An Excellent Dissection of Bob WOODWARD (long)

[UTUSN]

Gentle Reader, take pity on this threadkill-forsaken thread: Your humble poster exerted a considerable amount of time and effort in:

* Tracking down the correct link, since the ROMENESKO website now only links back to itself instead of to the original links.
* Selecting the very most ENTICING excepts.
* Replacing EVERY single apostrophe and quotation mark to avoid type-garble.
* Highlighting painstakingly with the laborious formula.

May this effort serve to expiate the poster's other, ERRATIC, late night misdeeds. But otherwise, a pox on the thread's sinking like a stone!

*******QUOTE*******

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/

Grokking Woodward

.... ...The best thing I read about Woodward not us what he knew was Nora Ephorn's post at Huffington's place, What About Bob? "It's hard to sit by and watch the man be unjustly attacked by people who don't understand the most fundamental truths about him," she wrote. The fundamental things that to her apply:

* Woodward doesn't lie or make things up.

* True, he can't see the forest for the trees ("That's why people love to talk to him; he almost never puts the pieces together in a way that hurts his sources.")

* His professional life is not like anyone else's professional life (Tina Brown says it's the weirdness of being a "human brand.")

* If you don't talk to Bob you'll regret it. (That’s power.)

* He's so far inside he could easily miss the story, just as the beat reporters covering the Nixon White House missed the story of Watergate, giving the younger Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein their chance. ....

The best thing ever written about Woodward is nine years old, but its fundamentals still apply. It is Joan Didion's portrait, "The Deferential Spirit," published in September, 1996 by The New York Review of Books (subscription required.) It’s a character study disguised as a book review, and concentrated on Ephorn's "Truth #2: Bob has always had trouble seeing the forest for the trees."

Didion's piece is especially valuable because it was written during the Clinton years, and so it illuminates Woodward's method and "spirit" in their constancy from White House to White House. Among her observations is a single theme: Woodward can't think, or won't; and he knows better than to try. To think too deeply would bring him into conflict with his sources.

She refers to, "Mr. Woodward's rather eerie aversion to engaging the ramifications of what people say to him." She talks of his "refusal to consider meaning or outcome or consequence." More vividly: "this tabula rasa typing…" Or: "this disinclination of Mr. Woodward"s to exert cognitive energy on what he is told." ....

********UNQUOTE*******

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. You did a good job

and I appreciate it. I'm at work and can only sneak peeks at articles. But if Woodward is so dense, how in the world did he ever break Watergate? Was it all Bernstein?

[tularetom]

2. KICK!

I love to read about the dissection of Woodward. Now will someone tell me why he talks like a kid on the short school bus?