The Glade 4.0 :: View topic

Two years after [John] Belushi died, Bob Woodward published Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi...a scathing, lurid account of Belushi’s drug use and death....Twenty years later, in 2004, Judy Belushi hired me...to help her with a new biography of John, this one titled Belushi: A Biography. As her coauthor, I handled most of the legwork, including all of the interviews and most of the research....Over the course of a year, page by page, source by source, I re-reported and rewrote one of Bob Woodward’s books. As far as I know, it’s the only time that’s ever been done.

Wired is an infuriating piece of work....There’s never a smoking gun like an outright falsehood or a brazen ethical breach. And yet, in the final product, a lot of what Woodward writes comes off as being not quite right—some of it to the point where it can feel quite wrong. There’s no question that he frequently ferrets out information that other reporters don’t. But getting the scoop is only part of the equation. Once you have the facts, you have to present those facts in context and in proportion to other facts in order to accurately reflect reality. It’s here that Woodward fails.

Over and over during the course of my reporting I’d hear a story that conflicted with Woodward’s account in Wired. I’d say, “Aha! I’ve got him!” I’d run back to Woodward’s index, look up the offending passage, and realize that, well, no, he’d put down the mechanics of the story more or less as they’d happened. But he’d so mangled the meaning and the context that his version had nothing to do with what I concluded had actually transpired.

...Whenever people ask me about John Belushi and the subject of Wired comes up, I say it’s like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn’t very good at playing basketball.

...All of which helps explain the recent Sperling affair. What did Woodward do? He took a comment from a source, missed or misinterpreted the subtext of what was being said, and went on to characterize it in a way that bore no resemblance to reality. What’s damning about the Sperling emails—and Wired—is that we can go back to the source and see the meaning and subtext for ourselves; normally with Woodward’s confidential reporting, we can’t.

Spoiler:

Slate wrote:

A little more than a week ago, during an interview with Politico, Bob Woodward came forward to claim he’d been threatened in an email by a “senior White House official” for daring to reveal certain details about the negotiations over the budget sequester. The White House responded by releasing the email exchange Woodward was referring to, which turned out to be nothing more than a cordial exchange between the reporter and Obama’s economic adviser, Gene Sperling, who was clearly implying nothing more than that Woodward would “regret” taking a position that would soon be shown to be false.

A rather trivial scandal, but the incident did manage to raise important questions about Woodward’s behavior. Was he cynically trumping up the administration’s “threat,” or does he just not know how to read an email? Pretty soon, those questions tipped over into the standard Beltway discussion that transpires anytime Woodward does anything. How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve his legendary status?

I believe I can offer some interesting answers to those questions. Thirty-one years ago, on March 5, 1982, Saturday Night Live and Animal House star John Belushi died of a cocaine overdose at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles—which, bear with me a moment, has more to do with the current coverage of the budget sequester than you might initially think.

Two years after Belushi died, Bob Woodward published Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi. While the Watergate sleuth might seem an odd choice to tackle such a subject, the book came about because both he and Belushi grew up in the same small town of Wheaton, Ill. They had friends in common. Belushi, who despised Richard Nixon, was a big Woodward fan, and after he died, his widow, Judy Belushi, approached Woodward in his role as a reporter for the Washington Post. She had questions about the LAPD’s handling of Belushi’s death and asked Woodward to look into it. He took the access she offered and used it to write a scathing, lurid account of Belushi’s drug use and death.

When Wired came out, many of Belushi’s friends and family denounced it as biased and riddled with factual errors. “Exploitative, pulp trash,” in the words of Dan Aykroyd. Wired was so wrong, Belushi’s manager said, it made you think Nixon might be innocent.

Twenty years later, in 2004, Judy Belushi hired me, then an aspiring comedy writer, to help her with a new biography of John, this one titled Belushi: A Biography. As her coauthor, I handled most of the legwork, including all of the interviews and most of the research. What started as a fun project turned out to be a rather fascinating and unique experiment. Over the course of a year, page by page, source by source, I re-reported and rewrote one of Bob Woodward’s books. As far as I know, it’s the only time that’s ever been done.

Wired is an infuriating piece of work....There’s never a smoking gun like an outright falsehood or a brazen ethical breach. And yet, in the final product, a lot of what Woodward writes comes off as being not quite right—some of it to the point where it can feel quite wrong. There’s no question that he frequently ferrets out information that other reporters don’t. But getting the scoop is only part of the equation. Once you have the facts, you have to present those facts in context and in proportion to other facts in order to accurately reflect reality. It’s here that Woodward fails.

Over and over during the course of my reporting I’d hear a story that conflicted with Woodward’s account in Wired. I’d say, “Aha! I’ve got him!” I’d run back to Woodward’s index, look up the offending passage, and realize that, well, no, he’d put down the mechanics of the story more or less as they’d happened. But he’d so mangled the meaning and the context that his version had nothing to do with what I concluded had actually transpired. Take the filming of the famous cafeteria scene from Animal House, which Belushi totally improvised on set with no rehearsal. What you see in the film is the first and last time he ever performed that scene. Here’s the story as recounted by Belushi’s co-star James Widdoes:

"One of the things that was so spectacular to watch during the filming was the incredible connection that [Belushi] and Landis had. During the scene on the cafeteria line, Landis was talking to Belushi all the way through it, and Belushi was just taking it one step further. What started out as Landis saying, “Okay, now grab the sandwich,” became, in John’s hands, taking the sandwich, squeezing and bending it until it popped out of the cellophane, sucking it into his mouth, and then putting half the sandwich back. He would just go a little further each time."

Co-star Tim Matheson remembered that John “did the entire cafeteria line scene in one take. I just stood by the camera, mesmerized.” Other witnesses agree. Every person who recounted that incident to me used it as an example of Belushi’s virtuoso talent and his great relationship with his director. Landis could whisper suggestions to Belushi on the fly, and he’d spin it into comedy gold.

Now here it is as Woodward presents it:

"Landis quickly discovered that John could be lazy and undisciplined. They were rehearsing a cafeteria scene, a perfect vehicle to set up Bluto’s insatiable cravings. Landis wanted John to walk down the cafeteria line and load his tray until it was a physical burden. As the camera started, Landis stood to one side shouting: “Take that! Put that in your pocket! Pile that on the tray! Eat that now, right there!”
John followed each order, loading his pockets and tray, stuffing his mouth with a plate of Jello in one motion."

First off, Woodward wrongly calls the cafeteria scene a rehearsal, when half the point of the story is that Belushi pulled it off without ever rehearsing it once. Also, there’s actually nothing in the anecdote to indicate laziness or lack of discipline on Belushi’s part, yet Woodward chooses to establish the scene using those words. The implication is that Belushi was so unfocused and unprepared that he couldn’t make it through the scene without the director beside him telling him what to do, which is not what took place....

The wrongness in Woodward’s reporting is always ever so subtle. SNL writer Michael O'Donoghue—who died before I started the book but who videotaped an interview with Judy years before—told this story about how Belushi loved to mess with him:

"I am very anal-retentive, and John used to come over and just move things around, just move things a couple of inches, drop a paper on the floor, miss an ashtray a little bit until finally he could see me just tensing up. That was his idea of a fine joke. Another joke he used to do was to sit on me."

When put through the Woodward filter, this becomes:

"A compulsively neat person, O’Donoghue was always picking up and straightening his office. Frequently, John came in and destroyed the order in a minute, shifting papers, furniture or pencils or dropping cigarette ashes."

Again, Woodward’s account is not wrong. It’s just … wrong. In his version, Belushi is not a prankster but a jerk.

Then there’s an anecdote related to me by Blair Brown, Belushi’s co-star in Continental Divide. In that movie, Belushi was cast as Ernie Souchack, a straight-man role in a romantic comedy. On the day they were to film the movie’s love scene, Belushi, not known for his matinee good looks, was terribly nervous. Here’s what happened, in Brown’s words:

"If you’ve ever been a part of one of these movie love scenes, they’re just deeply peculiar. … You’re wearing this robe, and all you’ve got under that is this little bitty underwear that you’re going to still be wearing when you do the scene. I don’t think John had ever done a love scene before, and he was clearly nervous about doing it. He just lay there in bed trying to think up all the funny names for penis that he could: the Hose of Horror … Mr. Wiggly. … We were weeping with laughter it was so funny. It was just like watching a little kid stalling because he doesn’t want to eat his vegetables. “Oh, oh, wait—you know what else? Here’s another one …” After a while we finally had to say, “Okay, okay, John. Now you have to do the love scene.” He was just stalling and stalling and stalling because he was so nervous."

Here’s the scene as written in Wired:

"The script called for a love scene, in bed, in a hotel room. They were to be nude under the covers. John was very nervous preparing for the shooting and kept making jokes, trying to get them to remember all the known names for the male sex organ. They came up with many—“the hose of horror,” “Mr. Wiggly’s dick,” and “one-eyed snake in a turtleneck.” Brown didn’t mind the conversation, but she thought it was an inappropriate prelude to a love scene."

Twenty years later, when Brown told me about the love scene, she was still upset at how Woodward had portrayed it in Wired. “It was my first experience of getting tricked by a journalist,” she said. “Woodward appeared as if he really wanted to know what went on, and I actually had marvelous times with Belushi. But the thing that was depressing when I read the book was that he had taken the facts that I told him, and put an attitude to them that was not remotely right.”

Wired is like that throughout. Like a funhouse mirror, Woodward’s prose distorts what it purports to reflect. Moments of tearful drama are rendered as tersely as an accounting of Belushi’s car-service receipts. Friendly jokes are stripped of their humor and turned into boorish annoyances. And when Woodward fails to convey the subtleties of those little moments, he misses the bigger picture. Belushi’s nervousness about doing that love scene in Continental Divide was an important detail. When that movie came out, it tanked at the box office. After months of fighting to stay clean, Belushi fell off the wagon and started using heavily again. Six months later he was dead. Woodward missed the real meaning of what went on.

....

Whenever people ask me about John Belushi and the subject of Wired comes up, I say it’s like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn’t very good at playing basketball.

...Woodward has an unmatched skill for digging up information, but he doesn’t know what to do with that information once he finds it.
All of which helps explain the recent Sperling affair. What did Woodward do? He took a comment from a source, missed or misinterpreted the subtext of what was being said, and went on to characterize it in a way that bore no resemblance to reality. What’s damning about the Sperling emails—and Wired—is that we can go back to the source and see the meaning and subtext for ourselves; normally with Woodward’s confidential reporting, we can’t.

...

It’s also easy to discount Wired by saying that Woodward just doesn’t have a sense of humor and was out of his depth writing about a comedian. And that’s true as far as it goes. But the stories from Animal House and Continental Divide aren’t really about comedy so much as they’re about human beings interacting, which is a lot of what goes on at the White House, too. The simple truth of Wired is that Bob Woodward, deploying all of the talent and resources for which he is famous, produced something that is a failure as journalism. And when you imagine Woodward using the same approach to cover secret meetings about drone strikes and the budget sequester and other issues of vital national importance, well, you have to stop and shudder.

The WaPo Continues to Devour Its Own

I wonder what the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward thinks about this article in today’s Washington Post-owned Slate, which attempts to trash — key word being “attempt” — one of Woodwards’s few non-political* books, Wired, his look at the drug-fueled death of John Belushi, which had occurred in 1982.

Two years after Belushi died, as a favor to Belushi’s widow, and no doubt knowing it was a great story about a very public figure, Woodward produced a reporter’s look into the superstar comedian’s self-destruction. Woodward explored how a gifted, intuitive performer who had possibly the most intense charisma — it just poured into the camera lens, magically — of anyone who came out of the SNL/Lampoon/late night comedy circuit of the 1970s would implode so spectacularly after leaving SNL to concentrate on movies.

In order to cast aspersions on Woodward’s anti-Obama reporting — and isn’t this rich, a “liberal” journalist angry at another liberal journalist because he’s (at least as of now) anti-establishment — Slate gives space for author Tanner Colby, who has written his own biography of Belushi, along with a book focusing on his later SNL doppelganger Chris Farley, to pick apart Woodward’s reporting on some of the quotidian details of Belushi shooting his scenes.

Such as Animal House:

First off, Woodward wrongly calls the cafeteria scene a rehearsal, when half the point of the story is that Belushi pulled it off without ever rehearsing it once. Also, there’s actually nothing in the anecdote to indicate laziness or lack of discipline on Belushi’s part, yet Woodward chooses to establish the scene using those words. The implication is that Belushi was so unfocused and unprepared that he couldn’t make it through the scene without the director beside him telling him what to do, which is not what took place. When I interviewed him, Landis disputed that he ever referred to Belushi as lazy or undisciplined. “The greatest crime of that book,” Landis says of Wired, “is that if you read it and you’d just assume that John was a pig and an *******, and he was anything but. He could be abrupt and unpleasant, but most of the time he was totally charming and people adored him.”

The wrongness in Woodward’s reporting is always ever so subtle. SNL writer Michael O’Donoghue—who died before I started the book but who videotaped an interview with Judy years before—told this story about how Belushi loved to mess with him:

I am very anal-retentive, and John used to come over and just move things around, just move things a couple of inches, drop a paper on the floor, miss an ashtray a little bit until finally he could see me just tensing up. That was his idea of a fine joke. Another joke he used to do was to sit on me.

When put through the Woodward filter, this becomes:

A compulsively neat person, O’Donoghue was always picking up and straightening his office. Frequently, John came in and destroyed the order in a minute, shifting papers, furniture or pencils or dropping cigarette ashes.

Again, Woodward’s account is not wrong. It’s just … wrong.

So Woodward isn’t wrong, but he’s wrong. He’s accurate but fake, apparently. Not to be confused with “fake but accurate,” which eight and a half years ago was a perfectly acceptable journalistic defense by the New York Times. Or as the Washington Post wrote a year ago in their defense of Mike Daisey, after the monologist had been caught by NPR lying about Apple’s factories in China, “The main point he drives home is that he felt it was necessary to embellish his story in order to retain the ‘truth’ of the message of his show. He lied to tell the truth, basically.”

But apparently Woodward telling the truth is lie. I think I need new scorecards.

Fortunately, they’re available in the lobby; the Wikipedia page for Woodward’s book has already been updated with passages such as these:

In 2013 Tanner Colby, who had coauthored the 2005 Belushi: A Biography with Judy, wrote about how the book exposes Woodward’s strengths and weaknesses as a journalist. While in the process of researching the anecdotes related in the book, he found that while many of them were true, Woodward missed, or didn’t try to find, their context.

The late Michael Crichton coined a phrase he called “the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect,” named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist:

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

Which, ultimately, is what Colby’s article boils down to. In other words, if Woodward didn’t produce a satisfactory write-up of the day they shot Belushi’s Animal House cafeteria scene, or didn’t provide an appropriately sympathetic portrait of Belushi as his life spiraled out of control, we shouldn’t trust his reporting on anything else. Or at least in articles that says bad things about The Anointed One. Gotcha.

(And again, if the Washington Post wants to use its bandwidth to tell us that reporters from the Post botch their reporting, carry on. I’m sure Newsbusters and the Media Research Center will appreciate the paper making their jobs that much easier.)

Near the beginning of his article, Colby writes:

When Wired came out, many of Belushi’s friends and family denounced it as biased and riddled with factual errors. “Exploitative, pulp trash,” in the words of Dan Aykroyd. Wired was so wrong, Belushi’s manager said, it made you think Nixon might be innocent. Woodward insisted the book was balanced and accurate. “I reported this story thoroughly,” he told Rolling Stone. Of the book’s critics, he said, “I think they wish I had created a portrait of someone who was larger than life, larger than he was, and that, somehow, this portrait would all come out different. But that’s a fantasy, not journalism.” Woodward being Woodward, he was given the benefit of the doubt. Belushi’s reputation never recovered.

Gee, I’ll bet many of Nixon’s associates felt the same way after their reputations were torn apart by The Final Days and especially after All the President’s Men and its movie version, starring as Woodward none other than Robert Redford at the peak of his matinee idol career. (And to repeat my request from the PJ Lifestyle blog, for a tiny amount of counter-balance, can we please finally see Victor Lasky’s It Didn’t Start With Watergate in Kindle form?) But if the Washington Post and its spin-off publications want to continue to destroy their single best-known journalist’s reputation, as another comedian who also did his own tour of duty on SNL famously said…

No wonder, John Podhoretz looked at Colby’s article and tweeted:

This piece is an absurd embarrassment, and I say that as someone who is not a Woodward fan. slate.com/articles/arts/…

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) March 12, 2013

Actually, Podhoretz’s whole Twitter stream on the above article, which is where I originally found it, is also worth a read.

* Since the left views the personal as being the same as the political (see also, Colby’s hit piece above), from their perspective, what has Woodward written that isn’t a political tome?

Author:	RangerDave [ Tue Mar 12, 2013 3:32 pm ]
Post subject:	Woodward redux
Starting a new thread for this post since the last thread meandered into a discussion of the sequester. Anyway, I found this to be a really interesting article on Woodward's reporting style and how he has a tendency to get all the details of a story right and yet completely misinterpret their meaning. Nutshell version: Quote: Two years after [John] Belushi died, Bob Woodward published Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi...a scathing, lurid account of Belushi’s drug use and death....Twenty years later, in 2004, Judy Belushi hired me...to help her with a new biography of John, this one titled Belushi: A Biography. As her coauthor, I handled most of the legwork, including all of the interviews and most of the research....Over the course of a year, page by page, source by source, I re-reported and rewrote one of Bob Woodward’s books. As far as I know, it’s the only time that’s ever been done. Wired is an infuriating piece of work....There’s never a smoking gun like an outright falsehood or a brazen ethical breach. And yet, in the final product, a lot of what Woodward writes comes off as being not quite right—some of it to the point where it can feel quite wrong. There’s no question that he frequently ferrets out information that other reporters don’t. But getting the scoop is only part of the equation. Once you have the facts, you have to present those facts in context and in proportion to other facts in order to accurately reflect reality. It’s here that Woodward fails. Over and over during the course of my reporting I’d hear a story that conflicted with Woodward’s account in Wired. I’d say, “Aha! I’ve got him!” I’d run back to Woodward’s index, look up the offending passage, and realize that, well, no, he’d put down the mechanics of the story more or less as they’d happened. But he’d so mangled the meaning and the context that his version had nothing to do with what I concluded had actually transpired. ...Whenever people ask me about John Belushi and the subject of Wired comes up, I say it’s like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn’t very good at playing basketball. ...All of which helps explain the recent Sperling affair. What did Woodward do? He took a comment from a source, missed or misinterpreted the subtext of what was being said, and went on to characterize it in a way that bore no resemblance to reality. What’s damning about the Sperling emails—and Wired—is that we can go back to the source and see the meaning and subtext for ourselves; normally with Woodward’s confidential reporting, we can’t. Much longer excerpt, with examples, spoilered below for those who are interested but don't want to click through to the article: Spoiler: Slate wrote: A little more than a week ago, during an interview with Politico, Bob Woodward came forward to claim he’d been threatened in an email by a “senior White House official” for daring to reveal certain details about the negotiations over the budget sequester. The White House responded by releasing the email exchange Woodward was referring to, which turned out to be nothing more than a cordial exchange between the reporter and Obama’s economic adviser, Gene Sperling, who was clearly implying nothing more than that Woodward would “regret” taking a position that would soon be shown to be false. A rather trivial scandal, but the incident did manage to raise important questions about Woodward’s behavior. Was he cynically trumping up the administration’s “threat,” or does he just not know how to read an email? Pretty soon, those questions tipped over into the standard Beltway discussion that transpires anytime Woodward does anything. How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve his legendary status? I believe I can offer some interesting answers to those questions. Thirty-one years ago, on March 5, 1982, Saturday Night Live and Animal House star John Belushi died of a cocaine overdose at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles—which, bear with me a moment, has more to do with the current coverage of the budget sequester than you might initially think. Two years after Belushi died, Bob Woodward published Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi. While the Watergate sleuth might seem an odd choice to tackle such a subject, the book came about because both he and Belushi grew up in the same small town of Wheaton, Ill. They had friends in common. Belushi, who despised Richard Nixon, was a big Woodward fan, and after he died, his widow, Judy Belushi, approached Woodward in his role as a reporter for the Washington Post. She had questions about the LAPD’s handling of Belushi’s death and asked Woodward to look into it. He took the access she offered and used it to write a scathing, lurid account of Belushi’s drug use and death. When Wired came out, many of Belushi’s friends and family denounced it as biased and riddled with factual errors. “Exploitative, pulp trash,” in the words of Dan Aykroyd. Wired was so wrong, Belushi’s manager said, it made you think Nixon might be innocent. Twenty years later, in 2004, Judy Belushi hired me, then an aspiring comedy writer, to help her with a new biography of John, this one titled Belushi: A Biography. As her coauthor, I handled most of the legwork, including all of the interviews and most of the research. What started as a fun project turned out to be a rather fascinating and unique experiment. Over the course of a year, page by page, source by source, I re-reported and rewrote one of Bob Woodward’s books. As far as I know, it’s the only time that’s ever been done. Wired is an infuriating piece of work....There’s never a smoking gun like an outright falsehood or a brazen ethical breach. And yet, in the final product, a lot of what Woodward writes comes off as being not quite right—some of it to the point where it can feel quite wrong. There’s no question that he frequently ferrets out information that other reporters don’t. But getting the scoop is only part of the equation. Once you have the facts, you have to present those facts in context and in proportion to other facts in order to accurately reflect reality. It’s here that Woodward fails. Over and over during the course of my reporting I’d hear a story that conflicted with Woodward’s account in Wired. I’d say, “Aha! I’ve got him!” I’d run back to Woodward’s index, look up the offending passage, and realize that, well, no, he’d put down the mechanics of the story more or less as they’d happened. But he’d so mangled the meaning and the context that his version had nothing to do with what I concluded had actually transpired. Take the filming of the famous cafeteria scene from Animal House, which Belushi totally improvised on set with no rehearsal. What you see in the film is the first and last time he ever performed that scene. Here’s the story as recounted by Belushi’s co-star James Widdoes: "One of the things that was so spectacular to watch during the filming was the incredible connection that [Belushi] and Landis had. During the scene on the cafeteria line, Landis was talking to Belushi all the way through it, and Belushi was just taking it one step further. What started out as Landis saying, “Okay, now grab the sandwich,” became, in John’s hands, taking the sandwich, squeezing and bending it until it popped out of the cellophane, sucking it into his mouth, and then putting half the sandwich back. He would just go a little further each time." Co-star Tim Matheson remembered that John “did the entire cafeteria line scene in one take. I just stood by the camera, mesmerized.” Other witnesses agree. Every person who recounted that incident to me used it as an example of Belushi’s virtuoso talent and his great relationship with his director. Landis could whisper suggestions to Belushi on the fly, and he’d spin it into comedy gold. Now here it is as Woodward presents it: "Landis quickly discovered that John could be lazy and undisciplined. They were rehearsing a cafeteria scene, a perfect vehicle to set up Bluto’s insatiable cravings. Landis wanted John to walk down the cafeteria line and load his tray until it was a physical burden. As the camera started, Landis stood to one side shouting: “Take that! Put that in your pocket! Pile that on the tray! Eat that now, right there!” John followed each order, loading his pockets and tray, stuffing his mouth with a plate of Jello in one motion." First off, Woodward wrongly calls the cafeteria scene a rehearsal, when half the point of the story is that Belushi pulled it off without ever rehearsing it once. Also, there’s actually nothing in the anecdote to indicate laziness or lack of discipline on Belushi’s part, yet Woodward chooses to establish the scene using those words. The implication is that Belushi was so unfocused and unprepared that he couldn’t make it through the scene without the director beside him telling him what to do, which is not what took place.... The wrongness in Woodward’s reporting is always ever so subtle. SNL writer Michael O'Donoghue—who died before I started the book but who videotaped an interview with Judy years before—told this story about how Belushi loved to mess with him: "I am very anal-retentive, and John used to come over and just move things around, just move things a couple of inches, drop a paper on the floor, miss an ashtray a little bit until finally he could see me just tensing up. That was his idea of a fine joke. Another joke he used to do was to sit on me." When put through the Woodward filter, this becomes: "A compulsively neat person, O’Donoghue was always picking up and straightening his office. Frequently, John came in and destroyed the order in a minute, shifting papers, furniture or pencils or dropping cigarette ashes." Again, Woodward’s account is not wrong. It’s just … wrong. In his version, Belushi is not a prankster but a jerk. Then there’s an anecdote related to me by Blair Brown, Belushi’s co-star in Continental Divide. In that movie, Belushi was cast as Ernie Souchack, a straight-man role in a romantic comedy. On the day they were to film the movie’s love scene, Belushi, not known for his matinee good looks, was terribly nervous. Here’s what happened, in Brown’s words: "If you’ve ever been a part of one of these movie love scenes, they’re just deeply peculiar. … You’re wearing this robe, and all you’ve got under that is this little bitty underwear that you’re going to still be wearing when you do the scene. I don’t think John had ever done a love scene before, and he was clearly nervous about doing it. He just lay there in bed trying to think up all the funny names for penis that he could: the Hose of Horror … Mr. Wiggly. … We were weeping with laughter it was so funny. It was just like watching a little kid stalling because he doesn’t want to eat his vegetables. “Oh, oh, wait—you know what else? Here’s another one …” After a while we finally had to say, “Okay, okay, John. Now you have to do the love scene.” He was just stalling and stalling and stalling because he was so nervous." Here’s the scene as written in Wired: "The script called for a love scene, in bed, in a hotel room. They were to be nude under the covers. John was very nervous preparing for the shooting and kept making jokes, trying to get them to remember all the known names for the male sex organ. They came up with many—“the hose of horror,” “Mr. Wiggly’s dick,” and “one-eyed snake in a turtleneck.” Brown didn’t mind the conversation, but she thought it was an inappropriate prelude to a love scene." Twenty years later, when Brown told me about the love scene, she was still upset at how Woodward had portrayed it in Wired. “It was my first experience of getting tricked by a journalist,” she said. “Woodward appeared as if he really wanted to know what went on, and I actually had marvelous times with Belushi. But the thing that was depressing when I read the book was that he had taken the facts that I told him, and put an attitude to them that was not remotely right.” Wired is like that throughout. Like a funhouse mirror, Woodward’s prose distorts what it purports to reflect. Moments of tearful drama are rendered as tersely as an accounting of Belushi’s car-service receipts. Friendly jokes are stripped of their humor and turned into boorish annoyances. And when Woodward fails to convey the subtleties of those little moments, he misses the bigger picture. Belushi’s nervousness about doing that love scene in Continental Divide was an important detail. When that movie came out, it tanked at the box office. After months of fighting to stay clean, Belushi fell off the wagon and started using heavily again. Six months later he was dead. Woodward missed the real meaning of what went on. .... Whenever people ask me about John Belushi and the subject of Wired comes up, I say it’s like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn’t very good at playing basketball. ...Woodward has an unmatched skill for digging up information, but he doesn’t know what to do with that information once he finds it. All of which helps explain the recent Sperling affair. What did Woodward do? He took a comment from a source, missed or misinterpreted the subtext of what was being said, and went on to characterize it in a way that bore no resemblance to reality. What’s damning about the Sperling emails—and Wired—is that we can go back to the source and see the meaning and subtext for ourselves; normally with Woodward’s confidential reporting, we can’t. ... It’s also easy to discount Wired by saying that Woodward just doesn’t have a sense of humor and was out of his depth writing about a comedian. And that’s true as far as it goes. But the stories from Animal House and Continental Divide aren’t really about comedy so much as they’re about human beings interacting, which is a lot of what goes on at the White House, too. The simple truth of Wired is that Bob Woodward, deploying all of the talent and resources for which he is famous, produced something that is a failure as journalism. And when you imagine Woodward using the same approach to cover secret meetings about drone strikes and the budget sequester and other issues of vital national importance, well, you have to stop and shudder.

Author:	Diamondeye [ Tue Mar 12, 2013 3:36 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Woodward redux
So.. because Belushi's wife hired this dude and he claims Wired is a hit job, that somehow implicates Woodward in anything else he wrote? Why should we take this guy's word for it? In like the second paragraph he basically says "Well, I can't actually point out anything he did wrong, but.. it's still wrong! trust me!".

Author:	RangerDave [ Tue Mar 12, 2013 3:47 pm ]
Post subject:
Actually, he doesn't claim Wired was a hit job; just that it offers a good example of Woodward getting the facts right but the overall picture wrong, which is a common criticism of his work. And he doesn't say "I can't point out anything he did wrong, but...it's still wrong! Trust me!" On the contrary, he provides specific examples of where Woodward got things wrong. Sure, he was hired to research and help write the book by Belushi's widow (8 years ago), so maybe he was biased, but the examples and quotes from primary sources seem fairly persuasive to me. Anyway, read the rest of it and judge for yourself whether Woodward's characterization of events match what the sources say they told him.

Author:	Arathain Kelvar [ Tue Mar 12, 2013 4:31 pm ]
Post subject:
If you can't discredit the facts, discredit the source. You'll make a good lawyer.

Author:	Diamondeye [ Tue Mar 12, 2013 4:47 pm ]
Post subject:
I'm not particularly interested in reading Woodward's book, but the mere fact that this guy was hired by Belushi's wife, plus the relatively trivial importance of John Belushi in the general scheme of things makes this entire comparison more than a little bit silly to me. And yes, he does say basically "trust me". It 'feels' wrong to him. Ok, well, sorry to hear that, jack.

The Glade 4.0 https://gladerebooted.net/

Woodward redux https://gladerebooted.net/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=9742	Page 1 of 2

Author:	RangerDave [ Tue Mar 12, 2013 5:14 pm ]
Post subject:	Re:
Diamondeye wrote: And yes, he does say basically "trust me". It 'feels' wrong to him. Ok, well, sorry to hear that, jack. No, he doesn't. He provides direct and specific comparisons between the way Woodward describes events and the way the actual participants in those events describe them, revealing that Woodward's characterization significantly misses the mark.

Author:	RangerDave [ Tue Mar 12, 2013 5:15 pm ]
Post subject:	Re:
Arathain Kelvar wrote: If you can't discredit the facts, discredit the source. You'll make a good lawyer. Did you read the article?

Author:	Rorinthas [ Tue Mar 12, 2013 5:17 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Woodward redux
Its still not okay to threaten Woodward if he does shoddy work, and The WH has already admitted that sequestration was their idea. So how does him being possibly wrong about Belushi effect today's debate?

Author:	RangerDave [ Tue Mar 12, 2013 5:28 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Woodward redux
Rorinthas wrote: So how does him being possibly wrong about Belushi effect today's debate? It's relevant because the debate was about whether the Admin official's comment to Woodward was actually threatening. Woodward claimed it was, but when the actual email was revealed, it was patently clear to most people that it wasn't a threat at all. The Belushi book is a similar example of Woodward misinterpreting/misrepresenting things - he gets the bare facts correct, but totally misses the actual meaning of those facts.

Author:	Diamondeye [ Tue Mar 12, 2013 5:50 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Re:
RangerDave wrote: Diamondeye wrote: And yes, he does say basically "trust me". It 'feels' wrong to him. Ok, well, sorry to hear that, jack. No, he doesn't. He provides direct and specific comparisons between the way Woodward describes events and the way the actual participants in those events describe them, revealing that Woodward's characterization significantly misses the mark. Because people involved in events always describe them in a totally impartial and objective manner.

Author:	Diamondeye [ Tue Mar 12, 2013 5:53 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Woodward redux
RangerDave wrote: Rorinthas wrote: So how does him being possibly wrong about Belushi effect today's debate? It's relevant because the debate was about whether the Admin official's comment to Woodward was actually threatening. Woodward claimed it was, but when the actual email was revealed, it was patently clear to most people that it wasn't a threat at all. The Belushi book is a similar example of Woodward misinterpreting/misrepresenting things - he gets the bare facts correct, but totally misses the actual meaning of those facts. And in that case Woodward was personally involved. Therefore, it is not unreasonable for him to be biased in that case. This other guy, on the other hand, has been hired by Belushi's wife, so not only is he not objective about Woodward, but he's being not objective about Woodward's behavior in a situation where Woodward is personally involved. Worse, he's comparing that to a situation where Woodward isn't involved and claiming he acts the same way based on how it "feels wrong" even though all the facts are right.

Author:	DFK! [ Tue Mar 12, 2013 6:29 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Woodward redux
RangerDave wrote: Rorinthas wrote: So how does him being possibly wrong about Belushi effect today's debate? It's relevant because the debate was about whether the Admin official's comment to Woodward was actually threatening. Woodward claimed it was, but when the actual email was revealed, it was patently clear to most people that it wasn't a threat at all. The Belushi book is a similar example of Woodward misinterpreting/misrepresenting things - he gets the bare facts correct, but totally misses the actual meaning of those facts. The underlined statement is false, insofar as context and tone involved in the written word. If I write to you, "RD, as your friend, I think you'll regret failing to check your car for a bomb tomorrow," that's not a "threat" either. It's more overt than what this guy did, but I also haven't been yelling at you for 30 minutes.

Author:	Aizle [ Tue Mar 12, 2013 9:24 pm ]
Post subject:
There are many times on this board where it's painfully obvious that we don't all speak the same language. I mean, they are the same words, but for all that we jointly understand their meaning some of us might as well be speaking Swahili.

Author:	Müs [ Tue Mar 12, 2013 9:25 pm ]
Post subject:
Durka durka. Mohammed jihad. Hake sherpa sherpa, bakala.

Author:	Khross [ Wed Mar 13, 2013 6:24 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Woodward redux
As I mentioned in another thread ... Aizle and RangerDave have both given up on facts and moved totally into the realm of political confirmation bias when it comes to posting about Obama. They are constitutionally incapable of being objective regarding our current president, just as they were constitutionally incapable of being objective regarding our previous president. So, I'll just say this one more time. Barack Obama is part of our government. Our government is a mono-culture organization. The Two Party System is political theatre; the fractious populism dividing the United States is an intentional construct put in place by our ruling class; our ruling class is entrenched and dynastic, look for Obama's successor to run against Jeb. Amusingly, the only thing Obama has that W didn't is an ego the size of Alaska and a wife with an *** almost as big.

Author:	RangerDave [ Thu Mar 14, 2013 6:19 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Re:
Arathain Kelvar wrote: So, as I said, he can't discredit the statements, so he's attempting to discredit the source. Just so I understand - you think questioning a source's judgment based on the track record of their prior judgments is "attempting to discredit the source" and is thus not a persuasive point? Yes? So let's say that you, Taly and I are all discussing hockey. I cite a bunch of stats and make a prediction about who will win the Stanley Cup this year. Taly disagrees with my prediction, and tries to convince you that I'm wrong. Obviously, my prediction is derived from three things - the raw stats themselves, my analysis of those stats, and my judgment as to what conclusion should then be drawn. Taly doesn't object to the stats that I cited, but she does think my analysis and judgment are flawed. In making her argument to you, therefore, she concedes the accuracy of the stats, offers her contrary analysis of those stats, and points out that I have a long history of poor judgment and crappy conclusions (i.e., I can't pick a winner to save my life). In your view, is that third prong of her argument "attacking the source"? Is it in any way illuminating? Should it have any bearing on your evaluation of my prediction? Consider another scenario, this time involving dishonesty. If some salesman has cheated you multiple times in the past, and your friend argues against his latest offer by citing those prior examples of dishonesty, is that an unpersuasive attack on the source? Should he restrict his argument to a clean-slate evaluation of the current offer? Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice...shame on you again because I shouldn't hold your prior dishonesty against you?

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Author:	Nitefox [ Tue Mar 12, 2013 9:40 pm ]
Post subject:
Heh, I can refute the article's author with crap of my own. The author, Tanner Colby, wrote a book titled Some Of My Best Friends Are Black. Apparently, this Colby fella looked around...noticed he didn't have any black friends(the horror!!) so went about trying to figure out why. He's your typical lefty, white guilt lib. He feels the need to the defend The One because he is black(well at least half of him is) so why not try to come up with a flimsy reason to try and discredit a legendary journalist who has crapped away more info in his life than Mr. White Guilt has learned. No wonder RD likes him.

Author:	Taskiss [ Wed Mar 13, 2013 5:59 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Woodward redux
I read the article. Sour grapes. Woodward wasn't amused by juvenile behavior and it showed through. That's why it's factual...but "wrong", because he doesn't write as if he sees Belushi through rose colored glasses. Pretty much the way Woodward reported the events around the threat he received from the executive administration. Woodward just refuses to see the events rose colored. That's pretty much what I'd expect from a good reporter, as opposed to what passes for reporters these days. Unbiased reporting isn't pretty, nor should it be.

Author:	Elmarnieh [ Wed Mar 13, 2013 7:15 am ]
Post subject:
While I agree that it is a monoculture I disagree that the letter was in fact threatening to any person reasonably capable of inferring meaning from writing. The tone of the entire letter was one of personal and professional care not one of threats. Barring any record of previous phone conversations and their tone - this letter is simply one of genuine concern and entirely absent threats.

Author:	Arathain Kelvar [ Wed Mar 13, 2013 12:35 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Re:
RangerDave wrote: Arathain Kelvar wrote: If you can't discredit the facts, discredit the source. You'll make a good lawyer. Did you read the article? I read your nutshell version. It was an example of something unrelated, then extrapolated to the current issue. There's nothing there that sheds light on the current issue, only on the credibility of Woodward.

Author:	Taskiss [ Wed Mar 13, 2013 12:48 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Woodward redux
I think barring the phone conversation from consideration would fly in the face of reason, since a description of the phone conversation was included in the email to Woodward by White House aide Gene Spirling and an apology was offered as a result of that phone conversation. Clearly the aid was attempting some form of damage control, even if it were just of a personal nature. The "regret" the aid communicated would be felt as a consequence of Woodward's claim, coming after a conversation worthy of an apology, can either be a veiled threat or sincere. Woodward clearly felt it to be a veiled threat, given his conversation later with Wolf Blitzer and Sean Hannity. Then, the jump the White House Press Secretary Jay Carney made in response - to impugn his character by calling him "willfully wrong" - seems to me to support the theory that there was a threat. Administration personnel yelling at and warning reporters that they will regret their reports... What exactly do people think is defensible about that? Sure, nobody was drone-bombed...yet.

Author:	Nitefox [ Thu Mar 14, 2013 9:21 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Woodward redux
http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2013/03/1 ... n/?print=1 Quote: The WaPo Continues to Devour Its Own I wonder what the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward thinks about this article in today’s Washington Post-owned Slate, which attempts to trash — key word being “attempt” — one of Woodwards’s few non-political* books, Wired, his look at the drug-fueled death of John Belushi, which had occurred in 1982. Two years after Belushi died, as a favor to Belushi’s widow, and no doubt knowing it was a great story about a very public figure, Woodward produced a reporter’s look into the superstar comedian’s self-destruction. Woodward explored how a gifted, intuitive performer who had possibly the most intense charisma — it just poured into the camera lens, magically — of anyone who came out of the SNL/Lampoon/late night comedy circuit of the 1970s would implode so spectacularly after leaving SNL to concentrate on movies. In order to cast aspersions on Woodward’s anti-Obama reporting — and isn’t this rich, a “liberal” journalist angry at another liberal journalist because he’s (at least as of now) anti-establishment — Slate gives space for author Tanner Colby, who has written his own biography of Belushi, along with a book focusing on his later SNL doppelganger Chris Farley, to pick apart Woodward’s reporting on some of the quotidian details of Belushi shooting his scenes. Such as Animal House: First off, Woodward wrongly calls the cafeteria scene a rehearsal, when half the point of the story is that Belushi pulled it off without ever rehearsing it once. Also, there’s actually nothing in the anecdote to indicate laziness or lack of discipline on Belushi’s part, yet Woodward chooses to establish the scene using those words. The implication is that Belushi was so unfocused and unprepared that he couldn’t make it through the scene without the director beside him telling him what to do, which is not what took place. When I interviewed him, Landis disputed that he ever referred to Belushi as lazy or undisciplined. “The greatest crime of that book,” Landis says of Wired, “is that if you read it and you’d just assume that John was a pig and an ******, and he was anything but. He could be abrupt and unpleasant, but most of the time he was totally charming and people adored him.” The wrongness in Woodward’s reporting is always ever so subtle. SNL writer Michael O’Donoghue—who died before I started the book but who videotaped an interview with Judy years before—told this story about how Belushi loved to mess with him: I am very anal-retentive, and John used to come over and just move things around, just move things a couple of inches, drop a paper on the floor, miss an ashtray a little bit until finally he could see me just tensing up. That was his idea of a fine joke. Another joke he used to do was to sit on me. When put through the Woodward filter, this becomes: A compulsively neat person, O’Donoghue was always picking up and straightening his office. Frequently, John came in and destroyed the order in a minute, shifting papers, furniture or pencils or dropping cigarette ashes. Again, Woodward’s account is not wrong. It’s just … wrong. So Woodward isn’t wrong, but he’s wrong. He’s accurate but fake, apparently. Not to be confused with “fake but accurate,” which eight and a half years ago was a perfectly acceptable journalistic defense by the New York Times. Or as the Washington Post wrote a year ago in their defense of Mike Daisey, after the monologist had been caught by NPR lying about Apple’s factories in China, “The main point he drives home is that he felt it was necessary to embellish his story in order to retain the ‘truth’ of the message of his show. He lied to tell the truth, basically.” But apparently Woodward telling the truth is lie. I think I need new scorecards. Fortunately, they’re available in the lobby; the Wikipedia page for Woodward’s book has already been updated with passages such as these: In 2013 Tanner Colby, who had coauthored the 2005 Belushi: A Biography with Judy, wrote about how the book exposes Woodward’s strengths and weaknesses as a journalist. While in the process of researching the anecdotes related in the book, he found that while many of them were true, Woodward missed, or didn’t try to find, their context. The late Michael Crichton coined a phrase he called “the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect,” named after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist: Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.) Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know. Which, ultimately, is what Colby’s article boils down to. In other words, if Woodward didn’t produce a satisfactory write-up of the day they shot Belushi’s Animal House cafeteria scene, or didn’t provide an appropriately sympathetic portrait of Belushi as his life spiraled out of control, we shouldn’t trust his reporting on anything else. Or at least in articles that says bad things about The Anointed One. Gotcha. (And again, if the Washington Post wants to use its bandwidth to tell us that reporters from the Post botch their reporting, carry on. I’m sure Newsbusters and the Media Research Center will appreciate the paper making their jobs that much easier.) Near the beginning of his article, Colby writes: When Wired came out, many of Belushi’s friends and family denounced it as biased and riddled with factual errors. “Exploitative, pulp trash,” in the words of Dan Aykroyd. Wired was so wrong, Belushi’s manager said, it made you think Nixon might be innocent. Woodward insisted the book was balanced and accurate. “I reported this story thoroughly,” he told Rolling Stone. Of the book’s critics, he said, “I think they wish I had created a portrait of someone who was larger than life, larger than he was, and that, somehow, this portrait would all come out different. But that’s a fantasy, not journalism.” Woodward being Woodward, he was given the benefit of the doubt. Belushi’s reputation never recovered. Gee, I’ll bet many of Nixon’s associates felt the same way after their reputations were torn apart by The Final Days and especially after All the President’s Men and its movie version, starring as Woodward none other than Robert Redford at the peak of his matinee idol career. (And to repeat my request from the PJ Lifestyle blog, for a tiny amount of counter-balance, can we please finally see Victor Lasky’s It Didn’t Start With Watergate in Kindle form?) But if the Washington Post and its spin-off publications want to continue to destroy their single best-known journalist’s reputation, as another comedian who also did his own tour of duty on SNL famously said… No wonder, John Podhoretz looked at Colby’s article and tweeted: This piece is an absurd embarrassment, and I say that as someone who is not a Woodward fan. slate.com/articles/arts/… — John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) March 12, 2013 Actually, Podhoretz’s whole Twitter stream on the above article, which is where I originally found it, is also worth a read. Since the left views the personal as being the same as the political (see also, Colby’s hit piece above), from their perspective, what has Woodward written that isn’t a political tome?

Author:	RangerDave [ Thu Mar 14, 2013 10:19 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Re:
Arathain Kelvar wrote: RangerDave wrote: Arathain Kelvar wrote: If you can't discredit the facts, discredit the source. You'll make a good lawyer. Did you read the article? I read your nutshell version. It was an example of something unrelated, then extrapolated to the current issue. There's nothing there that sheds light on the current issue, only on the credibility of Woodward. The facts of the two situations were unrelated, but it wasn't the facts Colby was questioning; it was Woodward's judgment and ability to draw inferences from any given set of facts. There's a difference between attacking a source's credibility based on irrelevant flaws (e.g., suggesting that because he's into Japanese hentai porn, his credibility on banking regulations is questionable) and attacking a source's credibility based on relevant flaws (e.g., suggesting that because he demonstrated poor judgment in the past, his credibility when making judgments now is also questionable). In this case, Colby is doing the latter - he's suggesting that because Woodward demonstrated poor judgment in the past when evaluating and conveying the tone/subtext of Belushi's actions, his credibility now when evaluating and conveying the tone/subtext of Sperling's comments is also questionable. Generally, when people talk about attacking/discrediting the source rather than the argument, they mean attacking on the basis of irrelevant flaws, not relevant ones. Again, Colby is doing the latter, not the former.

Author:	Hopwin [ Thu Mar 14, 2013 11:14 am ]
Post subject:	Re: Re:
RangerDave wrote: The facts of the two situations were unrelated, but it wasn't the facts Colby was questioning; it was Woodward's judgment and ability to draw inferences from any given set of facts. There's a difference between attacking a source's credibility based on irrelevant flaws (e.g., suggesting that because he's into Japanese hentai porn, his credibility on banking regulations is questionable) and attacking a source's credibility based on relevant flaws (e.g., suggesting that because he demonstrated poor judgment in the past, his credibility when making judgments now is also questionable). In this case, Colby is doing the latter - he's suggesting that because Woodward demonstrated poor judgment in the past when evaluating and conveying the tone/subtext of Belushi's actions, his credibility now when evaluating and conveying the tone/subtext of Sperling's comments is also questionable. Generally, when people talk about attacking/discrediting the source rather than the argument, they mean attacking on the basis of irrelevant flaws, not relevant ones. Again, Colby is doing the latter, not the former. Meaning is subjective, the facts are not. The facts are right. The meanings behind those are interpreted differently by everyone.

Author:	Arathain Kelvar [ Thu Mar 14, 2013 5:12 pm ]
Post subject:	Re: Re:
RangerDave wrote: Arathain Kelvar wrote: RangerDave wrote: Arathain Kelvar wrote: If you can't discredit the facts, discredit the source. You'll make a good lawyer. Did you read the article? I read your nutshell version. It was an example of something unrelated, then extrapolated to the current issue. There's nothing there that sheds light on the current issue, only on the credibility of Woodward. The facts of the two situations were unrelated, but it wasn't the facts Colby was questioning; it was Woodward's judgment and ability to draw inferences from any given set of facts. There's a difference between attacking a source's credibility based on irrelevant flaws (e.g., suggesting that because he's into Japanese hentai porn, his credibility on banking regulations is questionable) and attacking a source's credibility based on relevant flaws (e.g., suggesting that because he demonstrated poor judgment in the past, his credibility when making judgments now is also questionable). In this case, Colby is doing the latter - he's suggesting that because Woodward demonstrated poor judgment in the past when evaluating and conveying the tone/subtext of Belushi's actions, his credibility now when evaluating and conveying the tone/subtext of Sperling's comments is also questionable. So, as I said, he can't discredit the statements, so he's attempting to discredit the source. Quote: Generally, when people talk about attacking/discrediting the source rather than the argument, they mean attacking on the basis of irrelevant flaws, not relevant ones. Again, Colby is doing the latter, not the former. Generally, when people can't discredit specific statements, and attempt instead to discredit the source, they attempt to draw parallels between two completely different situations in an attempt to illustrate how they are relevant to each other.