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Bob Woodward is said to be an investigative journalist and non-fiction author.
Yet the central character in his famous book “All the President's Men” actually did not exist!
“Deep Throat” was of course the name he gave his key “unnamed source” in that book.
But it turned out “Deep Throat” was a complete fabrication, an utter lie. Here:
http://www.lpatrickgrayiii.com/watergate02.html
It has now become clear that “Deep Throat” was fabricated. The most famous anonymous source of all time was a fictional character made up by (Woodward and Bernstein)
Then there's the fact there are notable discrepancies between Woodward's books “The Agenda” and “Maestro”.
Which one of these two books is the one that paints an accurate portrait of Clinton’s White House... or is it neither:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/10/w ... _cant.html
It is certainly true that nothing Bob Woodward writes can be fully trusted without very, very careful, careful checking.... For the full Woodward treatment, read his The Agenda, then read his Maestro, contemplate how one and the same person could use the Third Person Omniscient to write both accounts of the making of Clinton economic policy, and collapse to the floor in helpless laughter...
I would like to hear Mr. Greenberg explain how Woodward's account of the making of Clinton economic policy in Maestro--where an intelligent but naive president is tutored in the realities of economic policy by wise Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, and chooses intelligent policies in the national interest--is consistent with the account that Greenberg worked on in Woodward's The Agenda, in which the process (a very good, a very thoughtful process, that I know, for I was there) is reported to have been, in Woodward's words, "chaos. Absolute chaos."
I don't think Greenberg can. I don't think Greenberg dares try. And if he dares not try, then he needs to stay quiet. Very quiet.
In one book, Clinton’s WH is portrayed as “chaos” (not unlike Trump’s WH in this new book)
… and in the other book everything is hunky dory in Clinton’s WH.
Does this mean Woodward’s next book will tell of an exemplary Trump WH?
And does this mean Woodward’s books should be placed in the Fiction rather than the Non-fiction section?
Here is a good example of how Woodward tends to distort things and create caricatures:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/cult ... _tell.html
Two years after John Belushi died, Bob Woodward published Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi… (He wrote) a scathing, lurid account of Belushi’s drug use and death.
Wired is an infuriating piece of work…. Woodward doesn’t make Jonah Lehrer–level mistakes. There’s never a smoking gun like an outright falsehood or a brazen ethical breach. And yet, in the final product, a lot of what Woodward writes comes off as being not quite right—some of it to the point where it can feel quite wrong. There’s no question that he frequently ferrets out information that other reporters don’t. But getting the scoop is only part of the equation. Once you have the facts, you have to present those facts in context and in proportion to other facts in order to accurately reflect reality. It’s here that Woodward fails…
“The greatest crime of that book,” Landis says of Wired, “is that if you read it and you’d just assume that John was a pig and an asshole, and he was anything but. He could be abrupt and unpleasant, but most of the time he was totally charming and people adored him.”
The wrongness in Woodward’s reporting is always ever so subtle. SNL writer Michael O'Donoghue—who died before I started the book but who videotaped an interview with Judy years before—told this story about how Belushi loved to mess with him:
“I am very anal-retentive, and John used to come over and just move things around, just move things a couple of inches, drop a paper on the floor, miss an ashtray a little bit until finally he could see me just tensing up. That was his idea of a fine joke. Another joke he used to do was to sit on me.”
When put through the Woodward filter, this becomes:
“A compulsively neat person, O’Donoghue was always picking up and straightening his office. Frequently, John came in and destroyed the order in a minute, shifting papers, furniture or pencils or dropping cigarette ashes.”
Again, Woodward’s account is not wrong. It’s just … wrong. In his version, Belushi is not a prankster but a jerk.
Twenty years later, when Blair Brown told me about a love scene, she was still upset at how Woodward had portrayed it in Wired. “It was my first experience of getting tricked by a journalist,” she said. “Woodward appeared as if he really wanted to know what went on, and I actually had marvelous times with Belushi. But the thing that was depressing when I read the book was that he had taken the facts that I told him, and put an attitude to them that was not remotely right.”
Wired is like that throughout. Like a funhouse mirror, Woodward’s prose distorts what it purports to reflect. Moments of tearful drama are rendered as tersely as an accounting of Belushi’s car-service receipts. Friendly jokes are stripped of their humor and turned into boorish annoyances.
Whenever people ask me about John Belushi and the subject of Wired comes up, I say it’s like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn’t very good at playing basketball.
The simple truth of Wired is that Bob Woodward, deploying all of the talent and resources for which he is famous, produced something that is a failure as journalism. And when you imagine Woodward using the same approach to cover secret meetings about drone strikes and the budget sequester and other issues of vital national importance, well, you have to stop and shudder.
And consider this:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/04/ ... d-black/2/
This was of a piece with Watergate celebrity journalist Bob Woodward’s invention of a conversation in his book Veil, about the Iran-Contra affair, with former CIA director William Casey. PROVEN LIE: Woodward claimed to have entered, in disguise, into Casey’s hospital room, shortly before he died and to have extracted a confession of wrongdoing from him. It was proved absolutely that Casey was not compos mentis at the time, and that his room was heavily secured from such intrusions. Clearly, Woodward’s proprietary instincts toward Washington scandals were mortally offended by being left out on this occasion, and he simply turned what purported to be a history of Iran-Contra into a novel to maintain his standing as the capital’s reigning scandal-monger.
A "
novel" indeed… this is a guy who writes fiction and passes it off as non-fiction.
What really hurts is his lies do real damage to people, institutions, governments and the world at large.
If lunatics like Kim Jong-un and Bashar al-Assad believe some of the crap in this book, who knows what the extent of the damage might be.
But Woodward doesn't care, he gets his fame + fortune.
And the Trump-hating libs don't care, they get what they believe to be fresh mud to wallow in.
Woodward “reports” (
HA!) on interviews that never happened (Deep Throat, William Casey).
Ronald Reagan:
"Woodward is a liar and he lied about what Casey is supposed to have thought of me.”
Some people reportedly quoted in this new book are already saying they never said the things Woodward attributes to them.
He is a proven painter of false pictures and an outed liar.
He does writes about interesting topics
... but he does so in an agonizingly boring style, he has
no sense of humour, takes things out of context, and laces it all with insidious lies.
Pass.
