“I’m not an American. I’m a New Yorker.” – Michael Wolff, Author
BusinessInsider.com reports that
The author of the explosive new book about Donald Trump’s presidency acknowledged in an author’s note that he wasn’t certain all of its content was true.
Michael Wolff, the author of “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” included a note at the start that casts significant doubt on the reliability of the specifics contained in the rest of its pages.
Several of his sources, he says, were definitely lying to him, while some offered accounts that flatly contradicted those of others.
But some were nonetheless included in the vivid account of the West Wing’s workings, in a process Wolff describes as “allowing the reader to judge” whether the sources’ claims are true.
In other cases, the media columnist said, he did use his journalistic judgment and research to arrive at what he describes “a version of events I believe to be true. “Here is the relevant part of the note, from the 10th page of the book’s prologue:
“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. These 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 the accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true.”
The book itself, reviewed by Business Insider from a copy acquired prior to its Friday publication, is not always clear about what level of confidence the author has in any particular assertion.
Lengthy, private conversations are reported verbatim, as are difficult-to-ascertain details like what somebody was thinking or how the person felt.
Wolff attributes his book to “more than two hundred interviews” with people including Trump and “most members of his senior staff.” According to the news website Axios, Wolff has dozens of hours of tapes to back up what he said.
Claims contained in the book have been widely reported by the media in the US and further afield.
They include assertions that Trump never wanted to be president, that all of his senior staff considered him an idiot, that he tried to lock the Secret Service out of his room, and that he ate at McDonald’s to avoid being poisoned.
Business Insider rounded up some more of the most eye-catching claims in this article.
Trump, who sought to block publication of the book but was too late, tweeted Thursday that it was “full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist.”
The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, described the book as “complete fantasy.”
Asked to rebut specific points, she said: “I’m not going to waste my time or the country’s time going page by page and talking about a book that is complete fantasy and just full of tabloid gossip.”
Other people mentioned in the book have also disputed claims made about them.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who the book said warned Trump that he may be under surveillance from British spies, issued a statement describing the claim as “categorically absurd” and “simply untrue.”
Anna Wintour, the longtime Vogue editor, also dismissed the claim that she lobbied Trump to be his ambassador to the UK as “laughably preposterous.”
Other journalists have also urged caution. Some cited Wolff’s track record — questions were raised about his 2008 book on Rupert Murdoch — and others compared his claims with their own knowledge of the Trump White House.
On Friday morning, Wolff responded to claims about the accuracy of his book in an interivew with NBC’s “Today” show.
Host Savannah Guthrie asked him: “You stand by everything in the book? Nothing made up?”
He responded: “Absolutely everything in the book.”
Shortly after, he expanded, saying: “I am certainly and absolutely, in every way, comfortable with everything I’ve reported in this book.”
This isn’t necessarily at odds with what he said in the author’s note, as it allows for the possibility that he was told something untrue and repeated it without realising, or reached a wrong conclusion when presenting a version of contested events.
So, who is this “legitimate author” who admits to faking at least parts of this “Tell-All” Book?
Per an article found in The Chicago Tribune…
Among the many things he’s been called – “blunt,” “pathetic,” “calculating” – the one thing Michael Wolff has never been described as is boring.
A provocateur and media polemicist, Wolff has a penchant for stirring up an argument and pushing the facts as far as they’ll go, and sometimes further than they can tolerate, according to his critics. He has been accused of not just re-creating scenes in his books and columns, but of creating them wholesale.
…His reliability has been challenged before – over quotes, descriptions and general accounts he’s provided in his many newspaper and magazine columns and in several books. Wolff has even acknowledged that he can be unreliable: As he recounted in “Burn Rate” – his best-selling book about his time as an early Internet entrepreneur – Wolff kept his bankers at bay by fabricating a story about his father-in-law having open-heart surgery.
“How many fairly grievous lies had I told?” he wrote. “How many moral lapses had I committed? How many ethical breaches had I fallen into? . . . Like many another financial conniver, I was in a short-term mode.” Wolff’s business collapsed in 1997.
“Burn Rate” came under siege from critics who challenged its credibility, including the long verbatim conversations that Wolff recounted despite taking scant notes. Brill’s Content, a now-defunct media-review publication, cited a dozen people who disputed quotes attributed to them in the book.
Wolff followed up “Burn Rate” by taking over the media column at New York magazine, where he almost immediately ran into trouble. Judith Regan, then a hotshot book editor who had been a classmate of Wolff’s at Vassar, vigorously disputed almost every paragraph of Wolff’s column about her. She said she hadn’t had a personal conversation with Wolff in 30 years.
Wolff’s response: “She doesn’t speak to me. … I suppose the world is full of people who no longer speak to me.”
New Republic columnist Andrew Sullivan accused Wolff of putting words in his mouth when Wolff wrote in 2001 that Sullivan “believes that he is the most significant gay public intellectual in America today.” Sullivan said he never made any such claim.
In a 2004 cover story for the New Republic, Michelle Cottle wrote that Wolff had become the “It Boy” of New York media after winning two National Magazine Awards for his commentary: “His quick wit, dizzying writing style, and willingness to say absolutely anything about anybody made his column a must-read,” she wrote.
But she added, “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. Even Wolff acknowledges that conventional reporting isn’t his bag.” An editor who worked with Wolff told Cottle, “He is adroit at making the reader think that he has spent hours and days with his subject, when in fact he may have spent no time at all.”
If you would have watched, read, or listened the Main Stream Media yesterday, you would have sworn that Michael Wolff wrote with all of the veracity of the Apostle Paul.
Michael Wolff is the MSM’s shiny new weapon which they are brandishing at every opportunity as the Vanguard/Propaganda Arm of the Democratic Party.
Just like everything else controversial that Modern Liberals have latched onto as gospel, it doesn’t matter if it actually happened or not, as long as the MSM can run with it, as if it is God’s Honest Truth.
Remember “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot?”
I have never seen more chest heaving angst, grief, and uncontrollable anger over a Presidential Election in all of my 59 years.
Liberals are so desperate to thwart the progress that President Trump is making, in bringing our country back, both economically and as a World leader, that they are literally willing to sell their soul to Satan, through the dissemination of lies and innuendos which they desperately hope will result in the 45th President’s Impeachment or resignation.
Liberals who seem to spend their entire day on Social Media posting fake news stories, pulling “facts” out of their hindquarters, and posting anything and everything that they can, in order to attempt to remove President Trump from office, are probably in diabetic shock from consuming too many Cheetos and donuts in their Mom’s basement, as they attempt to comprehend what I am writing.
Here’s the deal, Snowflakes…
The majority of Americans are seeing through Mr. Wolff’s book for what it is: a work of fiction published for political propaganda purposes.
It doesn’t matter how many Facebook Political Pages that you post Liberal articles about it on.
None of these fake news stories, interviews with disreputable authors, Democrat-heavy polls, and photoshopped pictures and stupid Occupy Democrat Memes on Facebook are making any difference to average Americans.
The Democrats, as a result of their own regional bias toward the major metropolitan areas on the East and Left Coasts, which has been obvious to average Americans for the last several decades, effectively divorced themselves from the people whom they claimed in every previous election cycle to “love”…Average Working Class Americans.
And now, they expect us to believe the Fake News and downright lies which they are desperately trying to distribute in a vain attempt get Trump out of office, and which you are posting on Social Media ad nauseam, so that they and you, in your shared madness can get a do-over and Hillary Clinton will somehow miraculously become the President.
Americans do not care what the Main Stream Media…or you…think.
They are the Propaganda Arm of the Democratic Party and you are their unpaid (usually) stable boys and girls.
They produce it and you shovel it.
If you Petulant Provocateurs and Nattering Nabobs of Negativity would work with the rest of us toward strengthening our Sovereign Nation as hard as you are working in your efforts to turn us into another failed Socialist Nation, just think what could be accomplished.
But, then again, that would require ethics and a love of country,
Both things, which sadly, seem to be devalued in your political philosophy.
Until He Comes,
KJ
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