Is Woodward lying?

Sunday, September 16, 2018

Woodward new book “Fear” is very similar to all of his other books in that he frames the truth the way he wants to.

The problem in the past is no one could actually check is facts because he used so many unnamed sources.

This is particularly true and is Watergate coverage which has come under heavy scrutiny over the years as more records open up showing how he distorted information and often mischaracterized some of the people he quoted.

He has been accused of literally making up facts for some of his books such as the deathbed confession of CIA director Casey or such as the email exchange he claimed during the Obama Administration in which he was threatened which turned out to be not the case.

Even his editor at The Washington Post, Bradlee had serious reservations about some of his sources such as deep throat and z and the numerous flowerpot incidents that led to underground garage meetings – concerns Woodward attempted to keep from being published.

Woodward's reporting over the years as a journalist has come under serious scrutiny because of the way he spins facts and no matter how many recordings he has of interviews his facts are not in question but the way he spins those, facts refocusing them into a preconceived notion of what he appears to want rather than what actually is.

In his Watergate reporting, for instance, he claimed some high officials had control of funding which as it turned out was simply not true and then he not only doctored quotes from one of his sources, but he implied that that source had access to information that that source did not have.

In most cases it is impossible to check his sources because like the Washington Post and recently the New York Times they use sources that are named and so can't be verified by more objective reporter.

We have to take Woodward's word for the accuracy of these.

Yet even when he gets the facts right he gets the situation wrong clearly spinning his tale the way he wants to see it rather than how's the facts add up.

This became extremely obvious with his biography of John Belushi in which every person he interviewed claimed he miscued the facts often painting things in a dark or light than were absolutely accurate.

There was a famous cafeteria scene in which Bellucci flexed his muscles as a performer and yet Woodward painted this as a lazy and drug-induced when in fact every witness who saw the scene claims Woodward got it completely backwards and clearly was promoting an agenda of an out-of-control Bellucci.

It took another reporter 20 years later and really interviewing all of those people Woodward originally interviewed to show just how skewed a reporting Woodward did.

Baluchi's agent said of Woodward's reporting that if this was an example of his kind of reporting then it is easy to believe Nixon was innocent.

Because this work on Bellucci was so easily verifiable we get a real good glimpse into how Woodward AKA The Washington Post Slants stories.

It is difficult to tell whether Woodward is acting on behalf of some agenda or merely trying to cause trouble the way all of his previous books have often relying on sources that can't be verified and so the tapes won't reveal how skewed he is.

We’re not questioning the fact, but how he frames them and how he selectively picks things to emphasize a particular point when seen in the whole the truth maybe something far different from the way he paints it.

Bellucci biography is a perfect lens into Woodward's style of reporting which is to selectively pick facts and scenes often misinterpreting what those scenes are about and distorting facts to fit what he has a preconceived notion of.  He may have the fact right but may have painted them so that they are exactly the opposite of what the truth is, a kind of fabricated montage of real things that define something that is not real.

Unfortunately, Woodward represents a kind of Journalism that is common today which is to take pieces of a puzzle and put them together in the wrong way so that they say something they want to have said in the first place not what is accurate, spinning a kind of false narrative that we are expected to accept as truth.

Facts don't lie but often the way they put together do and in this case gauging from Woodward's past we have to really seriously question how he put together his latest book and question what his motives are.