Reputations: A Tangled Web - author David Brock's credibility now beyond repair with confession that he lied - Brief Article

National Review, July 23, 2001

David Brock is a liar. On this point, everyone agrees, including Brock himself. Brock used to be a conservative journalist, and in that capacity wrote a book defending Clarence Thomas called The Real Anita Hill. In recent years, Brock has taken to disavowing his previous work. In a new book that has been excerpted in Talk, he has gone so far as to claim that he lied in his book on the Hill-Thomas controversy and in follow-up articles. He says that Justice Thomas had a friend give Brock damaging information about a woman who was backing up Hill's account- information Brock then used to threaten the woman to change her story.

One oddity is that the lies to which Brock has admitted are peripheral. They concern subordinate points in the case for Thomas and against Hill. He is not saying that the balance of evidence now suggests that Thomas made lewd remarks to Hill and then lied about it. His earlier book, as modified by the Talk excerpt, still leaves the balance on Thomas's side. But perhaps Brock will offer new revelations that change that conclusion.

Or perhaps he will reveal that he is lying in Talk. Or that he lied a little in his book on Anita Hill, and lied a little more in his denunciation of it. By calling the truth of anything he says into doubt, Brock has become a one-man Cretan paradox. Tina Brown and Random House should let him fade into well-deserved obscurity.