The New York Sun’s Gary Shapiro reports that former President Jimmy Carter‘s most recent book, PALESTINE: PEACE NOT APARTHEID has riled up CBS stockholders in a big way. That’s because the book was published by Simon & Schuster – a subsidiary of CBS – and so Carol Greenwald, the treasurer of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (and a CBS shareholder) plans to criticize the publisher at the meeting.
According to a statement shown to The New York Sun, Greenwald, who calls Carter’s book “error-filled,” plans to ask that a fact-checking system be set up to prevent material errors in books Simon & Schuster publishes and that a code of ethics be adopted for its publishing division. CBS declined comment, but a spokesman said that if the proposal is raised at the meeting, it is expected that the company would reply. The article later weighs the pros and cons of fact checking with a telling quote from journalism professor and critic Steve Weinberg: “Book publishers don’t usually take responsibility for what their authors write because the authors are seen contractually as independent agents.”