Bob Woodward Book and Cognitive Dissonance? Confusion? What is Happening?

nighttimer · Sep 11, 2018

Twick said:
I'm not sure that he told "the wrong story" about Belushi. It wasn't sympathetic, but he wasn't under any obligation to be. It may not be the story that his friends and families wanted, it may not be compassionate, but that isn't an essential part of reporting.

Neither is cold insensitivity as defined by the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics.

Minimize harm

Ethical journalists treat sources, subjects and colleagues as human beings deserving of respect. Journalists should:

Show compassion for those who may be affected adversely by news coverage. Use special sensitivity when dealing with children and inexperienced sources or subjects.

Be sensitive when seeking or using interviews or photographs of those affected by tragedy or grief.

Recognize that gathering and reporting information may cause harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance.

Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.

Twick said:
You say that taking coke wasn't "a big part of Belushi's life," but it was a big part of his death. In an era where coke was becoming the new weed, and a lot of people were getting hurt as a result, it was probably harder to pitch it as "tormented genius driven to use drugs, not really his fault."

No. I did not say taking coke wasn't "a big part of Belushi's life." I said, "Woodward focused obsessively on Belushi's drug addiction to the exclusion of nearly everything else about the man" and I attempted to not only say that but to verify it as well.

I don't have a problem clarifying or defending what I say, Twick, but please make the effort to quote me correctly. It'll save us the time wasted on clarifying or defending something I didn't say.

cornflake said:
Again, I don't understand the relevance of people's opinions about Woodward's books. People like them or don't -- so?

You don't or you won't understand? :Huh:

Here's the relevance of people's opinions about Woodward's books. Critiquing and criticism of a writer's work (which all of us are) is not simply a matter of whether people like them or not. Some people like the pickles on a McRib sandwich while others recoil in nausea. It's subjective.

That said, it is very relevant when any writer takes on the subject of a man's life and death and turns in a pedantic, preachy, moralistic piece of shit like Wired. The Woodward Method is to gain entry to the levers of power by dint of his reputation as a serious, credible and honest journalist. However, Woodward has repeatedly been accused of being less a journalist than a stenographer in several of his books. After all, access to power is all very well and good, but what does Woodward have to give up to gain that access?

You may not understand the relevance of people's opinions about Woodward books, but it is extremely relevant when some of those books are obsequious paeans to Washington insiders swapping war stories and ratfucking each other.

I haven't read Fear yet, but if you have I'd be very interested to see if it delivers of all those sterling and above reproach journalistic values you seem to believe Bob Woodward personifies.

cornflake said:
The administration and people quoted are saying they did not say what Woodward says they did. That's about as possible as Trump being able to locate Iran on a map.

I said if he says you said something, you said it and he can prove it.

If he says he'll protect a source, he will protect the source.

Whether someone thinks he was right about how he portrayed Belushi .... eh?

Your faith is exceeded only by your...well, actually it doesn't. Nothing exceeds your faith in Woodward. Which as you said...so?

cbenoi1 · Sep 11, 2018

R.A. Lundberg said:
Trust me, these folks? They see the faults and foibles of the man.

They just don't care anymore.

R.A. Lundberg said:
They aren't blind.

They are. Otherwise they would have had Kasich instead.

R.A. Lundberg said:
But he's their champion. He infuriates the liberals and that's good enough for them.

He's a wrecking ball all right. No contest.

-cb

ElaineA · Sep 11, 2018

R.A. Lundberg said:
Both sides have set up a "We vs They" mentality among followers

I'll admit we have now, with our republic threatened, but before Trump? I don't agree so much. Of course electioneering is always going to be we vs they battle, but American Democratic liberalism *requires* information and compromise to govern. American GOP conservatism requires exclusion and fear, because without it, people will start to ask, "what's good for me?" and realize that the GOP doesn't want that. GOP leaders refuse to compromise, or even hear the other side at all.

Exhibit 1: The health care plan that passed congress, the ACA, was heavily influenced by Republicans and their lobbyists. Every single item in it was a compromise, and still the GOP used it to divide the country.

Exhibit 2: Merrick Garland. It doesn't need a link.

I had daily contact with a lot of Republicans before this. People I disagreed with vehemently, but still socialized and conversed with, even about politics. It wasn't we vs. they, it was "but aren't schools and healthcare good for all of us?" I never stopped trying to find common ground somewhere, until McConnell and Trump, especially, blew up the bridges.

So, no. I'm not going to accept that particular both-siderism talking point.

Kaiser-Kun · Sep 11, 2018

Having read a bit already, it seems Trump was this close to dropping out of the race after the "Grab the pussy". THIS FREAKING CLOSE. If it weren't for Steve Bannon, who was the main enabler for his worst impulses then, Pence would have run instead and perhaps you'd have President Clinton.

cornflake · Sep 11, 2018

nighttimer said:
...
You don't or you won't understand?

I don't.

Here's the relevance of people's opinions about Woodward's books. Critiquing and criticism of a writer's work (which all of us are) is not simply a matter of whether people like them or not. Some people like the pickles on a McRib sandwich while others recoil in nausea. It's subjective.

That said, it is very relevant when any writer takes on the subject of a man's life and death and turns in a pedantic, preachy, moralistic piece of shit like Wired.

Which is... your entirely subjective opinion.

The Woodward Method is to gain entry to the levers of power by dint of his reputation as a serious, credible and honest journalist.

Are you suggesting he's not those things? It's not like he's a shadowy, secretive figure. Anyone he's talking to knows exactly who he is, and if they choose to speak to him, that's on them.

However, Woodward has repeatedly been accused of being less a journalist than a stenographer in several of his books.

Which is, again, entirely subjective opinion based in how someone feels about it -- and suggests he reports, not opines, himself.

After all, access to power is all very well and good, but what does Woodward have to give up to gain that access?

I don't know, but why is the assumption that anything was relinquished, as opposed to he's writing what he would.

You may not understand the relevance of people's opinions about Woodward books, but it is extremely relevant when some of those books are obsequious paeans to Washington insiders swapping war stories and ratfucking each other.

Again, WHY? Why are subjective opinions about whether some of his books obsequious paeans relevant to whether he's accurate?

I haven't read Fear yet, but if you have I'd be very interested to see if it delivers of all those sterling and above reproach journalistic values you seem to believe Bob Woodward personifies.

Your faith is exceeded only by your...well, actually it doesn't. Nothing exceeds your faith in Woodward. Which as you said...so?

You haven't presented anything suggesting he's anything BUT beyond reproach w/re the topic at hand.

Yeah, I have pretty absolute faith that Bob Woodward is not lying when he uses quote marks. He's got like 50 years of history of having backup for what he claims as fact.

Your saying some people think he didn't insert enough opinion into things, or didn't look at aspects they wanted, or whatever subjective view, doesn't seem to have anything at all to do with that.

nighttimer · Sep 12, 2018

cornflake said:
Which is... your entirely subjective opinion.

Which is, again, entirely subjective opinion based in how someone feels about it -- and suggests he reports, not opines, himself.

Again, WHY? Why are subjective opinions about whether some of his books obsequious paeans relevant to whether he's accurate?

You keep falling back on this phrase as if those who dare lavish anything but endless praise upon Woodward are coming from a place of irrational emotion instead of objective facts. That is certainly not the case, but just as Trump Zombies see no flaw, deny all evidence to the fallibility of their hero and accept no criticism of him as legitimate it becomes obvious there's no point in attempting to debate anything with someone who has no intention to consider any perspective contrary to their own as holding any merit or value.

cornflake said:
You haven't presented anything suggesting he's anything BUT beyond reproach w/re the topic at hand.

Actually, I've presented quite a bit that states pretty clearly that Woodward ISN'T beyond reproach and with regard to this new book, I'll reserve judgment until I've read some reviews or read it myself.

Which is something you haven't done either.

cornflake said:
Yeah, I have pretty absolute faith that Bob Woodward is not lying when he uses quote marks. He's got like 50 years of history of having backup for what he claims as fact.

Whether it's 50 years or 100 years, having backup for what someone claims as fact, doesn't mean it should always be taken as fact until it can be corroborated and verified it actually is fact. When Woodward and Carl Bernstein were working the Watergate story, it was an editorial mandate that they had to have two sources before they could publish a story. Most of the time they did, but a few times they didn't. It's still the critical difference between having absolute faith and blind faith.

cornflake said:
Your saying some people think he didn't insert enough opinion into things, or didn't look at aspects they wanted, or whatever subjective view, doesn't seem to have anything at all to do with that.

Yeah, that's pretty much the sort of thing someone who has "absolute faith" in someone they're a huge fan of who wrote a book they haven't read would say. :LilLove:

Alessandra Kelley · Sep 13, 2018

The book sold 750,000 copies the first day of release and is on its ninth printing.

cornflake · Sep 13, 2018

Again, that people say they don't like what he wrote is not in any way suggesting, implying, or anything else, that what he wrote isn't factual.

If you want to take opinions on his work as some kind of mandate on whether he's factual, go nuts. Facts and opinions are not the same things.

I'm not a Woodward fan, particularly, nor a fucking Trump zombie or anything close, and I'm done being insulted by you.

Twick · Sep 14, 2018

R.A. Lundberg said:
There's a huge feeling among conservatives that they've gotten the short end of the stick, politically, for the last eight years, especially from the mainstream media. And not just a little bit, either. You hear constantly the quote from Barack Obama about "Bitterly clinging to guns and religion" and the one from Hillary about Trump supporters being "A basket of Deplorables". The name "Bitter clinger" and "Deplorable" are worn as badges of pride by many. Both sides have set up a "We vs They" mentality among followers, and neither side wants to talk to the other, just denigrate and scorn the opposing side. Hey, when you call more or less half the electorate "Deplorable", there are attitudes that are going to be influenced on both sides, and that has consequences.
Trust me, these folks? They see the faults and foibles of the man. They aren't blind. But he's their champion. He infuriates the liberals and that's good enough for them.

OK, first of all, Hillary didn't call all Trump voters deplorables. She said they included a "basket of deplorables," and anyone who's seen Charlottesville and subsequent developments would be outright lying if they said these *particular* supporters aren't "deplorable."

And I seriously disagree with "oth sides have set up a "We vs They" mentality among followers, and neither side wants to talk to the other, just denigrate and scorn the opposing side." I think mainstream Democrats and liberals have bent over backward to try to debate issues. it's rarely worked. People have just gotten sick of the endless trotting out of "Virginia coalminers, who are the HEART of America," as if people of other backgrounds were lesser Americans.

Michael Avenatti went on Tucker Carlson's show looking for open debate. What he got was a chyron through the whole thing calling him a "creepy porn lawyer." Carlson even used the phrase signing off before Avenatti could counter.

When someone's goal is simply to be obnoxious to "liberals," how on earth are liberals to have open and honest interchange of ideas with them?

nighttimer · Sep 14, 2018

cornflake said:
I'm not a Woodward fan, particularly, nor a fucking Trump zombie or anything close, and I'm done being insulted by you.

Could have fooled me by the way you've waved away even the mildest critique that BOB WOODWARD isn't God's gift to investigative journalism.

cornflake said:
It's BOB WOODWARD. In what circumstance would he not have a nice, clear tape of every conversation he had on the record, indexed and ready to go? Who thinks they can lie about what they said to Woodward and get away with it?

More than any of the revelations that have come out so far w/re the book (and this is the one I want to read), this has me utterly baffled -- people saying BOB WOODWARD is lying about what they said to him. I don't even... is it that they think people will just take their word he lied?

It had to be the all-caps which gave me the erroneous impression you were a fan of BOB WOODWARD. Totally my bad.

Moving right along, here's a review of Fear from the Columbia Journalism Review which shares my trepidation if it's worth what Woodward gets when he gives someone like Steve Bannon the shield of anonymity to go after his White House enemies.

Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear, a devastating portrait of a presidency lurching from crisis to crisis, is a certified blockbuster. On its first day on shelves, 750,000 copies were sold. The hype was good: for more than a week before its debut, Fear dominated the news cycle, as journalists and pundits parsed the revelations within. Those scoops, as Woodward writes in his note to readers, come from hundreds of hours of interviews conducted on “deep background,” meaning that the officials with whom Woodward spoke are not named in the text.

This sort of reporting isn’t new for Woodward, nor is he its only practitioner. In books about presidents from Nixon to Obama, Woodward has employed a similar approach, conducting exhaustive interviews on background and using the information he gathers to write from an omniscient perspective. Woodward and Carl Bernstein, his colleague at The Washington Post, used the most famous anonymous source in American history—FBI Associate Director Mark Felt a.k.a. “Deep Throat”—to expose the cover-up behind the Watergate burglary that unraveled Nixon’s presidency. This week, Woodward told Michael Schmidt of The New York Times that “you won’t get the straight story from someone if you do it on the record. You will get a press release version of events.” But as Axios’s Jonathan Swan, one of the current masters of Washington intrigue, noted, sources “also lie on background. A lot.”

And no group of officials in recent memory has proved as willing to bend the truth as those in the Trump administration. The recent controversy over Steve Bannon’s invitation (later rescinded) to appear at The New Yorker Festival led The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan to declare, “Enough, already, with anything Steve Bannon has to say.” When Kellyanne Conway appears on CNN, critics question why the network gives a platform to the official who coined “alternative facts.” Yet for Woodward, reliance on the same sources is received differently: If it’s not OK for David Remnick to talk to Bannon in front of an audience, why is it OK for Woodward to use him, quite obviously, as a key source in the book?

Woodward’s approach hasn’t changed; the climate in which his sources are viewed has. Every administration is filled with people who have an agenda, who want to spin events in their favor, but the lines of credibility have shifted. In taking on the Trump presidency as his topic, Woodward is left to assemble a reliable book from unreliable sources.

Woodward hasn’t confirmed the identities of any people he spoke with, but it doesn’t take much of a close reading of Fear to recognize the fingerprints of Bannon, Rob Porter, John Dowd, and Reince Priebus, among others, on the narrative. Bannon is a visionary (see ch. 2), Porter a bulwark against chaos (ch. 32), Priebus a beleaguered good soldier (ch. 18), and Dowd a committed lawyer who knows his client is “a fucking liar” (ch. 42).

The reliance on Bannon for sections of the narrative is especially troubling. Practiced in the art of self-aggrandizement, he not only holds the sort of views on immigration and race that got him banished from The New Yorker event, but he’s told his story before.

Woodward has earned readers’ trust through a career built upon diligent reporting, and it’s that record that led even Trump to admit, on their taped conversation, that “You’ve always been fair.” Indeed, Woodward gets at a central truth of the administration, but at least some of the sources he draws from have proven that they have, at best, a loose relationship with honesty. Relying on their words to narrate events, to borrow the title of Joshua Green’s book on Steve Bannon, is a devil’s bargain.

There is no doubt Fear will be one of the biggest selling books of 2018. If Woodward knows anything, he knows who to talk to get the dirt and people love dirt. The problem is, when you wallow in the muck with pigs you're going to get pretty dirty yourself. Yes, you may be getting a juicy story, but it's worth considering what is it the source gets out of telling it. :rolleyes

AW Admin · Sep 14, 2018

nighttimer said:
Your faith is exceeded only by your...well, actually it doesn't. Nothing exceeds your faith in Woodward. Which as you said...so?

cornflake said:
Again, that people say they don't like what he wrote is not in any way suggesting, implying, or anything else, that what he wrote isn't factual.

If you want to take opinions on his work as some kind of mandate on whether he's factual, go nuts. Facts and opinions are not the same things.

I'm not a Woodward fan, particularly, nor a fucking Trump zombie or anything close, and I'm done being insulted by you.

You both know how to use Ignore, right? And the

?

I'm really not interested in playing kindergarten cop. If you start to make it personal, walk away from the screen.

If you start to feel it's personal, use Ignore. Walk away from the screen.

You don't get to derail the conversation by sniping at each other.

CathleenT · Sep 15, 2018

FWIW, I'm reading the book in question right now. I'm about halfway through, and if Woodward's lying, he's incredible at it. This book has a level of detail that the most avid fantasy world-builder would envy. Lying to this extreme...honestly, I think it would be too hard to keep it all straight without having plot holes abound. My BS meter hasn't gone off, although I don't have the contacts or expertise to check his facts. I think it's a good nonfiction read.

So when I'm done with the thing, I'm going to wrap all that up in syllables and leave a five-star review. Unless he somehow radically blows it in the last half.

Bob Woodward Book and Cognitive Dissonance? Confusion? What is Happening?

nighttimer

No Gods No Masters

cbenoi1

ElaineA

All about that action, boss.

Kaiser-Kun

!

cornflake

practical experience, FTW

nighttimer

No Gods No Masters

Alessandra Kelley

Sophipygian

cornflake

practical experience, FTW

Twick

nighttimer

No Gods No Masters

AW Admin

CathleenT

I write