Arianna to BoWoo: U R the Dumb Blonde of Journalism

Arianna and many others at the HuffingtonPost.com (including writer/director/producer Nora Ephron -- also ex-wife of Carl Bernstein) keep the pressure on yet another disgraceful former journalist, Bob Woodward, in the most recent HuffPo blog posts. I particularly appreciated Arianna digging out this gem of a Joan Didion quote:

In her scathing 1996 essay in the New York Review of Books, Joan Didion criticized Woodward's reporting as marked by "a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured."

That last concept obviously brings to mind (Herman &) Chomsky's seminal work Manufacturing Consent, both book and documentary.

I believe that far-too-frequent form of complicity, dissembling and lack of critical engagement is a major reason the public has understandably lost confidence in the Fourth Estate (see my previous posts about journalism, and here's a cogent example from TruthDig about what's happening at the LA Times (and other major newspapers across the nation) -- I'd much prefer it happen to Faux News, CNN, MSNBC, etc but print media is taking the biggest hit right now and will continue to be diminished as it exists in its classic form.

Read Arianna's blog here and Ephron's here.