What does a columnist have to do for a publication to ghost a writer?
Ask Rich Miniter. Because it happened to him at the hands of Forbes.
Wooooosh! And no more Miniter.
New York Post Page Six’s Richard Johnson first reported news of the split, or more accurately, the “spike.” As noted by Johnson, “Miniter has just had his Forbes magazine column on Middle East affairs spiked after seven years.”
Miniter found the whole thing “punitive.”
He told Johnson that the Qataris “want to keep Americans in the dark about who they really are.”
Miniter is no stranger to problems with fabrication as detailed in a 2012 CNN story by Peter Bergen. The story mocked some of the wild claims made in Miniter’s book, Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors who Decide for Him.
The book’s big claim was that Obama put the bin Laden raid on hold three times because Valerie Jarrett had a lock on his ability to pull the trigger.
Bergen basically completely re-reported the claims in Miniter’s book and found them to be a “pile of poppycock served up with heaps of hogwash.”
“In the course of reporting a book about the hunt for bin Laden, I spoke to scores of White House, Pentagon and intelligence officials familiar with the hunt for al Qaeda’s leader, more than a dozen of whom had firsthand knowledge of Obama’s decision-making process about the operation to take out the terrorist leader,” he wrote.
“Many of those officials spoke to me on the record. I also traveled to Pakistan three times after bin Laden was killed to do my own investigation of the hunt for al Qaeda’s leader and spoke to a number of Pakistani military and intelligence officials who investigated the bin Laden raid and its aftermath.”
Bergen called serious b.s. on Miniter’s work, saying, “Based on that reporting and also what is available on the public record, Miniter’s account of the intelligence that led to bin Laden and the decision-making surrounding the operation that killed him is a pile of poppycock served up with heaps of hogwash.”
Not surprisingly, the White House then-Spokesman Josh Earnest called Miniter’s claims “an utter fabrication.”
Miniter is quite a colorful character in Washington media dating back to 2009.
In that year, The Washington Time‘s then acting publisher Jonathan Slevin issued a memo to staff about Miniter, a former TWT editor who alleged discrimination. (He has consistently been a pasty, overweight white guy.)
“I would like to stress publicly what Times employees know well,” Slevin wrote in a newsroom wide memo. “The Washington Times does not discriminate and does not tolerate discrimination. We operate within the law and require the same of employees. I am confident that once the charges raised by Mr. Miniter, are investigated, the company will be fully vindicated. The company has no further comment about this matter due to our policy of not giving out information about employees.”
By Sept. 3, 2010, TWT settled a lawsuit with Miniter for a reported $20,000. At the time, Miniter said he was “very, very happy” with the settlement, despite also saying that the newspaper owed him a quarter of a million in fees.
