<I>WSJ</I> Reporter Responds to Criticism of Her Book

Last week, we posted about Steve Friess' claims that Wall Street Journal Las Vegas reporter Christina Binkley's book Winner Take All was filled with errors. Galleycat's Ron Hogan, who has been all over the story, interviewed Binkley, who contacted FishbowlNY after reading our coverage and wanted to respond to Friess' claims. The salient points of his post are below: "I don't want to blow this up into a brouhaha," she said over the phone. "It's not a big book. But it's my book, and he's putting out information about who I talked to and didn't talk to for it that's completely wrong." In the USA Today review, Friess claims that Binkley got no face-time with Terry Lanni, the CEO of the MGM Mirage. "Lanni spoke to me many times," she counters, including conversations that took place in his office," [and] I'm still trying to get Friess to correct that." Given how often she directly quotes Lanni, she explained, the false allegation about the nature of their interviews undermines the book's credibility in the public eye. As for the other errors, "you can argue trivia about Vegas into the night," she says, and the "errors" he picks apart are tangential at best to the main narrative drive of her book. "Whether it took ten seconds of twenty-seven seconds for the Sands to implode, for example and I don't think YouTube is the place to go for the definitive answer on that." He did find one typo; impressionist Danny Gans's name is misspelled once as Ganz, "Of course I regret that, and I want to get it fixed in the next printing," she says, but, she adds, Friess makes it sound as if she got the name wrong throughout the book. "The nasty, blog-like style of these reviews bothers me," she concludes. "The Drudge-like mudslinging is just ugly."

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WSJ Reporter Responds to Criticism of Her Book

Noah Davis

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Noah Davis