Because the story told by a criminal or civil informant is understood to be colored by self-interest, the informant knows that his or her testimony will be unrespected, even reviled, subjected to rigorous examination and often rejection. Woodward knows, the person on the inside who calls and says “I want to talk” is an informant, or snitch, and is generally looking to bargain a deal, to improve his or her own situation, to place the blame on someone else in return for being allowed to plead down or out certain charges. For all his self-proclaimed rigor and attention to detail, Woodward’s work was at core defined by its “deferential spirit”-a basic, transactional pact in which he would be allowed access as long as he maintained his unquestioning credulity:Īs any prosecutor and surely Mr. to exert cognitive energy on what he is told.” Selling a sexily packaged “insider’s inside story,” Woodward, per Didion, did more than just spin a “crudely personalized,” Great Man narrative history of recent events: he offered his powerful subjects near limitless opportunities for comprehensive image rehabilitation. Writing in the New York Review of Books, she skewered the famous journalist and his “disinclination. Joan Didion had Bob Woodward’s number back in 1996. It is a bleak fact of American life that a brilliant woman can publicly speak the devastating truth about a prominent man for decades without his success being affected much at all.

Bob woodward fear review