At the moment, it's book reviews written by highly-interested parties. Wasn't there a belief years ago that a formal review should be penned by someone who doesn't have a horse in the race? And if so, what happened to that policy?
The new book by Clinton cohort Sidney Blumenthal, The Clinton Wars, is presently being reviewed all over the place — and rarely by someone who doesn't have a vested interest in the book being totally believed or disbelieved. A large part of the work calls the New York Times coverage of Whitewater inept and dishonest…and the New York Review of Books assigned one of the men behind that coverage to review Blumenthal. (He did a pretty poor job of discrediting it and, as Joe Conason notes here, made some amazing errors in his review. Here's a link to that review.) The New York Times commissioned two reviews — one by another reporter whose coverage is criticized by Blumenthal. The New York Observer assigned Andrew Sullivan, a former editor of Blumenthal's who has invested a lot of column space perpetuating a version of the Clinton scandals that Blumenthal's book seeks to debunk. Vanity Fair is running as what may or may not be its only review a piece by Christopher Hitchens, who is called a drunk and a backstabber in the book — also a man who has wrapped a lot of his career around a lot of "facts" that Blumenthal says are not so. Slate ran two reviews today — one by Michael Isikoff, who is soundly criticized in the book; the other by Timothy Noah, who is a close friend of Blumenthal's.
Why does it have to be one or the other? I'm not saying these folks shouldn't have had the opportunity to write about the book and rebut whatever they felt warranted rebuttal. But wouldn't it be nice if some of these differing versions were evaluated by parties that weren't already wedded to one in particular? Who couldn't be accused of looking to settle scores or defend their own work?
I always come to these disagreements with the assumption that both sides are at least somewhat full of manure; that there are fuzzy memories and distortions and outright fibs emanating from all directions. Someone who has a stake in the matter may write with more outrage or passion but their reviews pretty much come down to "Don't believe a word of this dishonest book" or "Believe every word of this candid account." You'll get the occasional admission of one or two minor points just to look reasonable, but otherwise it's all or nothing. There is no one to impartially weigh whatever evidence exists and tell us which portions of the book stand up to scrutiny and which don't.
Once upon a time, that's what a reviewer was supposed to do. But these days, all we get are a lot of wrestling matches.