It was suspicious enough when journalist-author Bob Woodward inferred that an email exchange he had with a highly placed White House representative was a veiled threat against him. Did anyone believe that a Presidential staff as media savvy as the one Obama has working for him would consider even on their worst day that threatening a celebrity political reporter was even remotely a good idea? It turns out , we learn , that Woodward, who of late has be absorbed into the alternate reality known as Fox News, mis-characterized the correspondence. If that wasn't pathetic enough, Woodward took the Fox air again to defend is original remarks about the digital digression. He has the look of someone caught telling a lie, a self-inflicted wound to the reputation to someone who curried favor with presidents, Supreme Court justices, Generals and other power players.
Beyond his ability to get interviews with the
most powerful people in Washington and then write best selling books
about them, Bob Woodward has struck me as a glorified ambulance chaser,
an eavesdropper, a gossip hound only a screen door removed
from the stench. In an another life he would be hosting a TMZ
variant. In an digital era when information is available immediately to
anyone who seeks it and when news breaks faster than we're able to
blink, Woodward, a creature of newspaper culture and the author of books that attempted to give broader context to complex
personalities, must have felt his relevance fading rapidly,badly. I can
only think that appearing on Sean Hannity's show was a way for him to stay in
the game and remain in the current discussion.
The problem, though, is
that his awkward attempts to give his email exchange with his White
House contact a "Fox' spin only made him a story , separate from any
real journalism and perspective he might have provided. The White House
release of the emails after Woodward's characterization of them as
somehow menacing --they sound anything but--just makes this once highly
considered writer seem like another old , tired warhorse subjecting
himself to the buffoonery that is the stock-in-trade of Fox News. It is a
pathetic spectacle.
