Doris Kearns Goodwin, Union-Buster?

    The strike at Northwest Airlines is continuing. As part of a campaign to save the jobs of the mechanics at Northwest, the union is now targeting the company's board of directors (it has hired Corporate Campaign as an outside consultant).

    Today, there is an interesting twist. It turns out that one of the members of Northwest's board of directors is Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the new biography about Abraham Lincoln, which is climbing the best-seller list.

    When last heard from, Doris was trying to salvage her reputation after it became clear that she had plagiarized many passages for one of her best-selling works, "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys." Rather than admit her errors, she took the coward's route and blamed her assistants. Well, Doris, after being a sought-after pundit, almost disappeared into the witness protection program--she stopped appearing on PBS' "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer and had to step down from the board that awards Pulitzer Prizes.

    Now, I must admit I have a particular interest in Doris Kearns Goodwin because I've had my own particular experience with her tendency to side with powerful corporations over regular people. In 2001, a little band of freelance writers ended up reaching the U.S. Supreme Court with our copyright infringement case against Big Media (the short story: Big Media was stealing our work, using it in electronic form without our permission).

    And who should Doris side with? Big Media. She signed on to an amicus brief siding with Big Media against her own kind--writers. After all, Doris had made it, she was a big shot, she was being paid tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees. The average freelance writer's livelihood was of no relevance to Doris. The amicus brief argued that, if we won, there would be holes in the historical record because Big Media would remove the articles from databases.

    To me, the big issue was that Doris never bothered to call us to seek our opinion. We would have pointed out that all the major library organizations, perhaps the most important guardians of the historical record, had sided with the writers. And that the simple solution was--egads--pay the writers for their works. Instead, it seemed apparent that her first impulse was to cozy up to the powerful. (BTW, we won the Supreme Court 7-2--I have to admit here that even Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and William Rehnquist sided with us--and just settled a series of class actions based on the precedent which created an $18 million pool of money for damages to authors).

    Bottom line: There is now a pattern for Doris Kearns Goodwin--plagiarist, siding with Big Media over her own brethren and, now, participating in corporate decisions to crush the livelihood of the Northwest workers.

    I certainly won't spend a nickel for any of her books and why should you? You can tell her what you think at: http://doriskearnsgoodwin.com/contact.php

Comments

[Jason Crane]

Hi JT,

I just sent my comment to Doris Kearns GOodwin. Her site generated a boilerplate reply in response to my comment.

Jason in Rochester

[paul jerome kearns]

The surname "Kearns" should be pronounce the same as "Cairns":

[Paul J. Kearns]

Dear Doris,

Your surname "Kearns" should be pronounced the same as "cairns". How would you pronounce Yates???