http://www.politico.com/story/2013/02/woodward-at-war-88212.html
Woodward at war By: Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei February 27, 2013 08:01 PM EST Bob Woodward called a senior White House official last week to tell him that in a piece in that weekend’s Washington Post, he was going to question President Barack Obama’s account of how sequestration came about — and got a major-league brushback. The Obama aide “yelled at me for about a half-hour,” Woodward told us in an hourlong interview yesterday around the Georgetown dining room table where so many generations of Washington’s powerful have spilled their secrets. Digging into one of his famous folders, Woodward said the tirade was followed by a page-long email from the aide, one of the four or five administration officials most closely involved in the fiscal negotiations with the Hill. “I apologize for raising my voice in our conversation today,” the official typed. “You’re focusing on a few specific trees that give a very wrong impression of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here. … I think you will regret staking out that claim.” Woodward repeated the last sentence, making clear he saw it as a veiled threat. “ ‘You’ll regret.’ Come on,” he said. “I think if Obama himself saw the way they’re dealing with some of this, he would say, ‘Whoa, we don’t tell any reporter ‘you’re going to regret challenging us.’” (clip) Debunking Bob Woodward by Louis Proyect (Swans - December 5, 2005) Bob Woodward was the first reporter to be informed that Valerie Plame was a CIA agent. While keeping that a secret, he tried to minimize the importance of Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation on television and in the pages of the Washington Post. This led many media analysts to wonder why one of America's premier investigative journalists would violate the principles that made him so famous. As this article will try to point out, Woodward was never the fearless muckraker popularized by Robert Redford's portrayal in All the President's Men. Moreover, the Washington Post was exactly the kind of paper that would recruit and promote somebody so willing to violate journalist ethics in the pursuit of advancing his own career and the larger goals of American foreign policy. The story starts with Eugene Meyer who bought the paper in 1933 and turned it into a family fiefdom just as the Sulzbergers, another German-American Jewish family, had made the New York Times its own. Meyer was a financier who served in high government posts from WWI through the New Deal under both Democratic and Republican administrations -- just the sort of background that one would expect in a publisher of a major American daily. During the 1930s, the children of ruling class families often veered to the left as a response to the social misery that stared them in the face and out of sympathy with the new radical movement that included many of the brightest members of their generation. Katherine Meyer was no exception to this rule. As a Vassar student, she took a bus to Albany with other students to protest a loyalty oath. In 1936, she wrote an article for a student newspaper complaining that Hollywood lacked the guts to make a "genuine Left wing" film. This was prompted by moves to censor a film based on Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, a cautionary tale about the rise of American fascism. As a board member of the American Student Union, she took part in peace demonstrations, struggles to abolish ROTC on campus, efforts to promote desegregation, and fundraising for the Spanish Republic. full: http://www.swans.com/library/art11/lproy31.html _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
