Whopper of the Week: Sumner Redstone
Posted Friday, April 6, 2001, at 11:02 AM ET"If they are treating [my autobiography] as an important book, they are doing it because they think it's an important book--not because it's me."
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StumbleUpon--Sumner Redstone, chairman of Viacom, whose Simon & Schuster unit will release Redstone's A Passion To Win in June, as quoted by Laurie P. Cohen in the April 5 Wall Street Journal.
"This is being treated as a big book. You want to get it right or you'll be fired."
--Simon & Schuster publisher David Rosenthal, as quoted in the Journal story, which characterizes this as a "quip."
"I'll probably end up returning 10 of them. Most people have no idea who Sumner Redstone is."
--Douglas Dutton, owner of the independent bookstore Dutton's Brentwood Books in Los Angeles, as quoted in the Journal story, which does not characterize this as a "quip."
(Thanks to Matthew Benjamin.)
Got a whopper? Send it to . To be considered, an entry must be an unambiguously false statement paired with an unambiguous refutation, and both must be derived from some appropriately reliable public source. Preference will be given to newspapers and other documents that Chatterbox can link to online.
Close readers of this column will note that we've eased up on the rules to accommodate whoppers that aren't necessarily lies. Chatterbox still gives preference to outright fibs (such as today's entry), but these are harder to confirm than Chatterbox previously imagined. Non-lie entries must still quote people who, it can be reasonably assumed, ought to know better.
Whopper Archive:
March 30, 2001: Spencer Abraham
March 23, 2001: George W. Bush, Rep. Jennifer Dunn, and/or the Treasury Department
March 16, 2001: George W. Bush
March 9, 2001: Russ Freyman, spokesman, National Association of Manufacturers
March 2, 2001: Paul O'Neill
Feb. 23, 2001: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton
Feb. 16, 2001: Oscar spokesman John Pavlik
Feb. 9, 2001: Lynne Cheney
Feb. 2, 2001: Bobby Thomson
E-mail Timothy Noah at .
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Reader Comment From The Fray:
Now that Chatterbox has officially changed the rules for Whoppers I declare a moratorium on criticism of Whoppers that are not whoppers. "Chatterbox" is Chatterbox's column, so Chatterbox is within his rights to change the rules so that Whoppers that are not whoppers are now Whoppers. This moratorium shall not be in force with respect to Whoppers that are not only not whoppers but are actually statements of opinion (e.g. "A tax cut is a good thing") that Chatterbox happens to disagree with, at least until such time as Chatterbox changes the rules again to permit these to count as Whoppers.
--Joseph Britt
(To reply, click here.)
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