{"id":187407,"date":"2013-03-12T20:15:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-13T01:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/03\/12\/this-explains-a-lot-about-bob-woodward\/"},"modified":"2013-03-12T20:15:00","modified_gmt":"2013-03-13T01:15:00","slug":"this-explains-a-lot-about-bob-woodward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/03\/12\/this-explains-a-lot-about-bob-woodward\/","title":{"rendered":"This Explains a Lot About Bob Woodward"},"content":{"rendered":"

The author of a biography on John Belushi compared his understanding of the life, and death, to Bob Woodward’s account, the book Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi<\/i>, and finds the Washington Post<\/i> scribe’s account to be bizarrely inaccurate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Tanner Colby is not suggesting that Woodward fabricating anything, but rather that he is completely incompetent when it comes to putting the facts he has in an accurate context:<\/p>\n

A little more than a week ago, during an interview with Politico, Bob Woodward came forward to claim he\u2019d been threatened in an email by a \u201csenior White House official\u201d for daring to reveal certain details about the negotiations over the budget sequester. The White House responded by releasing the email exchange Woodward was referring to, which turned out to be nothing more than a cordial exchange between the reporter and Obama\u2019s economic adviser, Gene Sperling, who was clearly implying nothing more than that Woodward would \u201cregret\u201d taking a position that would soon be shown to be false.<\/span>

<\/span>A rather trivial scandal, but the incident did manage to raise important questions about Woodward\u2019s behavior. Was he cynically trumping up the administration\u2019s \u201cthreat,\u201d or does he just not know how to read an email? Pretty soon, those questions tipped over into the standard Beltway discussion that transpires anytime Woodward does anything. How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve his legendary status?<\/span>

<\/span>I believe I can offer some interesting answers to those questions. Thirty-one years ago, on March 5, 1982, Saturday Night Live and Animal House star John Belushi died of a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles\u2014which, bear with me a moment, has more to do with the current coverage of the budget sequester than you might initially think.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>Twenty years later, in 2004, Judy Belushi hired me, then an aspiring comedy writer, to help her with a new biography of John, this one titled Belushi: A Biography. As her coauthor, I handled most of the legwork, including all of the interviews and most of the research. What started as a fun project turned out to be a rather fascinating and unique experiment. Over the course of a year, page by page, source by source, I re-reported and rewrote one of Bob Woodward\u2019s books. As far as I know, it\u2019s the only time that\u2019s ever been done.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>Wired is an infuriating piece of work. There\u2019s a reason Woodward\u2019s critics consistently come off as hysterical ninnies: He doesn\u2019t make Jonah Lehrer\u2013level mistakes. There\u2019s 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\u2014some of it to the point where it can feel quite wrong. There\u2019s no question that he frequently ferrets out information that other reporters don\u2019t. 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\u2019s here that Woodward fails.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>Woodward also makes peculiar decisions about what facts he uses as evidence. His detractors like to say that he\u2019s little more than a stenographer\u2014and they\u2019re right. In Wired, he takes what he is told and simply puts it down in chronological order with no sense of proportionality, nuance, or understanding.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>Of all the people I interviewed, SNL writer and current Sen. Al Franken, referencing his late comedy partner Tom Davis, offered the most apt description of Woodward\u2019s one-sided approach to the drug use in Belushi\u2019s story: \u201cTom Davis said the best thing about Wired,\u201d Franken told me. \u201cHe said it\u2019s as if someone wrote a book about your college years and called it Puked<\/i>. And all it was about was who puked, when they puked, what they ate before they puked and what they puked up. No one read Dostoevsky, no one studied math, no one fell in love, and nothing happened but people puking.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here is the money quote:<\/p>\n

Whenever people ask me about John Belushi and the subject of Wired comes up, I say it\u2019s 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\u2019t very good at playing basketball.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that Woodward is a manipulator with a partisan agenda. He doesn\u2019t alter key evidence in order to serve a particular thesis. Inconsequential details about rehearsing movie dialogue are rendered just as ham-handedly as critical facts about Belushi\u2019s cocaine addiction. Woodward has an unmatched skill for digging up information, but he doesn\u2019t know what to do with that information once he finds it.<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My thesis about Woodward, and I’ve thought this for a while is that he’s kind of a big Hoover*<\/sup> for information, but he needs someone who can connect the dots to create actual meaning.<\/p>\n

As I have followed Woodward’s solo career, I have increasingly given more credit to Bernstein.<\/p>\n

*<\/sup>The vacuum cleaner, not the former FBI director.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The author of a biography on John Belushi compared his understanding of the life, and death, to Bob Woodward’s account, the book Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, and finds the Washington Post scribe’s account to be bizarrely inaccurate. Tanner Colby is not suggesting that Woodward fabricating anything, but rather that …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1011,1129,1064,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-journalism","category-media","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187407"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187407\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}