Everyone in the world knows what Bill Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky, or what happened to Brad and Jennifer, Katie and Tom. These factoids mysteriously capture the world's attention. But there's a flip side to this: fog facts. Fog facts are known but not known, the sort of things that journalists and political junkies know, but somehow the world does not. The "Downing Street Memo" is a fine example. This document revealed that the head of British intelligence had been informed by his Washington counterparts that the White House was cooking the books on the information it was using to justify a war in Iraq. Yet this was not big news in America. Why? In Fog Facts, Larry Beinhart tackles this question and shows how soft-core, public relations-style political lying has been raised to an art form.
Larry Beinhart is an award-winning novelist who lives in Woodstock, New York. He is the author of Wag the Dog and last year's acclaimed novel The Librarian. His op-eds have appeared in the Baltimore Sun, Newsday and the Miami Herald. He was the Raymond Chandler Fulbright Scholar at Oxford University.
Larry Beinhart is best known as the author of
Wag the Dog (originally published as
American Hero) on which the film starring Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, Willie Nelson and Woody Harrelson was based. His
No One Rides for Free (1986) received the 1987 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. His most recent book,
Fog Facts, a work of nonfiction, examines why some important, even striking, truths are overlooked by the media and the culture at large.
Beinhart spent two years in Oxford, England, where he was the Raymond Chandler Fulbright Fellow at Wadham College. He is a regularly featured blogger on Huffingtonpost.com and his articles have appeared in the
New York Times, the
International Herald Tribune, the
Los Angeles Times, the
Washington Post, the
Baltimore Sun, and the
Chicago Tribune. He resides in Woodstock, New York, with his wife and two children.