Friday, March 1, 2013
Media / Books The Problem with Bob Woodward
Posted by Paul Constant on Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 1:31 PM
John Cassidy at The New Yorker puts it best:
The real rap on Woodward isn’t that he makes things up. It’s that he takes what powerful people tell him at face value; that his accounts are shaped by who coöperates with him and who doesn’t; and that they lack context, critical awareness, and, ultimately, historic meaning. In a 1996 essay for the New York Review of Books, Joan Didion wrote that “measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent” from Woodward’s post-Watergate books, which are notable mainly for “a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.”
It's no secret that I'll read just about anything with an American president on the cover. But Woodward's presidential books in the years since he toppled Nixon have been absolutely inessential. He's the ultimate access reporter, and right now he's throwing a fit because he didn't get the access (and phony respect) that he feels he deserves.
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Here's the real story. This is the first and only time in the last 4 years, that an Insider has come out with statements against the administration! That never, ever happens. I'm not talking about "right wing bloggers" or guys making comments. I'm talking about a dyed-in-the-wool, honest to God, Hollywood/East Coast Liberal Establishmentarian saying some thing bad about Obama. SNL doesn't make jokes about him. No major city newspaper in a blue state disparages him. This is the first. And there's a first time for everything!
Paul, have you read all of Caro's books on LBJ? Caro is pretty much the opposite of Woodward, as far as I can tell.
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Gee, I wonder what gave you that idea.
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P.S. welcome back!
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Bob Woodward, apparently a fame whore.
but perhaps not. IDC
This is much ado about nothing.
Obama is a corrupt little wuss. His domestic policy is about lining the pockets of his cronies. His foreign policy is nonexistent, I mean really, Hilliary and Kerry, bitch please.
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