Legendary Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward is about to publish a memoir. From the AP:
Bob Woodward’s next book will be an inside account of how the bestselling author and award-winning journalist came to write so many inside accounts.
“Secrets: A Reporter’s Memoir” will offer Woodward’s take on some of the government leaders he has known and the news he has helped break, from Watergate to the inner workings of the Trump administration. Simon & Schuster announced Tuesday that “Secrets” will come out November 24.
“He has kept notes, transcripts and files of all of his interviews with the most important players in Washington,” the publisher’s announcement reads in part.
“For the first time in this one-of-a-kind reporting memoir, Woodward lifts the lid on his historic reporting relationships, some spanning several decades.”
Will Woodward have the guts in Secrets to criticize the press? To “walk down the painful road of introspection” about his own profession? It’s possible. The phrase “walk down the painful road of introspection” is one Woodward himself used to criticize his colleagues at the Washington Post. It appeared in “The Press vs the President,” a long series of articles by Jeff Gerth that were published in January 2023 in the Columbia Journalism Review. The intelligence community set up President Trump for failure in 2016 by falsely claiming he was a tool of the Kremlin. The media peddled garbage, ignored contradictory evidence, and flat-out lied. “The Press vs the President,” which is a comprehensive and damning indictment of the media. (Seriously, go read it.)
One of the people interviewed in Gerth’s series is Bob Woodward. In January 2017, Woodward went on Fox News and criticized the Steele dossier, the anti-Trump file which was funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele. Woodward called the dossier a “garbage document.” The Steele dossier claimed Trump was hanging out with prostitutes in Moscow.
Jeff Gerth describes what happened next: “After his remarks on Fox, Woodward said he ‘reached out to people who covered this’ at the paper, identifying them only generically as ‘reporters,’ to explain why he was so critical. Asked how they reacted, Woodward said: ‘To be honest, there was a lack of curiosity on the part of the people at the WashingtonPost about what I had said, why I said this, and I accepted that and I didn’t force it on anyone.’” Woodward also told Gerth that the Mueller report was a ‘fizzle’ but reporters were ‘never going to declare it was going to end up dry.’”
If Woodward wants to show real courage he will name the people at the Post who peddled the Russiagate hoax.
That’s unlikely, I know — but it's also not impossible. Woodward is capable of showing real guts. In October 2019 Woodward moderated an event in Washington, D.C., featuring New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey on their book She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement. The book exposed Harvey Weinstein and the women who came forward about his abuse.
Woodward triggered heckling and walkouts when he asked Kantor and Twohey asked some tough questions. The angry feminist website Jezebel was not happy:
Yet Woodward, according to accounts from people who attended the event, seemed more interested in hearing himself talk and repeating tired ideas about sexual violence.
As Robyn Swirling—the founder of Works in Progress, an organization that aims to eliminate workplace sexual and gender-based harassment—detailed on Twitter, Woodward repeatedly interrupted Kantor and Twohey, and his questions and commentary, as she wrote, “made clear he doesn’t understand the first thing about rape culture.” At one point, he reportedly asked the two Times reporters: “Did you find any women who made up allegations? That’s very important.” Woodward also reportedly fixated on Weinstein’s motivations, describing his predatory behavior as a “weird foreplay.”
At another point, after Kantor and Twohey said that sexual harassment is about power, he doubled down on his point, asking: “So it’s about power? It’s about sex also though, isn’t it?” Woodward then moved on to discuss Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and, according to Swirling, asked them skeptically “whether they would have deemed Dr. Ford’s story, despite its ‘imprecision,’ credible enough” to report.
Jodi Kantor was last seen imploding her career by defending Graham Platner. In retrospect Woodward’s questions seem tough and fair, and Kantor is revealed as a political hack and operative.
Woodward was also far more fearless than his #MeToo colleagues when it came to questioning Christine Blasey Ford. Perhaps in Secrets the legendary reporter will give a fair hearing to those of us who called it out as total BS from the start, and who endured not only unethical but evil behavior on the part of the Washington Post.
Again, not likely. Yet also not impossible. In 2021, as the Steele dossier was falling apart, Erik Wemple, the media critic for the Post, pleaded with the media, including his own paper, to come clean. “What most dismayed me,” Wemple wrote, “was the failure of MSNBC and CNN to counter and properly address the questions I was asking them.” Wemple concluded that for the media “a reckoning is years overdue.” In case there was any doubt, Wemple made a demand about the fake Russiagate coverage: “Retract the stories.” Of course, they didn’t.
Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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