On his blog today, the dyspeptic Michael Wolff calls out the New York Times for omitting his name and book title from an anecdote about Rupert Murdoch that appears to be about him in its recent front pager on Fox News honcho Roger Ailes. A clever one, that Wolff, he manages to get a column out of the contretemps. So I figure hey, why not me, too? Wolff is certainly right that the Times, its “who, me?” protests notwithstanding plays favorites — and hardball, too. But Wolff is also being more than a little disingenuous. Not only did the Times print a major, albeit negative, Sunday review of Wolff’s biography of Murdoch, it also made it and its author the subject of a gossipy pre-publication news story, several Times blog items, and a daily review by Janet Maslin. He’s hardly been disappeared. Compare that to Rogues Gallery, which received a small, albeit positive, notice in the Sunday Book Review, and a brief mention in a Home section party column (a daily review assigned to Maslin never appeared), and I’d guess Wolff is more upset that his book was panned (Maslin called it “supercilious yet star-struck” in her opening sentence) and didn’t sell very well, not that he was, as he complains, disappeared. Even a rave in the Times can’t save a book people don’t want to read. Oddly enough, the same thing Wolff is so peeved about happened to me not long ago, only with Murdoch’s Times of London which, in its obituary of the museum titan, ahem, borrowed a quote from the exclusive gripebox story that broke the news of the death of Tom Hoving and credited it to a “friend” of Hoving instead of to me or to gripebox or, for that matter, noting that the source of the quote which held the position of honor at the end of the obit was the author of a book about the Metropolitan Museum. My letter to the editor requesting a correction hasn’t even been acknowledged. That said, I’d rather be disappeared for writing a book that scares the willies out of the powers-that-be (some printing press owners and operators among them) than panned for writing one they didn’t like. (n.b. In the interest of full disclosure, Wolff and I went to college together and just over a decade ago, I brought him to the attention of my editors at New York magazine, who subsequently hired him, beginning his career as a media gadfly.)