While most people, after meeting Maes in person, come away with a positive impression and even find it hard to believe how different he is from his image in the press, the reality is that he has unwittingly created severe problems for himself and he does not have the resources to overcome them.
But nobody has time for my multi-hyphenate-designer-author-illustrator-creative director-writer-small press-brand reality.
"There is a huge gap between what Correa says about press freedom and reality," said César Ricaurte, head of Fundamedios.
It existed, floating in the ether, somewhere between press release and reality, for at least 30 years before G.M. released OnStar for real in 1996.
(I should know. In February the agency deported me from Moscow. My crime? Officially, not having collected my press card; in reality reporting on themes – Putin's alleged "secret assets" abroad, for example – the Kremlin considers taboo).
Judicial missteps--like Judge Harold Baer's recent decision that police in Washington Heights had improperly sized four million dollars' worth of cocaine and heroin--may get all the press, but in reality more than eighty per cent of the felony indictments issued by the Manhattan D.A.'s office result in guilty pleas or jury convictions.
"There is a huge gap between what Correa says about press freedom and reality," said César Ricaurte, head of press watchdog group, Fundamedios.
He told me: "Beeching has had a really bad press... the reality is he made the tough decisions that anyone in that position would probably have had to make, the shame was it wasn't followed on with investment in the subsequent decades after that".
It's about how the media takes all this noise as some sign of reality," Press said.
This is surely the best press a British reality star's book has ever received.
