Don't Believe Ron Suskind
His book about Obama is as spurious as the ones he wrote about Bush.
By Jacob Weisberg
Thursday, Sept. 22, 2011
As an editor, you develop a B.S. meter—an internal warning system that signals caution about journalism that doesn't feel trustworthy. Sometimes it's a quote or incident that's too perfect —a feeling I always had when reading stories by Stephen Glass in the New Republic. Sometimes it's too many errors of fact, the overuse of anonymous sources, or signs that a reporter hasn't dealt fairly with people or evidence. And sometimes it's a combination of flaws that produces a ring of falsity, the whiff of a bad egg. There's no journalist who sets off my bullshit alarm like Ron Suskind.
Issues of accuracy, fairness, and integrity come up nearly every time Suskind publishes something. Key sources claim they've been misrepresented and misquoted, that basic facts are wrong, and that the Pulitzer-winning reporter has misconstrued the larger story as well. One discounts such complaints to some extent, of course. Good journalism often makes its subjects unhappy, and the kind of Bob Woodward-style White House reconstructions Suskind has come to specialize in inevitably favor those who pay the implicit blackmail of cooperation in exchange for sympathetic treatment. But Woodward is meticulous within the limitations of his method, and you seldom hear his subjects complain that he's gotten the details wrong or misrepresented their views by manipulating quotes.
When challenged on his conclusions, Suskind points to his meticulous reporting; when challenged on the facts, he pleads the larger picture. But his bigger points are equally inaccurate. The larger thesis of his book, to the extent it has one, is that the Obama White House is rife with sexism and that its economic policymaking has been misguided and chaotic. To support these claims, Suskind stretches the thinnest of material well beyond the breaking point.
He uses two key quotes to support his claim of sexism, one from Anita Dunn, Obama's former communications director, about the White House meeting the legal definition of a hostile work environment for women, and another from Christina Romer, the first chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, saying she "felt like a piece of meat" after being left out of a meeting by Larry Summers, the former director of the National Economic Council. In Dunn's case, Suskind spliced her actual words in a way that distorts their meaning, leaving out the crucial phrase "if it weren't for the president." (For another take on the Dunn dispute, see this blog item by Erik Wemple.) Romer says she can't imagine ever having used the "piece of meat" phrase.
When it comes to disarray in managing the economic crisis, Suskind hangs a lot on a line from Larry Summers about the economic team being "home alone." Summers, too, has vehemently disputed Suskind's characterization, telling Politico, "The hearsay attributed to me is a combination of fiction, distortion, and words taken out of context." In his case, the line was a remark Summers may have made over dinner to former OMB chief Peter Orszag, with whom he was at odds. Summers may well have been grousing about Obama. But neither he, nor anyone else on the economic team, seems to have believed—then or now—that the president was indecisive, detached, or clueless about economic policy.
more...
http://www.slate.com/id/2304228/pagenum/all/
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