Whistleblower Alert: Authors, Beware the Covert Art of Privishing

Author Gerard Colby, at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, reveals publishers’ dirty secret of how non-fiction books are commonly censored in America

By Charlotte Dennett

Imagine what authors go through, taking risks while exposing the rich and powerful, only to see their books die shortly after they are published. Their publisher may have told them “Too bad. Your book has had its run.”

Or, “Sorry, it just didn’t catch on.” This is not the kind of verdict authors want to hear, especially after spending years pouring heart and soul into researching and writing a book to inform an uninformed public.

The pain and suffering experienced by these truth-tellers is seldom acknowledged. They may have sacrificed career opportunities, building a family, buying a home, all for writing out of a sense of duty to the public’s right to know, often suffering financially and at great personal cost to their loved ones. What makes their ordeal all the more excruciating is that they often come to believe that their books’ “failure” is their own failure, not knowing that their publisher secretly deep-sixed the book before it had a chance to compete in the “free marketplace of ideas.”

There is a word for this book suppression practice. It is called privishing, which means “to privately publish a book so it “sinks without a trace.” It happens when the publisher deliberately shortens the book’s life span by cutting its advertising budget, the author’s book tour, and the book’s print run.

My husband, Gerard “Jerry” Colby (shown at right in a file photo delivering a lecture), and I discovered privishing while investigating what happened to his 586-page exposé, DuPont: Behind the Nylon Curtain. The New York Times Book review hailed it on page one as “something of a miracle … sculpture hewn out of the side of a mountain.” This and other great reviews did not sit well with the family that had come to be known as the Merchants of Death: the du Ponts of Delaware.

The DuPont book, originally published by Prentice-Hall in 1974, is a unique, unauthorized history of the DuPont Company, the duPont family, and America itself. It quickly took off in Delaware, (famously described by Ralph Nader as the “Company State,”) with long lines of purchasers waiting outside bookstores to get a copy. The Wilmington Delaware Inquirer reported that “bookstores couldn’t keep the book in stock after the Wilmington Morning News carried a front page story about a telephone call criticizing the “most unflattering book about the chemical giant.” And then, suddenly, the book died.

Now, some 5 decades later, Colby recently was honored at the14th Annual Whistleblower Summit and Film Festival at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. for his decades-long efforts at exposing privishing and trying to protect authors from this perfidious practice that can be ruinous to their careers

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Justice Integrity Project Editor Andrew Kreig, a member of the Press Club, presents the Pillar Award to Jerry Colby (Photo by Jerry Ashton, who won the Pillar Award in 2025 for exposing the predatory practices of the debt collection industry).

Seeing Jerry tell his story to an audience of whistleblowers and writers at the National Press Club was a wonderful moment in our 50 years together as investigative journalists. Never have I seen him happier for getting some well-deserved recognition for his book and the years of litigation that followed against his publisher and the subject matter of his book, Du Pont Company.

Better still, the person to present the award was perfectly suited for the job. It was Andrew Kreig, who is a long-time member of the Whistleblower Summit host committee and an author, journalist, lawyer and director of the Justice Integrity Project.

He revealed — while presenting Jerry with a Pillar [of civil society ] Award — that his own mother, Margaret Kreig, right, had long wondered what had happened to her book, Black Market Medicine, published by Prentice-Hall in 1967 in hardcover and then in paperback, shown above.

Ditto for L. Fletcher Prouty, left, a liasion officer between the Pentagon and CIA from 1955 to 1963, after Prentice-Hall likely privished his 1973 book, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (shown at right as republished by a different publisher). The only difference, Kreig acknowledged to this writer, was that they didn’t know about privishing, which happens in secrecy at the highest levels.

Book Rescue Missions: A Brief Preface to Colby’s Remarks

I should add that Lyle Stuart rescued Jerry’s book, and in 1984, published an updated version, DuPont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain, having urged him to write his heart out about what happened to the earlier edition — only to privish it later!

As Jerry revealed in the lead essay of Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press (2002, Prometheus Press, editor, Kristina Borjesson), shown below, “the only information Stuart’s company would provide later was that they had learned that their print jobber allegedly received 80% of its business from Prentice Hall.”

Finally, Mark Crispin Miller, a retired NYU professor of media studies, rescued DuPont Dynasty from oblivion. Along with 26 other books, it circulates freely within “The Forbidden Bookshelf,” published by OpenRoadMedia.

This phenomenal book publishing series was created by Miller, left, to bring vanished works back to life. Looking ahead, an important segment on The Forbidden Bookshelf will appear in a feature-length documentary Reading the World. The Life and Times of Mark Crispin Miller, directed by his wife, Amy Smiley, and will prominently feature DuPont Dynasty and Thy Will Be Done.

DuPont Dynasty is still earning e-book royalties; the hardcover edition is now a collector’s item currently selling on Amazon at $360.00.[Who benefits, I wonder?] Our joint project, Thy Will be Done. The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, privished by Harper Collins in 1996, also survived as anebook in the Forbidden Bookshelf series Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon : Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil.

In presenting the Pillar Award, Kreig pointed out that Colby had been the president of the National Writers Union to help protect other writers, including through years of litigation to prove “how and why a publisher can kill an author’s book without the author and sometimes even the editor knowing about because it is done at the highest levels.”

As a quick and notable aside, Kreig said the Justice Integrity Project “looks into theses types of things,” as it was founded by experienced journalists, and that one of them was the late John Kelly, left, a producer for CBS and NBC for years who interrupted that career to workwith the CIA for four years during the Vietnam era.

“I was talking about Prentice Hall,” Kreig said, “and John Kelly pointed out, ‘There’s someone there from the agency.’” Kreig googled it and saw that William Casey, right — a top media mogul with high-level political and intelligence connections who would become the director of the CIA for seven years in the 1980s, had a bit gig with Prentice-Hall during the early 1970s as a part-time editor of business books. “What a perfect place,” Kreig said, “to keep an eye out for books they don’t like.” [1]

Whereupon Kreig turned the mic over to Jerry at the Summit event.

Highlights of Colby’s Address on Receiving the Pillar Award

As Jerry scanned the audience while proudly holding his plaque commemorating him as a “Person of Conscience,” he  began by stating how honored he felt “looking at you as brothers and sisters in the struggle for the rights of authors, the rights of journalists, and the rights of the people to know what is going on.. We can’t have a democracy without this.” He reminded his audience of the words of colonial writer and publisher John Peter Zenger, who wrote in 1735, “The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance.”

Jerry proceeded to tell his story of how he got involved in writing about the DuPont Co. and family.

He was working as a press secretary for Congressman John Dow of the 17th Congressional District of New York. “I noticed John was fighting hard against his Republican opponent, the former commander of the American Legion, and that a lot of donations into his opponent’s campaign were from Delaware.

“I discovered the name duPont and began to investigate. They were the original founders of the gunpowder trust. They came from France, and were students of Antoine Lavoisier, who founded the gunpowder mills for King Louis XVI. They were the last people in France to protect the king with swords drawn. Then they fled from France. They landed on American shores and broke into a house while the occupants were at church and stole their food. Accounts differ as to whether they left a gold coin before moving on to Delaware to found the gunpowder mills along the Brandywine River.” [2]

From gunpowder in the 19th century they moved in the 20th century into heading General Motors, manufacturing autos, paints, and weapons, and then focusing on chemicals, producing rayon, nylon, and artificial rubber. They are most known today for discharging from their facilities PFOA, the toxic “forever chemical”[which never breaks down in the environment] used in Teflon, contaminating the drinking water of an estimated 200 million Americans.

The Du Ponts, he learned during his research, were the major figures in fighting the famous sit-down strike by UAW workers in 1937 at their General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan.

“So I went into the Eleutherian- Mills Hagley Foundation Library, the DuPont Library located above the old Brandywine gunpowder mills in Wilmington. I uncovered correspondence between Governor Frank Murphy of Michigan and the Du Ponts. They were asking Gov. Murphy to pull out the National Guard and set up machine guns to fight the strikers . Frank Murphy refused, thank God, due to FDR’s intercession, who declared that the UAW had the right to engage in collective bargaining.

“Suddenly the librarian pulled this document out of my hands. It turns out he was providing information about me to the du Ponts.”

Colby went back to finishing his book, which took him five years. He waited toward the end of writing to contact the company and family members for interviews. They declined, but behind the scenes, alarm bells began to go off. “Who is this guy?” queried. Irénée du Pont, Jr., the family patriarch.

DuPont Company launched an investigation. and got Prentice Hall to leak a copy of the manuscript to a du Pont- affiliated bookstore in Wilmington, Delaware.

Irénée duPont, above, died in 2023 at age 103. Photo Credit: Delaware Online, from “Irénée du Pont Jr. Tribute: Remembering His Life & Legacy”

The Infamous Phone Call to Book of the Month Club

“And then one day I got a call from my editor Bram Cavin, who took me out to lunch. He said there’s big trouble. Prentice-Hall got a call from the Public Relations Department of DuPont Co., who said the book was ‘scurrilous and actionable’ — in other words, threatening a lawsuit. I said wonderful. Let’s call a press conference. Bram said Prentice-Hall wouldn’t do that.”

“Next I learned that Book of the Month Club had been contacted by DuPont Company and dropped the book from its business-oriented Fortune Book Club in an unprecedented 24 hours. I thought, “Boy, that’s another reason for a press conference!”

The Summit audience chuckled, knowing that interference with a book is normally a writer’s dream to gain publicity. But this “Banned in Boston” dream was short-lived.

Instead, Prentice-Hall began to privish the book, cutting its ad budget, the author’s tour and book run “so it couldn’t price profitably under any conceivable formula,” as he later discovered during his lawsuit in a memo from a Prentice-Hall official. He sued Prentice-Hall for breach of contract and DuPont for inducing breach of contract. (Note: this was not a First Amendment case because the government was not doing the censoring).

“Thanks to my wife, Charlotte,” he continued, “she found an editor at Viking, William Decker, who was willing to testify in court about privishing.”

Authors Gerard Colby and his wife Charlotte Dennett at the 2026 Whistleblower Summit (Photo byJerry Ashton).

Decker admitted that privishing was well known in the industry but is not known to authors. His testimony was key to convincing federal judge Charles Brieant to find Prentice-Hall liable for privishing the book.

As for DuPont, the judge demurred. Jerry sensed problems when the family patriarch, Irénée duPont, Jr. took the stand, “and the judge stepped down from his dais and went over and turned on the light for him so he could read a document. I turned to my lawyer, Ron DePtris, and whispered, ‘We’re in big trouble, boy!’”

‘We finished the trial. It lasted two weeks. Not one bit of coverage by the media “

He later learned that after the trial ended, the Judge addressed the opposing attorneys in chambers.

Judge Brieant said he was not going to find the du Ponts, a “pillar of American society,” liable “for expressing its opinion of the book.” [3] (This, despite the fact that DuPont had threatened a lawsuit against Prentice-Hall. Wasn’t that inducing a breach of contract?) “But you, Prentice-Hall,” the judge continued, “you will publish it, not privish it.”

Prentice-Hall offered to settle for a paltry $24,000 “as long as I kept quiet about privishing.” Jerry refused, and appealed against both Prentice-Hall and DuPont to the U.S. Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit. The Court sided with both DuPont and Prentice-Hall in a lengthy opinion, most notably disagreeing with District Judge Brieant that “the contract in question obliges P-H “to use its best efforts to promote the book fully.’”

The ACLU appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied cert.

Still, the case is viewed as something of a landmark in legal and publishing circles, highlighting how publishing contracts are interpreted regarding promotional efforts, requiring a balance between a publishers’ discretion with a duty to support authors’ works adequately.

Publishers may be loathe to put in their contracts a clause requiring their “best efforts to promote the book” but that doesn’t mean authors shouldn’t try to advocate for this wording.

Jerry ended his acceptance speech urging writers to familiarize themselves with privishing, reminding them again of John Peter Zenger’s warning: “The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance.”

Notes 

[1] Jerry and I also discovered that Prentice-Hall’s editor in chief, John Kirk, had worked for two publishers with CIA ties: The Samuel Walker Publishing Company and the Free Europe Press (the publishing arm of the CIA-funded Radio Free Europe.]

[2] When Irénée du Pont testified at trial, he never mentioned being upset over charges that the DuPonts were widely known as “The Merchants of Death” for their millions in profits from WWI, or that their chemical plants spewed carcinogens and polluted the rivers of West Virginia, where Irénée was once plant manager in the 1980s. Instead, he said what troubled him was the perceived affront to the family’s proud history and the impact it would have on is children by suggesting that the newly-arrived immigrants failed to leave a gold coin after stealing the churchgoers’ food.

[3] Oh, the irony! Who could have guessed that the perceived enemy of America’s “pillar of society,” would be awarded the Pillar Award at a Whistleblower Summit decades later at the Press Club. Hats off to Marcel Reid, below, co-founder and Festival Director of the Summit, for making this happen. 

This column was originally published on Charlotte Dennett’s “Cui Bono? Who Benefits?” blog on Substack.

Related News Coverage

Cui Bono? Who Benefits? Whistleblower Alert: Beware the Covert Art of Privishing, Charlotte Dennett, Aug. 30, 2026. Author Gerard Colby, at National Press Club, reveals publishers’ dirty secret of how non-fiction books are commonly censored in America

Catching Our Attention on other recent Justice, Media & Free Press/Free Speech News 

Sept. 27

Hope for America, Trump replaces CNN with LindellTV in further free press assault, Heather Delaney Reese, Sept. 27, 2026. Donald Trump told a female reporter to be “quiet,” replaced CNN on his Tennessee trip with LindellTV and Real America’s Voice, and then announced, “I love an open, free press.”

That is where this day began. MS NOW’s Akayla Gardner had asked whether he only wanted supportive outlets in the White House press pool. He responded by calling her network fake news. A president who wants to choose which reporters can question him is trying to choose what the rest of us get to hear.

The Parnas Perspective, News and Comment: Trump ‘Steals’ Taxpayer Dollars for for Personal Ad Blitz, GOP Senators Turn on Trump Jr., Press War Escalates, and Much More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 27, 2026. If you needed one image to sum up where this administration is right now, Dan Scavino handed it to you this weekend: a champagne-popping, Pitbull-scored celebration video, posted while millions of Americans are struggling to afford groceries, gas, and rent. It backfired so badly that even Trump’s own allies piled on.

That video landed the same weekend the White House aired its third taxpayer-funded ad in recent days, this one featuring Trump warning of a “final battle” against “communists, Marxists, and fascists,” all paid for with public money a little over a month before the midterms.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino Draws Backlash From His Own Party Over a Champagne-Popping Celebration Video Set to Pitbull. Scavino posted what appears to be an AI-generated video of himself popping champagne alongside his wife Erin Elmore and Eric and Lara Trump, set to Pitbull’s “Don’t Stop the Party,” captioning it as a transparent share of his own post-State Dinner celebration and writing “GOD BLESS THE USA!!!” Rather than provoking Democrats as he seemingly intended, the video instead infuriated conservatives, with Dispatch editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg sarcastically calling it exactly the midterm messaging the GOP needs, and activist Carrie Prejean Boller accusing Scavino of tone-deafness given how many Americans can’t afford groceries, gas, or their mortgage. Meghan McCain and Never-Trump Republican Sarah Longwell also piled on, with Longwell likening it to “real fall of Rome sh-t,” while other self-described MAGA accounts called the display of wealth astonishingly out of touch.

The backlash lands as polling points to a potential GOP wipeout in the November midterms, with Trump’s own advisers reportedly urging him to focus on affordability and a growing number of Republicans, including some he’s endorsed, quietly scrubbing his name from their campaign websites. Even so, Trump has doubled down on tying the midterms to his own record, telling supporters at a recent Republican midterm conference to “pretend that I am on the ballot.”

White House Airs Another Taxpayer-Funded Ad Featuring Trump Warning of a “Final Battle,” the Third Such Ad Tracked in Recent Days. The latest government-funded ad shows Trump walking down a hallway as audio plays of him vowing to “cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists,” rout “the fake news media,” and “liberate America from these villains once and for all,” language echoing a 2023 Veterans Day speech, and it aired during at least two NFL broadcasts on Fox this Sunday. The ad is nearly identical to a video Trump posted to Truth Social during his 2024 campaign, minus six seconds featuring his campaign logo and a text-to-join number, with “Paid for by the US Government” displayed on screen instead. The White House has defended the ads, including two previous ones tracked by AdImpact this week featuring Trump denouncing communism and socialism and another showing him at Mount Rushmore, by comparing them to past administrations’ public service announcements on Medicare or COVID vaccination, insisting they are “very clearly not campaign ads” and calling them “educational and unapologetically patriotic.” Government watchdog group Common Cause has pushed back, with policy vice president Carol Evans questioning why taxpayer funds are being used to promote the president’s image just over a month before the midterms and suggesting the ads could amount to prohibited “propaganda.” The ads arrive amid Trump’s all-time low approval rating and a tense political climate ahead of November, adding fuel to concerns that public funds are being used for what critics see as thinly veiled campaign messaging.

Senator John Kennedy argued that no public official, including President Trump, Kristi Noem, or himself, should be spending public money on private ads promoting themselves. He acknowledged the position might not be popular within his own party, joking that he may end up wearing a sombrero for saying so, but added that he also believes there should be a rule barring any politician from having a building named after them while they’re still alive.

Trump’s Increased Attacks on Press:

Donald Trump suggested tearing down the Press Briefing room in the White House. Today, Donald Trump posted the following image seeking to possibly restore the FDR pool, which currently sits under the press briefing room, with gold trim.

Attorney General Todd Blanche Defends Trump’s White House Media Ban, Calling Press Access “a Privilege… Not a Right.”.Attorney General Todd Blanche argued on ABC’s “This Week” that the administration’s ban on CNN, MS Now, and Politico from the White House is justified because access to the building is a privilege rather than a constitutional right, framing the move as a response to Trump being “sick and tired” of reporting he considers inaccurate. The dispute has continued even after a judge issued a temporary restraining order last Thursday requiring the White House to restore the outlets’ credentials, since CNN was again barred from the press pool traveling with the president on Air Force One over the weekend. Blanche insisted the White House routinely decides which reporters fly with the president and that CNN’s exclusion wasn’t unusual, while separately maintaining the three outlets’ reporting amounted to a “national security problem,” a claim the judge overseeing the case explicitly rejected, writing that nothing in the record suggested the ban was motivated by security concerns rather than Trump’s stated frustration with the outlets’ truthfulness and tone. Former President Bill Clinton weighed in at the Clinton Global Initiative summit, saying he’d often wanted to ban the White House press corps himself but never did, adding “the law should be what it is.” 

Big, Monopoly Round-Up and Opinion: Paramount-WB Isn’t Just a Loss, It’s a Prelude, Matt Stoller, right, and Lee Hepner, Sept. 27, 2026. The unorthodox development isn’t that politicians caved; it’s that people noticed it.

The most important news is that Paramount and Warner Bros. overcame the key hurdle to closing their deal, when California Attorney General Rob Bonta and 11 Democratic state attorneys general dropped their opposition, which I discussed on Monday in detail. It isn’t quite done, the judge hasn’t agreed to approve the consent decree, and there are amicus briefs and a well-received letter from Senator Cory Booker that the judge will hear arguments about. But it’s hard to imagine this one being paused for legal reasons.

It’s easy to see this merger fight as a catastrophic loss, which it is. It will combine two of the five major movie studios, CNN and CBS, and major streaming platforms under the control of a highly politically connectedowner of Oracle and TikTok. Iconic TV writer Mike Schur basically said it’s game over for Hollywood, and the American news media will likely become more corrupt, feckless, and aligned with capital.

But the merger challenge is also more than that, and it has implications beyond the castle walls of media, as important as those are. This fight was a battle between coalitions, and in some ways, it is a prelude to more of that fight in this election cycle and beyond. 

David Ellison, billionaire controller of media properties (Lincoln Square graphic)

David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, wasn’t alone in his empire-building ambitions. It takes a village to centralize media. Wall Street was fully on board, as was the defense bar. In August, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that the state challenge to the Paramount-Warner merger has the potential to “deeply damage our capital markets, our dynamic system.” Donald Trump pushed the deal, but so did Democrat Ari Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emanuel. So did Tom Cruise. So did the Director’s Guild and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. So did California Governor Gavin Newsom, LA Mayor Karen Bass, incoming Governor Xavier Becerra, and much of the state legislature.

The other group were populists on the left, the anti-monopoly world, artists, the Writer’s Guild of America East and West, and the public itself. What they lacked in money and organization they made up for in grassroots support. Most voters do not think the deal will be good, and Californians supported challenging the merger 49-30. This fight was a line in the sand for the masters of the universe, who have been fighting against a pushback on AI data centers, and a billionaire tax, and before that, Lina Khan’s attempt to revive antitrust law. 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 25, 2026 [Trump v. Media Trump Hunt for Monuments, Glory], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 27, 2026. Trump’s war on the free press is continuing.

Source: https://www.justice-integrity.org/2200-whistleblower-alert-authors-beware-the-covert-art-of-privishing