You can’t throw a stone today without hitting excerpts from or analyses of or hot takes about a new book about the Trump administration by journalist Michael Wolff. “Fire and Fury” hasn’t even come out yet, and it’s already led to a fiery statement of fury from the president.
However, some reporters have already questioned the book’s content, from President Donald Trump’s inability to place former House speaker John Boehner to a 500-word passage of dialogue that Wolff may have “recreated.”
In fact, this 2004 profile on Wolff in the New Republic notes that “the scenes in his columns aren’t recreated so much as created–springing from Wolff’s imagination rather than from actual knowledge of events. Even Wolff acknowledges that conventional reporting isn’t his bag.”
Writing about a writer is probably one of the most masturbatory things you could do without lotion and a sock, but Michelle Cottle did so in the New Republic with relish, painting Wolff as an arrogant, unlikable snob and a gossip.
Cottle also coyly made Wolff into a journalism rebel of sorts. He is the kind of bad boy who doesn’t follow news embargoes, for instance. But striking a more unethical chord, he had a reputation more than 10 years ago for putting off-the-record conversations on the record, and he got his own son to spy on someone he was writing about during a play date. For some reason, Wolff also used his work to push what amounted to a conspiracy theory that the media had supported the Iraq War with hopes that their validation would lead the FCC to reduce regulations.
In the Washington Post, Aaron Blake pointed out a series of weaknesses with the book that put some of its claims in doubt. He went on to cite a passage in which Wolff describes his approach when accounts from within the White House conflicted with each other.
“Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them,” Wolff wrote. “In other instances I have, through a consistency in accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true.”
This presents problems, because journalists aren’t supposed to pick and choose when it comes to the truth. Furthermore, as Blake writes, “In an environment in which the press is widely distrusted by a large swath of the American people — and overwhelmingly by Trump’s base — the onus is even more on accounts of his presidency to try to filter out the tabloid stuff.”
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.