March 06, 2006

Publishers Weekly review of News Junkie

March 6, 2006
Publishers Weekly

Leopold, one of the reporters who broke the Enron story, is now
breaking his own story: how he got addicted to cocaine, committed
grand theft, cleaned himself up and found happiness as a "news
junkie." While residential rehab programs and an incredibly committed
wife were key to his turnaround, what saved his life was his
discovery of the adrenaline high of news scooping. After a few small
successes, Leopold got lucky when he began investigating insider
trading by aides to California's Gov. Grey Davis and stumbled onto
the extraordinary scandal of Enron's manipulation of utility
deregulation in California. By the time Leopold was pressured into
resigning from Dow Jones in 2002, he was one of the few reporters
who'd actually interviewed Enron president Jeff Skilling. He then
rushed to publish a flawed exposé of the secretary of the army's
Enron connections, seriously damaging his journalistic credibility.
Disillusioned by the institutional biases of mainstream media,
Leopold finally decided to freelance with independent, Internet-based
news services. While there's a lot of lying admitted to in this
scrappy memoir, from Leopold's hiding of his criminal past to his
playing of sources to get his scoops, it's (probably) not an
untruthful memoir—indeed, it might become required reading for
aspiring journalists.

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