A
very interesting take by Tanner Colby on
once great Washington Post Kaplan Daily associate editor, Nixon-slayer and
sequester expert Bob Woodward, using the writer's experience with
Wired, Woodward's biography of the late comedian John Belushi:
"When Wired came out, many of Belushi’s friends and family
denounced it as biased and riddled with factual errors. 'Exploitative,
pulp trash,' in the words of Dan Aykroyd. Wired was so wrong, Belushi’s manager said, it made you think Nixon might be innocent." (our emphasis)
Tanner shows how Woodward's book on Belushi was riddled with errors, events taken out of context and just plain misrepresentations. It makes it easier to see that Woodward's recent ax-grinding behavior and looseness with the facts was not an aberration. As Colby concludes,
"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."
After
l'affaire Sperling, when his e-mail exchange was exposed for all to judge on the merits, we have to wonder why this entitled meathead is still the object of fawning by the Beltway media. (Oh, wait,
they're entitled meatheads, too!)
