Michael Wolff is an author/journalist who admits said whatever it took to get a story. Wouldn't you think before he allowed the book to be printed he would try to verify the information he was given or at least record the interviews. Then again it's not about truth and honesty but about the greed and the almighty dollar he will make from trashing a President. be
Michael Wolff’s
spotty record raises questions about Trump tell-all
This
isn’t the first time author/journalist Michael Wolff has
been accused of fabricating quotes.
A
caustic gossip columnist more accustomed to taking down New York media moguls
than Washington politicians, Mr. Wolff trained
his fire on President Trump and
his inner circle in “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,”
an incendiary tell-all that has the president and his supporters fuming.
In
excerpts from the book given to outlets where Mr. Wolff’s
byline regularly appears — The Guardian, The Hollywood Reporter, New York
magazine and the British version of GQ — the White House is
portrayed as full of disorder, backbiting and infighting.
The
book, which will be published Friday after its release date was sped up to meet
heightened demand, relies on what Mr. Wolff, 64, describes as “extensive access
to the White House and
more than 200 interviews with Trump and
senior staff over a period of 18 months.”
Mr. Wolff’s
witty, provocative style has earned him accolades over the years — as well as
criticism and controversy.
He won
the National Magazine Award for commentary in 2002 and 2004, the latter for a
series of columns he wrote as a war correspondent in Qatar. He’s also the
founder of the news-aggregation website Newser.com.
But his
critics contend that he has a tendency to play fast and loose with the truth.
When
current and former members of the Trump administration came forward to dispute
the version of events presented in the book — or even quotes attributed to them
— Mr. Wolff said
he has dozens of hours of audio recordings to back up his assertions.
The
now-defunct website Brill’s Content reported in 1998 that more than a dozen
people said Mr. Wolff embellished
or outright invented quotes attributed to them in his 1998 book about Silicon
Valley, “Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet.”
“Wolff says
he has notes and email that back him up, but refuses to release them,” Brill’s
Content reported.
Writing
in the pages of The New Republic in 2004, Michelle Cottle took Mr. Wolff to
task for exploiting artistic license in his writing.
“Much
to the annoyance of Wolff’s
critics, the scenes in his columns aren’t recreated so much as created —
springing from Wolff’s
imagination rather than from actual knowledge of events,” Ms. Cottle wrote.
“Even Wolff acknowledges that conventional reporting isn’t his bag.”
Mr. Wolff himself
admitted to as much in the introduction to “Fire and Fury.”
“Many
of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are
in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue,” he
wrote. “Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality
itself, are an elemental thread of the book. Sometimes I have let the players
offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. 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.”
Part of
the problem may be Mr. Wolff’s
unfamiliarity with Washington.
Ms. Cottle pointed out that Mr. Wolff is
“neither as insightful nor as entertaining when dissecting politics,” as he is
when writing about his home turf, the Manhattan media scene. She quoted one “Washingtonmedia
eminence” who said Mr. Wolff is
not “anywhere near as sharp on politics.”
Several
details in Mr. Wolff’s
account already have been revealed to be highly unlikely, as Washington insiders
have been quick to point out.
The
author, for example, claims that Mr. Trump did
not know who former House speaker John Boehner was when former Fox News honcho
Roger Ailes suggested him as a potential chief of staff.
Mr. Trump and
Mr. Boehner played golf together as recently as 2013, and the president has
tweeted about the Ohio Republican dozens of times.
But
other anecdotes in the book have held up so far.
Former White House chief
strategist Steve Bannon has yet to deny calling Donald Trump Jr.“treasonous”
and “unpatriotic,” or Ivanka Trump “dumb as a brick.”
Even Mr. Trump,
who said Mr. Bannon had “lost his mind” following the revelation, appeared to
believe that part of the book.
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