Bob Woodward's Reputational Decline

In case you haven't caught it, there was a recent incident that has garnered quite a bit of press attention concerning the quality of Bob Woodward's reporting. He received a harmless, even friendly, e-mail from White House adviser Gene Sperling and basically tried to turn it into a mini-scandal. Woodward ended up looking either foolish or incompetent.

Tanner Colby has written an astonishingly good Slate article exploring Woodward's apparent tendency to exaggerate and over-dramatize. What is especially interesting about Colby's article is that he uses as a case study the one book Bob Woodward wrote that wasn't about Washington. The book was Wired, his 1984 biography of John Belushi. What makes this such an interesting and useful approach (Colby is writing his own book about Belushi) is that the sources in Wired did not speak to Woodward in secret, as is common with government sources. There was no Deep Throat here. They are basically all Hollywood and other entertainment people who Colby was able to re-interview, and they talked freely. He was essentially able to re-report Woodward's book by talking to people who knew and worked with Belushi like John Landis, Blair Brown, and Al Franken. They all told Colby the same thing: while Woodward got the essential facts correct, he twisted their meaning and context to the point that the larger story they told was unrecognizable from the reality that the eyewitnesses described.

Colby makes a compelling case that this is essentially what occurred in les affaires Sperling. It is a good read.

Postscript: Speaking of celebrity biographies, I recently read a biography of Clint Eastwood about which I was initially skeptical. It was so negative and painted such a relentlessly unflattering portrayal of the subject that I assumed the writing was based on bias or personal animus. Until I read the book's afterward, that is. The author openly, almost apologetically, acknowledged the negative tone of the book and made a real effort to explain it. He compared it to another biography he had written about Jack Nicholson. He explained that he tried to get his sources to relay salacious and negative stories about Nicholson, but was unsuccessful. "Everyone", he wrote, "just seems to love Jack." He contrasted this with the instant willingness of numerous sources to say bad things about Eastwood. Clint, it appears, has made a lot of enemies.