Jeez, the one weekend I go out of town, and all hell breaks loose… and to top it all off, the Daily News tried to blame me at first, suggesting that “the last straw” that led to Judith Regan’s firing may have been when HarperCollins read my account of a taping of Regan’s radio show in which I described her pointed remarks about, among many other topics, people in the press and at HarperCollins who have it in for her. Of course, since then we’ve learned from the LA Times that Regan offended a HarperCollins lawyer during a Friday phone call, with further clarification from the NY Times alleging the offensive statements to be anti-Semitic in nature. In the words of NYT media critic David Carr, “The News Corporation had profited handsomely from Ms. Regan’s tendency to shoot from the hip, but when she started firing inside the corral, well then, that was another matter.”
But until those stories ran, quite a few people emailed me asking how it felt “to get Regan fired,” and they didn’t mean “are you OK?” (Which I guess you can chalk up as more evidence of another point I’ve tried to make recently: Regan-hating has become an amusement in publishing circles, and an all-too-easy perspective from which to view the stories in which she’s involved.) I have to admit I didn’t much feel like viewing the situation ironically until it came time to write the headline for this item—not that I think for a second she’s not going to land on her feet somewhere, somehow, but it’s hardly a career arc I would’ve wished upon anybody, let alone want to set in motion, and the suggestion that I’d played a part, even a small one, in her ouster was profoundly unsettling, even if I was writing about an on-the-record studio taping of remarks that would be broadcast shortly thereafter, making some sort of confrontation inevitable (though whether the segment’s ever going to air now is anybody’s guess).
It’s worth taking a moment to clear up a point in the NYT story, which reports that “[Regan] had publicly defended herself from what she called the ‘backstabbers at HarperCollins’ during the taping of her Sirius Satellite Radio show.” That phrase, properly speaking, is my characterization of her remarks during the taping. As I explained to Jeffrey Trachtenberg for a Wall Street Journal story running this morning, Regan accused unnamed people at HarperCollins (not the entire company) of planting negative stories about her and her books in the press, but I did not quote her directly while summarizing the interview for this blog. I’d hoped the fact that I referred to her in the third person, not to mention that I didn’t put those sentences in quotation marks, would’ve conveyed that; the ambiguity that seems to have ensued is regrettable.