfeed uncovered a doctored image of McCain’s head atop the gun-toting body of the Virginia Tech campus shooter, in a post from 2007. In a separate post a year earlier, she urged people to see a film partly funded by Alex Jones of Infowars that falsely alleged the U.S. government planned the 2001 attacks. “I’ve … spoken openly about my evolution on many issues and know that I’m a better person today than I was over a decade ago,” Reid said. Reid apologized earlier this spring for anti-gay language found in some other old writings, and suggested she’d been a victim of a hacker that inserted offensive language. But after hiring a computer expert, she later acknowledged that she could not prove that a hacker had any hand in what happened. Reid said she has reached out to McCain’s daughter Meghan about the blog post. “I have the highest respect for Sen. McCain as a public servant and patriot and wish him and his family the best,” she said.
Former President Bill Clinton and author James Patterson’s new book, The President Is Missing, is set to be released this week. The book is officially fiction: the story of a president who disappears as he tries to prevent an apocalyptic cyberattack. But Clinton and Patterson swear it could happen. “You’re asking the Secret Service, in effect, to walk away from their duty,” Clinton said during a recent interview. “[But] it could happen. If you were determined to do it, you could do it,” he said. “A big piece of it [the novel] was getting him out of the White House,” Patterson said. “It would be irresponsible, but under the circumstances it was the responsible thing to do.” Prodded to collaborate by Washington attorney Robert Barnett, who handles book deals for both of them, Clinton and Patterson drew on their respective backgrounds in completing a 500-page novel that topped Amazon’s best-seller list before publication. Patterson is among the world’s most popular fiction writers, and the novel is a characteristically fast-paced narrative, with brief chapters and dramatic plot turns. Historian and Hamilton author Ron Chernow said in a recent email that he was initially “dubious” about the project, but was impressed by the “stylistic blend” of the two authors.