JIM GERAGHTY is defending Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe:

The publisher, Public Affairs, has just created a big headache for the Globe and Michael Kranish, by initially touting an independent book with a reporter covering Kerry involved, and then publishing Kerry’s campaign book under the same number. Now Amazon has the new book with the old cover and Kranish is being called a Kerry campaign shill.

Kranish may have misquoted Elliott — in fact, it seems pretty clear that Kranish interpreted some of Elliott’s statements about wishing to reword the specifics of his affidavit about Kerry as a recanting of his entire criticism — but he’s not a paid operative of the Democratic campaign.

Well, it may be, and probably is, the publisher’s fault. (Full disclosure — Public Affairs is part of the Perseus Group, which owns one of my publishers, from whom I still get a minuscule royalty check twice a year). My last book — different publisher — was put into the databases under the wrong title and that persisted, on Amazon and elsewhere, for a surprisingly long time. And there’s no real reason to regard Kranish as a “paid operative.” One notes, however, that journalists are quicker to assume innocence when things like this happen to journalists than they are when they happen to people in, say, the (non-media) corporate world.