Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Bulsajo]

Anyone read this one yet?

I've just got it from the library and am looking forward to it having already read his first two in this "trilogy"- Bush At War (9/11 Afghanistan) and Plan of Attack (Iraq).

I found these two a little frustrating in that he is the ultimate reporter, sitcking objectively to reporting the facts as they were told to him without editorializing. This was of course laudable in its own way but you really wanted to hear his opinions sometimes, like what he thought of the people he interviewed, and whether he believed what they were telling him, and whether he thought they believed what they were telling him. According to the reviews he is more candid in this one.

[Gopher]

[Bulsajo]

[Gopher]

[Green Tea]

I have the audio book and it's in my queue waiting to be listened to.

[EFLtrainer]

[Pligganease]

[bucheon bum]

[EFLtrainer]

I said relatively. not completely. It was not my understanding that they "praised" Bush, but were relatively supportive of the wars. What is interesting is that the one that is the most critical is dismissed by certain persons as a sales gimick.

Of course the books are supposed to turn a profit, but I'm not going to play mind reader and decide to what degree greed vs. journalism played a part. I do, however, have a hard time with someone doubting the journalism given no precedent I am aware of for the writer's integrity to be questioned. That's where the partisan agenda comes in.

[Gopher]

[Bulsajo]

I haven't read veil, but I still found putting Woodward's journalism (shoddy is it may or may not possibly be) in the same realm as Haliburton to be er,... disconcerting to say the least; But then again, you know a lot more about Woodward than I do- I know him as "that Washington Post reporter who knew who Deep Throat was" and hadn't read any books by him prior to Bush at War.

As for the rest of this thread, BB hits the nail on the head as usual.

The previous 2 books weren't "pro-Bush" so much as they were un-editorialized (or as some might claim "objective") reporting of interviews he had with White House staff and govt officials. "Just they facts" as they were told to him. And the facts spoke for themselves. You could see where the breakdowns occured, who was more or less thinking what and when. Lots of reading between the lines so you could easily view the books either as critical or supportive of Bush, depending on what mental baggage and opinions you were already toting around.

Woodward had access to the key players to an extent that no other journalist had, and for that reason alone I found he he was worth reading.

Could he have asked harder questions, could he have been more analytical in his reporting?
Certainly. But then he would have lost the access that made him worth reading...

Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading this latest one.

You can read reviews about it here (it's getting good- but not great- reviews):

http://www.metacritic.com/books/authors/woodwardbob/stateofdenial

So my opinion of Woodward is similar to my opinion of Hersch- he may or may not have done some shoddy journalism in the past, may or may not be over-eager in striving to recapture lost journalistic glory, but I'm reading them for the subject matter and there's no doubt in my mind that when it comes to the events in the States, Afghanistan and Iraq in the last 5 years they should both be on everyone's must read list (along with a lot of other sources to be sure; they may not be on the TOP of the must read list, but they ARE there).

[bucheon bum]

Yes, I do think they are all worth reading simply due to the connections and interviews he has.

[Gopher]

Bulsajo: I agree with what you and Bucheon say here: after all, I read some of Woodward's books, too. I particularly like Veil.

It may interest some here to know that a far, far left poly-sci prof. I know thinks that Woodward, who supposedly served in Naval Intelligence or something related to it at one point in his life -- indeed, this was how he originally met FBI's "deep throat" -- is part of an elaborate deception scheme. Indeed, is Woodward, by the way, not somehow caught up, from beginning to end, in the Plame Affair? In any case, this professor refuses to read any of Woodward's books, including the one that brought Nixon down. He tells me it is a larger, military-industrial complex PR game.

However this may be, my reservations and observations are this: Woodward, too, is capitalizing on the war; three, play-by-play books, sell very quickly on the current market, while the war is still "hot." If he were really disinterested and altruistic, he'd wait until the war ended, collate all of his information, find some dox, look at it from a more distant perspective, etc., and produce a definitive account.

Secondly, like most other journalists, esp. Hersh, who you mention above, Woodward ambitiously crosses the line between reporting the story and becoming an active part in it, shaping it. If you can bring down a president (or a Congressman, as the San Diego Union-Tribune recently did), who knows what else you can do? How about play cat-and-mouse with Casey and see what you can get out of it, for example?

So, as with everything else, we should take Woodward with a healthy grain of salt. His books are not divine revelation, just good insider-gossip, with a political agenda that is not entirely clear but, as I tried to point out above, may just be an agenda as simple to understand as "Bob Woodward, Inc." makes it...

[Bulsajo]

[Gopher]

What I like about you is that you can make leaps.

As far as the specifics of what you ask in one or another post on this or another thread, "no comment."