Media Bias: Bob Woodward

Bob Woodward is at it again (. The man who famously took down a Republican President has it appears been working for years to undo this leonine achievement by rewriting history to fit his rather skewed, conservative worldview. First were the many books bucking conventional wisdom to shine a largely positive light on the Bush administration. Then the many books doing the opposite to Obama that followed. Now he taken to the world of book criticism commenting on the soon to be released memoir of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Woodward seems to think that Gates, a holdover from the Bush administration, is as critical of Obama as Woodward is:

“Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes in ‘Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.’”

This seems particularly odd, given that Thom Stanker of The New York Times's sees things in a very different light: “In a new memoir, Mr. Gates, a Republican holdover from the Bush administration who served for two years under Mr. Obama, praises the president as a rigorous thinker who frequently made decisions “opposed by his political advisers or that would be unpopular with his fellow Democrats.” But Mr. Gates says that by 2011, Mr. Obama began expressing his own criticism of the way his strategy in Afghanistan was playing out.

Gates himself seems to undermine Woodward’s argument: “As I sat there, I thought: The president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his,” Mr. Gates writes. “For him, it’s all about getting out.” And Woodward then backs up this contention by arguing later in the same review, “Gates’s severe criticism is even more surprising — some might say contradictory — because toward the end of “Duty,” he says of Obama’s chief Afghanistan policies, “I believe Obama was right in each of these decisions.” And thus a minor retelling of the story alters the dynamics to reinforce the common GOP rhetoric that Obama is inept, ineffectual and to blame for all of the problems he inherited from one of the most inept and ineffectual administrations in history.

Woodward pulled off a similar coup a little over a year ago when he wrote a book about the failed budget deal in 2012 The Price of Politics. Woodward wraps up a book that provided little new information with this tidbit, “It is a fact that President Obama was handed a miserable, faltering economy and faced a recalcitrant Republican opposition. But presidents work their will – or should work their will – on important matters of national business … Obama has not.” While this might be to some extent true, it is more true that Republicans have been undermining democracy by blocking anything and everything Obama has tried to do to deal with our faltering economy and lack of regulation of Wall Street. But the wonderful sleight of hand makes it seem as if the problems reside solely in the White House – an opinion shared by the uncritical masses far too readily.